There are a few well-engineered products out of Stuttgart, Germany — Mercedes-Benz, an oft-visited tourist stop, is one. Another good Stuttgart product: SoftPro’s E-signature solution. Its strengths lie in its use of biometrics for image verification, particularly the SignAlyze product, a signature verification tool used extensively by German banks. SoftPro has a strong global presence outside of the US and solid banking accounts, all delivered with the kind of engineering foundation you would expect. The acquisition will help Kofax a lot, as it is virtually unknown in the US, with marketing and strategy behind the market leaders, and it has been slow to enter the trending SaaS market. In addition, SoftPro’s shortfalls in selected areas compared to the broader field, such as workflow and analytics, can be quickly plugged with the Kofax Total Agility BPM platform.

All in all, the SoftPro acquisition enhances Kofax’s competitive position in the smart process application category. E-signature also adds to Kofax’s portfolio for capture, process automation, analytics, and mobility to address key requirements for the rapidly growing need to automate and digitize document-centric applications. Kofax talks a lot about the first mile, but now can have deeper conversations about that last mile — where something needs to be signed.