One of the odd surprises over the past year at Deep Analysis has been the sheer popularity of our Feb 2021 analyst note detailing Box’s acquisition of CloudFast Path. To be brutally honest, it was a small deal involving a tiny vendor. The folks are CFP are lovely, so no disrespect intended here – but why so many more people are interested in reading about this rather than say Hylands much larger acquisition of Nuxeo or the meteoric IPO of UIPath, I have no idea. But, this past week, fellow cloud file migration vendor, SeeUnity (based in Colorado), was acquired by Boston-based private equity-backed legal tech firm Anaqua. We have spoken with the team at SeeUnity multiple times in the past. At least, in our analysis, they seemed to have carved out a niche for themselves in the legal sector, being the toolset used in many iManage migrations (for example). So it looks like they have found an excellent place to land. File migration systems live in a niche within a niche, but they play a critical role in many more extensive projects, and we would not be surprised to see more of these small vendors snapped up over the coming year or two.

The fact is that there are few greenfield customers out there, our industry is not new, and pretty much every mid to large organization has an ever-expanding rabbit warren of information silos and applications. Therefore logically, for any Information Management vendor to make any headway, they have to deal with legacy systems by migrating, integrating, federating, or consolidating content stores. As countless organizations can attest, that’s a job that sounds relatively easy but, in reality, can be tortuously slow and challenging to execute without the proper tools and specialist skills involved. As you can read in our report on this subject, the challenge is that many buyers who want to sort out their information management mess don’t want to pay for it, see it as too risky or complex, and therefore do nothing. Cloud File Migration tools can be the catalyst to move buyers to a place of action.

The only question arising from the SeeUnity question will be how their past partnerships with folks like iManage, OpenText, MFiles or NetDocuments will fare under the new management.