Lexmark’s Perceptive continues its buying spree

Contact: Alan Pelz-Sharpe

Perceptive Software, the document and content management division of printer giant Lexmark, continued its M&A spree Tuesday with the acquisitions of San Francisco-based Twistage and Seattle-based AccessVia for a combined total of $31.5m. Lexmark has now spent more than $600m buying software companies since it started its M&A machine in May 2010 with the purchase of Perceptive Software.

Twistage provides a cloud-based video ingestion and management system, and AccessVia sells retail industry point of sale-focused printing (signage) software. Both acquisitions come as a bit of a surprise because, previously, Perceptive had focused on building out document-centric case management and pure-play document management functionality, which extends Perceptive’s own heritage of providing document and form management capabilities to legacy business applications such as JD Edwards, PeopleSoft and SAP.

Twistage and AccessVia appear to take the firm in very new directions because they both could be described as providing Perceptive with more input and output options. Quite how these will be integrated – and leveraged by the firm – is unclear right now. We believe that Twistage mainly brings technology and AccessVia a substantial customer base, and will watch closely to see how this all pans out. But it’s likely that new industry-focused applications and solutions will come from a combination of these and existing technologies.

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