by Kevin Craine | 3/25/15
Mergers and acquisitions are rampant in the tech world, and another big one was announced yesterday. Lexmark and Kofax announced that the two companies have entered into a merger agreement in which Lexmark will acquire Kofax for a total enterprise value of approximately $1 billion.
Lexmark Becomes a Major ECM Player
Lexmark will nearly double the size of its enterprise software business with the purchase of Kofax. The company is looking to take the lead in the content and process management software vertical by integrating Kofax’s smart process applications with its perceptive intelligent capture technology (acquired with the 2010 purchase of Perceptive Software). The Kofax merger will provide Lexmark with a much wider scope of capture solutions ranging from mobile devices to smart scanners and printers.
Key Acquisitions, Key Solutions
The acquisition of Kofax immediately enhances Lexmark’s enterprise content management and business process management offerings and will create one of the broadest and deepest suite of capture solutions in the market. It’s also the largest deal Lexmark has made in recent years as it’s changed itself from a primarily a printer company to an imaging and business software company. In 2010 Lexmark paid $280 million for Perceptive Software. Two years later it acquired BDGB Enterprises for $148 million, which gave it the data capture software company Brainware, and in 2014 it paid $251 million for business process automation company ReadSoft.
Will It Work?
The purchase of Kofax makes sense since it is a traditionally strong player in capture applications for mortgage, invoice processing, other process-centric areas. Lexmark brings deeper vertical market penetration to the table and business development and marketing teams that are well positioned to accelerate awareness and adoption. After the dust settles, customers should benefit from this merger with a complete arsenal of technologies to help digitize their business.
Guest contributor Kevin Craine is the author of the book Designing a Document Strategy and host of the Document Strategy Podcast. He is the managing director of Craine Communications Group. For more information visit CraineGroup.com.
