by Jim Lundy

As we predicted in a recent blog, Alfresco was for sale, and this week, Hyland, a leader in enterprise content management solutions, announced that it had completed its acquisition of Alfresco. This blog discusses some of the rationale behind the deal and the opportunities for Hyland.

Analysis: What Does Hyland Get With Alfresco? More Cloud and Business Process Management (BPM)

In essence, Hyland gets an open source cloud-focused provider that was growing organically and winning deals, but often competing with Hyland on deals. So, given Alfresco’s focus on running its enterprise content platform (ECP) services on AWS cloud storage, that can’t hurt Hyland ECM products.

The challenge will be maintaining two separate sales organizations and two product lines. OpenText has certainly proved that a firm can have multiple product lines. However, it still comes down to innovation, and enterprises will need to see which product families at Hyland are invested in for new features vs. just maintained.

The other area that Alfresco can help Hyland in overall is its strong business process management (BPM) capabilities. Enterprises should ask about future product roadmap plans in this area.

Hyland Software, a leader amongst enterprise content management vendors has purchased Alfresco.

Global Reach

Alfresco will also help Hyland do more business in international markets. Alfresco has a growing number of VARs/distributors in Europe—a plus for Hyland.

Hyland Goes On M&A Spending Binge—RPA and More

While Alfresco represents a consolidation play, in August, Hyland acquired Another Monday, which bolsters it in the robotic process automation (RPA) market. Other acquisitions in 2020 included:

Streamline Health, an ECM provider—February 2020
Learning Machine, a content services provider—February 2020

Bottom Line

The bottom line is that Alfresco’s owners wanted to sell the company. Hyland did the deal, but we will still have to wait and see what, if anything, Hyland plans to do with Alfresco. There are other areas that Hyland could invest in, such as digital transaction management (DTM), which has seen much higher growth than the current enterprise content market. Enterprises should look at any provider of enterprise content platforms and consider their enterprise content management strategy carefully before signing a contract. The big issue is the future of the product and how providers will be updating it now and over the next five years.