The Company

Nintex was founded in 2006 in Melbourne, Australia and moved its HQ to Seattle, Washington a year later. CEO Eric Johnson has led the company since 2018, when private equity firm Thoma Bravo first made a significant investment in Nintex; TPG then took the majority share in 2021. Since then, Nintex has made a number of strategic acquisitions, the most recent being workflow vendor K2 in 2020, digital signature vendor AssureSign in 2021, and RPA vendor Kryon in 2022. We estimate that Nintex has around $250 million in annual revenue and approximately 900 employees, with offices in the US, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

The Technology

Nintex is one of the best-known names in enterprise automation and has one of the broadest and most used (over 10,000 customers) technology platforms in this sector. Regarding breadth, Nintex is a one-stop shop for everything from document automation to robotic process automation (RPA). At a high level is the Nintex Workflow Cloud, a standalone system built from the bottom up. This provides a full containerized cloud service that can run in almost any cloud environment, from private, to Azure, to the AWS GovCloud. And for those that want or need to keep their IT on-premises, Nintex provides the K2 workflow engine.

In addition, there are document automation capabilities to create invoices, contracts, etc., as well as forms capabilities to create dynamic online forms with integrated document capture functionality. Plus, Nintex has its own digital signature technology that can be embedded to replace and reduce the cost of the likes of Adobe and DocuSign in your organization. All of this technology is high quality, well tested, and widely used.

But in our analysis, what sets Nintex apart is its approach to enterprise automation in general. The broad range of technology available in the Nintex platform hints at this, but the approach goes deeper. For example, process and task mining are in vogue in the industry at the moment, but process mapping and optimization are often overlooked. Process mining, which Nintex provides via its Process Discovery module, captures and displays user activities well. The same goes for task mining, which Nintex also provides (originally from its Kryon acquisition). But Nintex truly excels through its process analytics and mapping functionality. Rather than simply providing tools to its customers, Nintex appears to have given thought to the practical and challenging realities of automating and optimizing process-related work.

To illustrate this further, Nintex uses natural language processing (NLP) to create user-friendly text descriptions of processes and provides a store within a workflow for process data which is then made accessible to artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) modules. Users can simply search for applicable modules, such as claim processing, to access and reuse these elements. Again using NLP, Nintex Promapp (its process mapping module – see Figure 1) creates process definitions as user-friendly, descriptive text, which is then integrated with the workflow designer and processed so that the user can click a button to generate a process model.

To put this in more practical terms, Nintex provides a holistic end-to-end approach, augmented by machine learning, to design, analyze, and optimize business processes and tasks. This approach removes the divide between business process management (BPM) and RPA bots, leveraging whatever level of complexity is required to automate work, whether repetitive tasks (RPA) or more complex and organic business activities. In short, this is one of the few platforms we have looked at that comes close to truly providing end-to-end, creation-to-closure automation. It offers user-friendly tools so a business can truly have some control and visibility over how it operates.

Of course, for all this to work, Nintex needs to be able to integrate with most if not all commonly used applications. The firm utilizes openAPI along with its associated SWAGR tools to build and consume REST APIs. In addition, it has out-of-the-box connectors to the likes of Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Google Drive, and others. For those staying on-premises and taking the K2 route, there is integration through its SmartObject integration service.