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Hyland, a content services provider to the insurance and other industries, has completed its acquisition of Nuxeo, a content services platform and digital asset management (DAM) provider. The acquisition brings the entire Nuxeo business, including products and technology, under Hyland.
The Nuxeo acquisition is Hyland’s fifth in just over two years, along with Learning Machine (Feb. 2020), Streamline Health (Feb. 2020), German RPA vendor Another Monday (Aug. 2020) and content services provider Alfresco (Oct. 2020). In the context of the recent Alfresco acquisition, the addition of Nuxeo represents a reinforcement of Hyland’s commitment to cloud-native platforms and open-source communities, while expanding its global footprint with additional team members, customers and partners, according to a company statement.
Ed McQuiston, EVP, Chief Commercial Officer, Hyland.
Alfresco acted as a catalyst to the Nuxeo acquisition, according to Ed McQuistion, EVP, Chief Commercial Officer, Hyland. “What we found with Alfresco was that there was an additional stripe in the content services space that, while rooted in open source, is also rooted in a developer community seeking autonomy to be able to build out their content services vision,” he commented in a press conference.
While Hyland’s success in off-the-shelf solutions is demonstrated in its over 15,000 active customers in various industries, Alfresco opened the door to another kind of customer, according to McQuiston. “This type of customer for was looking for a more build, do-it-yourself kind of scenario, with more control over the kinds of applications they wanted to build out, as well as participation in an open-source ecosystem.”
Powerful New Capabilities
Nuxeo’s enterprise-class DAM offering complements and extends Hyland’s portfolio of content services platform offerings with powerful new capabilities, a Hyland statement on the acquisition says. Nuxeo Insight, an AI and machine learning service, will enable Hyland customers to automatically enrich even the largest content libraries with business-specific metadata, trigger workflows and provide valuable insights to their information, according to the statement.
“With the addition of Nuxeo’s cloud-native, open-source, low-code platform, Hyland is now the largest open-source content services provider in the market,” observes Bill Priemer, Hyland’s CEO. “The expertise the Nuxeo team brings, along with the innovative capabilities of the Nuxeo platform, strengthen Hyland’s position as the leader in cloud-based content services platforms and present tremendous opportunities for the organizations we serve.”
Bill Priemer, President and CEO, Hyland.
The primary value the Nuxeo acquisition brings to Hyland’s insurance customers is the added options and choices they will have when looking to address core document and content management needs, according to Jeff Hiegert, insurance product manager, Hyland. “What we’re really excited about is the opportunity to introduce new offerings and capabilities to our insurance customers,” he says. “The Nuxeo acquisition adds things like Digital Asset Management, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to our toolbox which can greatly extend the value of our current offerings in the insurance industry.”
Hiegert says that while it’s still early in the process of incorporating Nuxeo’s associates and products into Hyland, the company’s insurance vertical team is excited about the possibilities Nuxwo brings. “In my 20-plus years of working in and for the insurance industry, I’ve learned that customers want and need options when it comes to investing in technology,” Hiegert elaborates. “Some are more comfortable implementing solutions that are, more or less, out-of-the-box but can be tailored to meet their needs through configuration. Others would prefer to buy of robust set of tools and have the freedom to build specific solutions that meet their unique needs.”
On Hyland’s Broader Recent Acquisition Activity
Of Hyland’s broader recent acquisition activity, Hiegert says the five new additions bring a breadth of capabilities to the Hyland platform including RPA tools, Blockchain solutions and additional offerings in the document and content management space. “There’s still quite a bit of work to be done, but all of those acquisitions fit into Hyland’s existing vision to help organizations better manage unstructured content,” he says.
Hyland is exploring a number of RPA-based use cases for its insurance customers to automate otherwise tedious manual tasks, Hiegert adds. “Leveraging “bots” to access the USPS address verification site to correct returned mail is one example. Pulling information off an agent application and validating licensing status with a state Department of Insurance is another. These aren’t ultra-fancy solutions but they can help our customers increase the efficiency and productivity of their associates.”
Blockchain for Insurance
The acquisition of Learning Machine brought Hyland a blockchain solution for digital credentials, Hiegert relates. “We see an opportunity for this in the insurance space for sharing and verifying a variety of certificates and licenses from medical professionals, physicians and agents as well as validating immunization records, birth and death certificates and marriage licenses,” he explains.
“Alfresco brings even more options to our insurance customers in terms of how they can approach their solution for document and content management,” Hiegert adds. “Although they go about it in different ways, every acquisition that Hyland has made has expanded our ability to help customers better manage documents, content and unstructured data.”