Hyland is on the acquisition trail, following up its purchase of RPA vendor Another Monday last month with the news it is also buying Alfresco, a content services platform and solutions provider.

Based in Boston, Alfresco provides a ‘cloud-native’ digital business platform that delivers content services solutions to connect, manage and protect organisations’ most critical information.

Hyland, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the company with the deal expected to close later this year, subject to usual and customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals. The cost of the deal has not been revealed.

Hyland has been operating in the Australian market since 2014 when it purchased local reseller and solution provider CAYLX.

It has had wins across a range of industry sectors in Australia and New Zealand including Henley Homes, icare NSW, Becker Mining, Farmers Mutual Group NZ, Mater Hospital Group and Mrs Macs.

“We continue to grow our business and advance our platform organically and via acquisitions,” said Bill Priemer, president and CEO of Hyland.

“This acquisition will expand our global reach, enabling us to help more organisations achieve their digital transformation goals and become more informed, empowered and connected.”

"For 15 years Alfresco has had the vision to provide the most open, cloud native content services platform,” said Jay Bhatt, president and CEO of Alfresco.

“With this acquisition Alfresco brings significant geographic and industry experience to Hyland as well as an open source community as a new source of product innovation. Both companies share the same passion for customer success and innovation and together will offer increased value for customers and partners.”

Forrester analyst Cheryl McKinnon believes this is a natural next step in Hyland’s recent rejuvenation strategy.

“Hyland’s investments over the last year include the distributed ledger (blockchain) company Learning Machine, focused on higher education credentials, and, most recently, European robotic process automation vendor Another Monday, revealing an appetite to leapfrog into newer, adjacent markets. Historically, Hyland’s acquisitions have been smaller: natural tuck-in technologies to further entrench itself in its key verticals (insurance, higher education, healthcare, and the public sector).

“But the acquisition of Alfresco is different and — if successfully executed — will help Hyland move confidently into the era of cloud-native, modern content services,” she said.

“Alfresco brings one of the more modern architectures to the content management market, and it has adapted quickly to the rise of cloud, with early, strategic partnerships with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
“Alfresco’s balanced portfolio of content, process, and governance services are enhanced by its relatively recent application development framework “low-code” development toolkit, as well as its ability to integrate leading AI/machine learning services, such as those from AWS.

“Alfresco’s own recent acquisitions (such as partners Technology Services Group for its insurance, cloud, and migration expertise and pernexas for its SAP integration) have been shots across the bow at long-time enterprise content management (ECM) megavendors IBM and OpenText respectively. This is important in the battleground to migrate the many large, mature deployments that remain on-premises, particularly in regulated industries.”