Craig Le Clair

IBM and Automation Anywhere  (AA’s) today announced a collaboration (note-not a formal partnership yet) to integrate (AA’s) Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform, used to create software bots to handle repetitive, task-based work, with IBM’s portfolio of digital process automation software, that includes IBM Business Process Manager and Operational Decision Manager. For AA, the partnership is a validation of […]

The search for “quick” solutions to fragmented business applications has pushed RPA investment. I've taken over 200 inquiries on RPA in the past six months and attended Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, NICE, and other vendor conferences and spoken to their customers. About half the enterprises I have talked with are just starting out either in vendor review […]

In the past several months, I’ve given 10 talks on robotic process automation (RPA), its relationship to AI, and its future effect on jobs. These talks were mostly at tech conferences where the audience is a mix of corporate and government technology and business leaders. The industries represented are diverse, as is the process focus […]

  AI is a hot topic in financial services. And its easy to see why. Increasing margins on transactions, decimated by compliance costs and low interest rates, reaching new market segments, and automating routine tasks, makes AI innovation attractive. And in one sense, FinServ has always been about algorithmic innovation. There is no higher potential […]

Bouncing among cognitive sessions and weaving though the crowds, it’s not clear what hurts the most, my feet or my brain.  How much of this are we to believe? What is actually deployable, affordable, and usable by mere humans, and when?  The cognitive exuberance at World of Watson (WOW) was certainly exhausting and even by […]

EMC purchased Documentum in 2003 for $1.7 billion, a very high price tag at the time, and did not grow the core business. Today, the Enterprise Content Division (ECD) business unit consists of Documentum, next-generation content platform Project Horizon, and the archiving solution EMC InfoArchive. Core Documentum products include the Documentum platform, xCP and D2, midmarket […]

Enterprises, in their quest to reduce labor costs, are applying RPA technologies. Yet they do not have a well-defined set of principles and best practices, including how to position RPA with other process tools and initatives. Today it may have become a bit more clear. Pega is the first tech provider, and only BPM market […]

The enterprise collaboration (EC) landscape is rife with innovative products that begin with a narrow feature set (e.g., Box for document collaboration or Slack for group messaging). Viral growth and company value often follow — along with competitors that target the newly identified market. A fragmented and overlapping landscape results as newer entrants pursue broader […]

We are kicking off a research series on the future of work for "production services," with a focus on administrative and customer service jobs where a high degree of automation is projected. Basically, cognitive computing may do to white-collar jobs what robotics did to blue-collar jobs. This may lead to radically different work patterns and unintended consequences. Enterprises risk blindly […]

Nintex is expanding into the emerging cloud-based workflow market — by acquiring Drawloop, an Irvine, California-based document generation provider: http://www.nintex.com/company/news-press/news-archive/2015/nintex-acquires-drawloop. Drawloop is one of the top 10 paid apps in the Salesforce AppExchange, with more than 1,000 customers, yet relative to the core customer communications management (CCM) market that has matured in a batch world driven by large-print […]

This latest Lexmark move is harder to assess than previous major acquisitions. Give  the Perceptive acquisition an  A, Brainware  a B -,  and Pallas maybe a  C+. The Kofax merger, on the other hand, has two legitimate views and lets start with the positive. Kofax has indeed assembled a range of complimentary components that fit well with Lexmark's […]

Somewhat lost in the discussion of HP splitting into two is whether breaking into smaller companies is an unstoppable trend in the tech sector.  HP plans to break itself apart, creating two approximately $60 billion, publicly owned, global companies. No one would consider these small. Companies at a certain size just can't execute at the speed of […]

  During the internet bubble of 2000, many of us predicted E-delivery of business content would reach a 40% to 50% adoption within a few years. Here we are now almost 15 years later and it still hovers around 20%. How can this still be true in 2014? Enterprises want print to become a secondary […]

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 […]

Vacation is a good time to read things that you can never get to while working. My list is quite long but I  scanned it  and took a copy of “The ZERO Marginal Cost Society” by Jeremy Rifkin to the beach. Now Forrester has a lot of focus on digital disruption, helping enterprises avoid being […]

Banks are burdened with sizable infrastructure, struggle to service traditional and emerging channels, are severely boxed in by increasing compliance demands, and are not particularly nimble — also due to overly seasoned business applications. At the same time, the banking industry is ripe for digital disruption, as banks’ traditional strengths of size and breadth aren’t […]

The ability to sense and execute on change are essential qualities of a digital business in today’s marketplace. Don’t believe me? Consider this: 70% of the companies that were on the Global 500 list a mere 10 years ago have now vanished – unable to adapt. In those 10 years we’ve seen digital disruption change the […]

Lexmark’s acquisition of Readsoft is part of a continued effort at Lexmark to balance mature and stable printer HW revenues with faster  growing software and services businesses.  This acquisition is one of many in the last two years, and is consistent with consolidation in the mature capture and content market.  And it works for me. Readsoft […]

  It hit me the other day when I was speaking with a call center operator about my reservation. She was funny, smart, well informed and flew around her app. with the quickness of the chipmunk. She is the new breed of worker. Not the production worker that performs repetitive tasks, like data entry and responding to […]