Making a multimillion-dollar investment in a software firm or buying a software firm outright hopefully requires some thorough due diligence. I say hopefully, for as an insider of sorts, I despair at how shallow due diligence exercises can be. Often the work is restricted to the financials of the target company. When investors come to Deep Analysis for due diligence advice, they are thankfully not asking us to look at the companies books, rather the technology and the broader buyer and market dynamics that impact the target. Hence we keep a close eye, month to month, week to week, on what is happening out there in this crazy and, at times, dysfunctional Information Management marketplace.
June is usually a quiet month, but we did see several deals close:
- Motordocs, a firm that specializes in digital documents for the automotive industry, was acquired by Keyloop
- Resolve Systems, acquired low code/RPA automation firm Ayehu
- Robyo acquired Akoa, in the intelligent automation/RPA space
- Netherlands based Woodwing acquired Expansion after previously acquiring Scienta to expand its document management capabilities
- Iron Mountain acquired DataVault
- Kofax acquired its channel partner PSIgen
- Nintex acquired esignature vendor AssureSign
July has now kicked off with a bang or punches, depending on your viewpoint. Box put its boxing gloves on and smacked back hard at activist investor Starboard (the link here is well worth a read!), and Dutch firm IPRO acquired veteran eDiscovery vendor ZyLAB.
So not quiet at all, and from what we can see, there is much more activity on the horizon. On the one hand, it’s a story of industry consolidation, but what interests us is that at no point since the dot-com era have there been more startups coming onto the scene. To see this solely in terms of consolidation is to miss the bigger picture; instead, we are in a period of intense change and reconstruction. There is a slow but distinct changing of the guard underway, and in my analysis, at least a rush of fresh blood coming into our industry to drive it forward and upward. That makes for some complex and turbulent market dynamics to navigate. Hence it would be remiss of me not to mention (once again) that Deep Analysis helps investors to navigate these waters!