After its 2011  purchase of ECM vendor Perceptive Software, Lexmark has moved further down the content chain with the $US148 million acquisition of  intelligent data capture software vendor Brainware.

Brainware Distiller extracts information from paper and electronic documents, validates the extracted data and passes it to data management systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and/or financial management systems.

The platform is used to process invoices, fulfill customer orders, balance remittances, index documents, process loan applications, and perform other document-intensive processes.

Lexmark sees this as a high growth market closely adjacent to both Lexmark's customer solutions and Perceptive Software's enterprise content management (ECM) and business process management (BPM) businesses.

Brainware has customers in the healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, retail, energy and technology segments. The company has offices in the US, UK, Switzerland and Germany.

"With the acquisition of Brainware, Lexmark is further strengthening and differentiating our industry-leading managed print services offerings and our end-to-end business process solutions," said Paul Rooke, Lexmark's chairman and chief executive officer. "Brainware's innovative intelligent data capture technology will be attractive to our customers across the globe."