• Reynolds Bish, CEO at Kofax


• 30.05.2019 10:06 am

FIT: Can you tell us more about the Kofax and your background?

Reynolds Bish: Kofax software enables organizations to Work Like Tomorrow™ – today. Kofax’s Intelligent Automation software platform and solutions help organizations transform information-intensive business processes, reduce manual work and errors, minimize costs, and improve customer engagement. We combine RPA, cognitive capture, process orchestration, mobility and engagement, and analytics to ease implementations and deliver dramatic results that mitigate compliance risk and increase competitiveness, growth, and profitability. Kofax provides a rapid return on investment for over 30,000 customers in financial services, insurance, government, healthcare, supply chain, business process outsourcing, and other markets. We deliver our software and solutions through a direct sales and services organization and more than 650 indirect channel partners and integrators in more than 60 countries throughout the Americas, EMEA and the Asia Pacific. Kofax is headquartered in Irvine, California with over 2,000 employees in more than 30 of those countries, and its annual revenues are in excess of $600 million.

Early in my career, I was a serial entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, initially as the CFO of a venture capital funded solar energy company, which we took public on NASDAQ when I was 27; and then as a Co-founder and CFO of a venture capital funded provider of data collection and production management systems. I then moved to the “Silicon Slopes” of Utah, where I co-founded and was CEO of Captiva, a provider of input management software, which we eventually took public on NASDAQ and sold to EMC for $325 million. I then took a 16-month sabbatical prior to joining Kofax as its CEO in 2007. This was an entirely different endeavor as the company had already been in business for over 25 years, with revenues of $300 million and the public on the London Stock Exchange but was struggling to develop a go-forward strategy. I’ve been with Kofax since then, affecting enormous transformational change on a continual basis.      

FIT: How the company evolved over the years?

Reynolds Bish: Since I joined Kofax in 2007, we’ve created a new vision and strategy for the company and affected a great deal of transformational change in business, which resulted in significant growth in revenues and profits, and shareholder value creation. This included the divestiture of a legacy hardware distribution and maintenance business, a new hybrid go-to-market model supporting direct and indirect channels, a number of acquisitions to move into larger and faster-growing markets and transitioning the company's listing from the London Stock Exchange to NASDAQ.

In 2015, Lexmark – the MFP and printer company – acquired Kofax for over $1 billion, which was an extremely successful exit for our shareholders. To our surprise, Lexmark then asked me and Kofax’s executive management team to manage it's then – including Kofax – $700 million revenue software business and its 3,000 employees. We accepted that challenge and began affecting transformational change to optimize the combined business, only to have Lexmark – four months later – publicly announce plans to sell itself. And if that wasn’t enough turmoil, their sale process ended in March 2016 with Lexmark agreeing to sell itself to a group of Chinese investors, who immediately told me they had no interest in Lexmark’s software business. Their acquisition of Lexmark closed in December 2016, we then worked with them to carve out and sell Lexmark’s software business and in July 2017 Thoma Bravo, a leading private equity firm, focused exclusively on enterprise software, acquired that business.

Since then, we’ve returned to a more stable state, further optimized the business for growth in revenues and profits and augmented that by acquiring Nuance’s Document Imaging business in January 2019 and Top Image Systems in May 2019. Both acquisitions significantly extend our product offerings, customer base, and market reach.

FIT: What are the main trends and challenges in the industry? How does Kofax address these challenges? 

Reynolds Bish: The workplace is undergoing a renaissance, due to the availability of a variety of new technologies – including cognitive capture, robotic process automation, AI and machine learning. Organizations are adopting these to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, enhance business processes and ultimately deliver a better customer experience.

While these technologies have a lot of value to offer, their potential is hindered by a disjointed approach to their adoption. Take RPA as an example. Organizations are adopting the technology to automate routine, repetitive, manual tasks so that their workforce can focus on higher value work. While many organizations are seeing initial success in RPA pilot projects, they’re struggling to scale those to an enterprise level that delivers business value.  

Kofax addresses this challenge by enabling organizations to work like tomorrow, today. Our functionally agnostic, unified Intelligent Automation platform connects data, documents, systems, people and analytics to enable organizations to solve automation problems across all lines of business – including financial management, supply chain, human resources, shared services and other operations. It helps build, manage and scale a digital workforce so organizations’ talented employees can focus on the tasks that truly matter to ensure business growth and customer satisfaction. This positively impacts everything from profitability and customer experience too, most importantly, workforce morale as it takes away the drudgery of mundane tasks.

We’re seeing a growing interest in this approach to automation – particularly in the banking, insurance, healthcare, logistics, and government sectors. Organizations in these industries are genuinely redefining the ‘future of work’. By way of an example, using our products, ABN AMRO has scaled its digital workforce to an enterprise level, saving thousands of employee-hours of work per week and improving their customer experience.

FIT: What are the future milestones that the company wants to achieve?

Reynolds Bish: In the near future, our goal is to continue to develop, refine and support solutions that further our mission – to help organizations work like tomorrow, today. Our Intelligent Automation software platform includes five key technologies: RPA, cognitive capture, process orchestration, advanced analytics and mobility, and engagement. Along these lines, we’re looking to further help customers strengthen their business with the launch of our Intelligent Automation Starter Pack, which includes production licenses of these technologies and allows organizations to test drive the complete IA platform, prior to starting their automation journey.

In addition, this year we are launching the Kofax Marketplace, which gives customers access to pre-built, best-in-class, low-code RPA robots, connectors and solutions that harness the power of our IA platform and its open architecture. Many of these solutions integrate and connect with products from some of the largest companies in the world, including Google, Microsoft, and Oracle, to name just a few.

Nearly 90 percent of organizations say they want their digital transformation initiatives implemented within the next two to three years, and our solutions arm them with the tools to achieve that objective.