Kofax is probably the world leading provider in software tools that are designed specifically for integrating scanned documents into digital repositories. If you are in this field of work, you have used a Kofax Product at least once in your lifetime.
I must say, their solutions are known to be quite user friendly, given their experience with a multitude of projects in the past. Now, they are setting their sights on the print management solutions, with their latest acquisition of Printix.net APS. This is a cloud based solution for print management, and is designed as a software as a service.
Acquisitions are nothing new to Kofax, as they seem to enjoy this kind of expansion. They want to bring all their know how to this company, in an effort to scale up their business and improve revenues from such solutions.
You can check the full press release by Kofax on the Printix aquisition.
Who is Printix.net APS
Printix is an Saas print management software that integrates through the cloud. Their biggest asset is the fact that you can eliminate all the print management software and print servers on site, and use their cloud based system. While their previous selling model included cloud marketplaces and traditional distributors, Kofax hopes to bring manufacturer support to the system.
Also, they hope to set up independent dealer partners, which might further improve the support customers get. While this all sounds well, we think that Kofax will mainly focus on using their existent network of partners to aggressively push the product.
Print management is nothing new, and there are a lot of competitors out there. But having such a large integration as Kofax can offer, is something that should bring added value to the company and the product itself. Whether this will work or not, we will see, but the start is quite good.
Will the acquisition of Printix be successful
To give a bottom line to this news, we have to look at a couple of aspects first. First is the competitive nature of the printing market. There are numerous solutions out there, all providing decent value to customers and new age tools which the printing market definitely needs. So I guess this is not the main thing.
Second of all, manufacturers are already pushing such products as freeware with their machines. Xerox, Konica and even other providers, all feature such solutions nowadays. This is where the main threat is for the success of this integration.
But the optimistic view is that the large coverage Kofax has, with current implementations and a lot of partners, will turn things in their favor. Wherever you have a Kofax acquisition solution in a large environment, pushing the Printix solution will be much easier. So we think Kofax is relying on numbers when integrating this solution in their portfolio.
Whether this is a success or not, only time will tell. But for Printix, this is definitely a move up the pecking order, as they get a head start compared to other similar suppliers on the market.