Digital content services company Hyland Software's revenue grew by 17% during 2020 and 10% during 2021 to surpass $1-billion, owing to the growing demand for digital content services solutions, Hyland chief commercial officer Ed McQuiston has said.

Speaking during an in-person event for its partners and clients on May 4, McQuiston added that the company saw strong growth in demand for its solutions in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region.

He further noted that the company's strong balance sheet had enabled it to complete five acquisitions during 2020 and 2021 to bolster its capabilities and broaden its offerings from document and data ingestion through to applying compliance rules to determine what to retain or delete.

"From January 2020 to April 2021, we made five acquisitions to add to our technology portfolio and capabilities. The focus of our capabilities is content services, but we also do a lot of things that are not strictly content services but augment them well.

"Our capabilities include capturing and ingestion of information, such as from emails and portable data files, to storing and applying metadata and taxonomy to the information to make it searchable on a granular level, to putting the information to work through process automation and workflows, as well as robotic process automation and then processing and applying compliance rules to retain or destroy the data," he said.

Further, Hyland has experience in serving the healthcare, financial services, government, retail and education industries, and clients can use the solutions developed for these industries as a framework and a guide for best practices when building their own solutions expertly tailored to their needs, said McQuiston.

"Our 16 000 employees, including now more than 600 serving the Europe, Middle East and Africa region, consult with partners and customers and provide advice based on prior experience. The sudden need worldwide to work remotely, owing to Covid-19 lockdowns, dramatically accelerated digital transformation, and saw many companies replacing older systems with more advanced versions that supported their employees' and customers' needs to conduct business digitally," he added.

The services can be provided through mobile, Web-based and desktop clients and create linkages to communications tools, lines of business and the broader ecosystem.

For example, Hyland acquired the widely used customer relationship management solution Salesforce and applied its content services capabilities onto this solution to enable better searchability, including much more granular searches that use the taxonomies and metadata of files, as well as artificial intelligence that identifies various additional elements, such as personally identifiable information.

"This enables our users to quickly find specific documents or information, such as a specific contract, which Salesforce was not built to do, but can now be done through its integration with Hyland's software and solutions," McQuiston illustrated.

Further, in April 2021, Hyland acquired digital asset management software company Nuxeo, which is used to manage digital content for large multinational companies, including Nike, Apple and Tommy Hilfiger, among others.

"As the digital assets are often content that is unstructured, such as images and promotional materials, Nuxeo applies various artificial intelligence processes to the digital assets to enable users to search by clothes, colours, fashion models through facial recognition and locations. This provides greater insight into and searchability of digital assets," he said.

"Part of our goal to be the foremost content services company in the world includes that we are embracing the concept of openness and transparency. Our acquisitions of Nuxeo and Alfresco increased our developers' exposure to Open Source [software] principles and processes, and this sparked changes including that open as a concept relates to radical transparency.

"For example, much of our content and services are provided through our community portal, but the teams have said that there is no reason to not share this more broadly and make our products more accessible to users and potential clients," McQuiston said.

This has had a transformative effect on Hyland and how it thought about the idea of openness and its products as a set, and it aimed to increase this openness going forward, he added.

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
As Covid-19 lockdowns came into effect in March 2020, companies were looking at their processes and how they could enable their organisation to carry out their business processes with most workers working from home, and how they could interact with their clients and external partners in ways they had not done before, said McQuiston.

"This transformed much of their priorities around technology. CEOs' focus shifted to accelerating digital transformation, improving cashflow and modifying their business models," he said.

Given these dramatic changes, Hyland's vision is to provide users with open, connected, cognitive, well-governed solutions and provide secure access to their business content.

"Cognitive capabilities enable greater insight into content and artificial intelligence capabilities make business processes smarter and enables automation of processes, such as through robotic process automation. These capabilities are necessary to provide a scalable and secure content platform."

Additionally, providing better customer experiences was inextricably linked to the user experience of employees. Providing employees with solutions that made their work processes faster and more accurate directly impacted on and improves customer experience, McQuiston noted.

Business information is often distributed across various systems and solutions, and this makes it difficult to have all the information on hand.

"It is important for employees to have information at their fingertips, so that they can carry out their functions and serve clients effectively. The idea is for the right people to have the right information at the right time; and this allows companies to transform their organisations and user experiences, whether internal employees or external clients and partners.

"This intuitive and easy access to content and information further enables companies to identify what is missing and what needs to be adjusted or changed to provide an excellent user experience, and thereby grow revenue and the company."

It is the combination of these changes that enables digital transformation of companies, he said.

To this end, Hyland has taken a low-code approach to its solutions that enables users to have solutions that are expertly tailored to their needs.

"It is no longer sufficient to deploy a technology solution over two to three years. Companies must be agile and able to adapt their processes to changing needs and client demands and Hyland enables users to customise the solutions to their needs," McQuiston said.