Brainware Acquired by Lexmark
March 7, 2012
Lexmark, the printer outfit located about an hour from the goose pond, is now in the back office, document imaging, search, and eDiscovery business. Like Xerox, Lexmark sees an opportunity in owning document centric software. The price of entry for Lexmark, a company which has had its share of revenue and product innovation challenges, was $148 million. Brainware is in the capture, manage, and access business along with printers and ink.
“Lexmark Acquires Brainware Parent BDGB Enterprise” reported:
Brainware, which provides data capture and enterprise search solutions, will become part of Lexmark’s Perceptive Software business unit. Brainware CEO Carl Mergele will stay with the company, and report to Scott Coons, Perceptive Software’s president and CEO and Lexmark vice president.
Brainware has a patent on tri-gram technology. The idea is that one access an index which creates three letter strings. The system works when performing patent research. By copying the claims from one patent and searching a corpus processed by Brainware, the relevance ranked list of hits provides a useful adjunct to key word and fielded search. Tri-grams are often not enough, so Brainware added support for controlled term lists. The combination added some utility to the firm’s search solution.
Brainware’s moment of insight was its push into the back office. As other search vendors were chasing the traditional documents in the office, Brainware tackled the problem of paper. Not surprisingly, few traditional search vendors paid much attention to Brainware, conceding the sector to ZyLAB, some imaging integrators, and Brainware.
The approach paid off. Compared to the somewhat lackluster performance of such capable search vendors as Coveo and ISYS Search Software, Brainware continued to add clients. The company cut a deal with Oracle, which surprised me and my colleagues in Harrod’s Creek. The denizens of Sea World Parkway realized that Brainware’s approach was able to solve some back office woes that Oracle’s formidable array of solutions could not. SES11g is not what one wants processing the text from random forms and documents which clog the enterprise arteries.
How will Lexmark leverage Brainware? One hopes that Lexmark figures out a way to navigate choppy financial waters. The merry band of Brainware owners are probably going to replace their HP and Canon printers with Lexmark gear. Worth watching how Lexmark leverages this $148 million purchase. For those of you who don’t calculate the relative buyout delta between Autonomy and Brainware, Hewlett Packard paid 67 times as much for its search acquisition Autonomy.
Stephen E Arnold, March 7, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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2 Responses to “Brainware Acquired by Lexmark”
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Excellent article. Keep posting such kind of info on your
page. Im really impressed by it.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts about search.
Regards
[…] March 7, 2012, I reported that Lexmark purchased Brainware, a search, eDiscovery, and back office system. Brainware caught my attention because its finding […]