industry analyst

A pair of earbuds in a holder

Deep Analysis Podcast: Series 2, Episode 3

The third episode of the second season of the Deep Analysis podcasts went live this week; Data Fabrics, Generative AI being helpful on your desktop and another Alan-based travelogue.

6 Years of Deep Analysis – Here’s to the future!

It’s also been great to see many startups that we uncovered and gave first visibility to grow rapidly and/or be acquired. Our open-door policy, making it easy for any enterprise or vendor to speak with us, has also proven to be a gift, meeting and hopefully helping countless new people in this ever-evolving market.

ECM M&A

M&A Roundup Dec 2021

This will be the last of the year of these notes, but what a year it has been! From a macro perspective, this year has seen over $1,200 B in M&A activity; yes, I said $1,200 B, almost double 2020 and three times 2019’s spend. At a slightly more granular level, we should note that investors have seen a massive increase in tech investment in previously ignored regions. For example, in Latin America, VCs spent nearly $15B, compared to just $4.4B in 2019, and you can see a trend in plain sight. For all the real-world horror of the pandemic from both an individual and global perspective, the fact is that the COVID virus has accelerated mass digitization in almost every area of business. Be that to support remote working, remote healthcare, or remote banking. It’s not hyperbole to say that this past year has been revolutionary from a tech perspective, and its impact on the industry will reverberate for many years to come.

Our Enterprise Information and Automation Management sub-sector has also been busy this year. Still, I suspect the next 2 to 5 years will be even more active, accompanied by a changing of the guard. What I mean by that is that many well-established, aka legacy vendors, will be walloped. Goliaths like Google & Microsoft are moving into the enterprise mainstream, and a veritable army of innovative startups is thriving. Out with the old, in with the new. Not that the old will necessarily go away, rather their strength will diminish over time as new blood comes in to transform the sector. At Deep Analysis, we are excited about the changes coming and the opportunities for both enterprises and vendors alike. So much to look forward to in the coming year and beyond.

The year-end is always a time to closeout deals, and this year is no exception. Below is a list (though not comprehensive) of some that have caught our eye recently:

EFSS vendor FileCloud secured a $30m round of investment from Savant Growth
Governance vendor Gimmal also secured a new round of funding from Rubicon Technology Partners
Governance firm Workiva acquired AuditNet
Tableau acquired NLP vendor Narrative Science
Component Content Management vendor Orbis Technologies acquired Innovasys
ProTitle USA acquired document prep company DocSolution
MarkLogic acquired veteran search vendor Smartlogic

But the eye-catching deal of the year-end has to be Oracle’s eye-popping acquisitions of medical records company Cerner for $28.3B, the biggest deal Oracle has ever closed, and that’s saying something. Oracle has stated that it expects Cerner to deliver substantial additional revenue for years to come, and we don’t doubt that. If medical records were of value before COVID, they are now priceless. But if medical records alone are of immense value, imagine what a transformation of the medical industry through increased automation, document processing, and AI-driven analysis will be worth? Its unpalatable and a concept few outside of the US can grasp. Still, the management of US medical records is in desperate need of a digital transformation, one that will take many years to undertake but maybe finally on the cusp of happening.

The “cusp of change” could be our theme for 2022 as a whole. For all the talk of Digital Transformation, there has been little to see beyond upgrades and a few new bells and whistles. The last true era of Transformation was the late 90’s with the introduction of both the internet (birth of SaaS) and the massive rollout of heavyweight, high-cost ERP systems. But if the sudden disruption and enforced discretion of the workforce have taught us anything, it’s that we need to rethink, reimagine and reinvent the way we work. The technology from AI to Blockchain is ready and waiting to go, but it was always required a massive leap of faith or a hard push for many enterprises to change; many are now prepared, whether they like it or not, to make that jump.

Deep Analysis Reports

2021 Deep Analysis Pick of the Pops

analyst notes we published at Deep Analysis in 2021? There are 89 in total! As the writers of this research, we have our personal favorites, but we thought it would be fun to just pull the numbers and see what were your favorites – remember our research is open source so anyone can access it from anywhere. That said  I would never have guessed the following would have been the most popular reports of 2021 in a million years 🙂

tulsa techj

WFH – KM & Tulsa OK

But one area that seems to have garnered little attention is the gritty reality of the challenge of finding information, gaining and sharing knowledge, and make informed decisions. Endless Zoom meeting, just don’t cut it. We get by, we do the best we can, but for knowledge workers, in particular, there are serious and often unacknowledged challenges ahead.

UIPath IPO

Mobius & UIPath take off – Our Thoughts

All in all quite month of activity, but all of course, overshadowed by the UIPath IPO. It will be interesting to see how this impacts the enterprise automation market in the short and long term. Undoubtedly some of the money raised, possibly much of the money, will go toward multiple acquisitions.

opentext 2021

How to Turn an Aircraft Carrier: A Review of OpenText World 2021

We attended OpenText World Europe this April to learn where the ship is headed. OpenText made it very clear that it is staking its content management future on the cloud. The company announced Cloud Editions 21.2, an all-encompassing, all-in effort to achieve that long turn away from on-premise legacy software. Mark Barranchea, CEO, pledged an R&D investment of over $1 billion in R&D in their diverse stable of products. For a company with $3 billion in sales last year, that is a very impressive number.