[Lexmark Blog] Let us introduce you: Saperion, Lexmark’s newest company acquisition

LexmarkNews interviewed John Gamble, executive vice president and chief financial officer for Lexmark, on today’s announcement of our agreement to acquire Saperion, a European-based leader in enterprise content management (ECM) solutions.

Lexmark: Tell us about Saperion and how the company is a great fit with Lexmark.

Gamble: Saperion is a leading provider of ECM and business process management (BPM) solutions headquartered in Berlin. It has a strong European-based clientele, which includes well-known brands such as Siemens and Daimler, as well as a strong base of medium-sized customers. Its solutions feature a platform-independent, multilingual architecture, making the products highly scalable and easy to integrate with all major enterprise resource planning software, email and document management systems.

The acquisition of Saperion accelerates several strategic Lexmark objectives, including rapidly expanding our software and solutions footprint in EMEA. Saperion is also a great fit in terms of customers, as it strengthens our position in delivering solutions to large enterprise customers in EMEA and growing our software channel.

Lexmark: How and why does Saperion fit well withPerceptive Software?

Gamble: Geographically, Perceptive and Saperion complement each other quite nicely. The acquisition of Saperion accelerates Perceptive achieving several strategic goals, including the before-mentioned growth in EMEA. This synergy works the other way also: Saperion will be able to offer and support its solutions in global regions where it previously was not represented. And existing Saperion global accounts now can benefit from Lexmark’s international breadth and presence to receive support across multiple geographies.

Lexmark: Why is a larger European presence strategic for Perceptive Software?

Gamble: EMEA is the second largest market for content and process management software worldwide, with $7.1 billion of software revenue in 2012 representing 32 percent of the world market (Source: Gartner – Forecast: Enterprise Software Markets, Worldwide, 2010-2017, 2Q13 Update, June 2013).

For Perceptive to achieve its strategic goal of being one of the leading content and process software solution providers in the world, we must develop and have a strong brand in this geographic region.

Also, strength globally ensures we can fully serve Lexmark’s largest multinational customers to support their business objectives and help manage their unstructured information challenges.

Lexmark: We’ve made a number of international purchases in the past three years - Pallas Athena, Brainware, ISYS and now Saperion. Is the strategy to add footprint or technical expertise?

Gamble: Lexmark’s acquisition strategy is multi-dimensional. At our core, we are a solutions company, and we look to add capabilities that allow us to deliver deeper and more compelling solutions to our customers.

Saperion, like many of our acquisitions, will help us both deepen our solutions capabilities and expand our geographic footprint while better serving our global enterprise customers.

As with all of our acquisitions, the most critical part in determining success will be the integration of the companies. We must embrace the opportunity to add new capabilities and take what is best from each acquisition to create a more dynamic Lexmark.

Click here to find out more about Saperion.