Kofax has acquired Singularity for $US48 million, an Ireland-based  provider of business process management (BPM) software and case management solutions.

Reynolds C. Bish, Chief Executive Officer of Kofax, said: “We’ve become a leader in the capture market by managing information into customers’ enterprise applications and repositories. The acquisition of Singularity will now allow our customers to manage that information as it flows through their organisations, expanding our reach beyond capture into the BPM market and providing a uniquely differentiated product with strong competitive advantages in both markets. We’re excited to deliver more capabilities to our customers and welcome the Singularity management team and its employees, customers and partners to Kofax.”

Kofax plans  to offer a capture enabled BPM platform, to automate both the capture processes needed to enter content into enterprise applications and repositories as well as the downstream knowledge worker processes needed to effectively utilise that information

The combined Kofax and Singularity products will be fully deployable “on premise” or via private clouds under a traditional perpetual license model and via a public cloud under a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) subscription model.

Singularity’s flagship product – TotalAgility – provides BPM software for automating the knowledge worker processes needed to effectively utilise information in enterprise applications and repositories, thereby improving business performance and agility. It includes the design, simulation, workflow control, business rule and integration capabilities needed to implement more efficient, flexible and better executed business processes, and the dynamic case management capabilities required to manage the fluid mix of correspondence, structured data, unstructured content, resources and processes that arise during interactions between a corporation or government agency and its constituents.

This would include, for example, the ability to offer new customer on-boarding, order entry, “quote-to-cash”, customer service or incident tracking and other dynamic case management solutions. TotalAgility is deployable “on premise” or via private clouds under a traditional perpetual license model. LiveAgility is a version of TotalAgility deployable via a public cloud under a SaaS subscription model.

Singularity was a privately held company headquartered in Derry, Northern Ireland with approximately 215 employees principally in Derry and Belfast, Northern Ireland, Hyderabad, India and London, England.

Roger Stocker, UK-based analyst at IMtelligence, believes the purchase allows Kofax to offer a more end to end business process solution to their customers.

“The workflow element of projects tends to be 4-6 times the capture element so it gives Kofax the potential to gain more share of customer budget. 

“Secondly, most of the BPM and content management platform providers such as IBM, Opentext and EMC have purchased capture venders over the few years. This has posed Kofax with a problem as it has increased competition with many of the companies it has typically integrated to. There are only two platforms left, which don’t have these elements; Oracle and Microsoft. Looking at Singularity, it looks like Kofax are betting on the Microsoft route.”