Hyland Software Inc. expanded the scope of its content management portfolio today with the release of Hyland Experience Capture, a web-based scanning, classification and data extraction tool and the announcement of a robotic process automation suite called Hyland RPA.

The announcements are part of an aggressive campaign by the company this year to broaden its scope beyond content management into a variety of ancillary products, including RPA and secure document tracking.

In February it acquired Learning Machine Technologies Inc., maker of a distributed ledger blockchain technology for content authentication. Last month it announced plans to buy Alfresco Software Inc., developer of open-source enterprise content management and business process management software.

Collectively, the moves are about “deepening integrations to the data layer rather than just the surface layer,” Chief Executive Bill Priemer said in a briefing with journalists.

Cleveland-based Hyland, which is owned by private equity firm Thoma Bravo LLC, has acquired seven companies over the last five years, with three of those purchases coming this year. The RPA technology came with the August acquisition of Cologne, Germany-based Another Monday Service GmbH, a small developer whose technology nevertheless earned it a “visionary” ranking on Gartner Inc.’s 2019 Magic Quadrant for that market.

RPA uses machine learning to mimic interactions between humans and computers, with high-end systems suggesting process improvements. Gartner expects the RPA market to total nearly $1.9 billion next year and to grow at double-digit rates through 2024.

Hyland Experience Capture or HxC is described as the first cloud-native application built on the Hyland Experience Platform, a re-architected version of the company’s data integration platform that Priemer said “will be the unifying layer across multiple repositories and back ends that we’ve developed and acquired over the years.”

The software combines intelligent capture functionality through digital ingestion and optical character recognition and combines it with machine learning to classify and distribute captured information according to rules. Using a small desktop host, it can handle anything from ad-hoc scanning to large batch ingestion across multiple work sites, the company said.

Hyland RPA automates manual, rule-based, high-volume and repetitive tasks and addresses all phases of automation, from process analysis to bot management, according to Another Monday’s website. The software can act as a personal assistant, independent bot or hybrid of the two.

Hyland picked up a hidden gem when it bought Another Monday, said Hyland Chief Product Officer John Phelan. “If Another Monday had invested in sales and marketing as the big three did there might be a big four,” he said.

There is no consensus on who the big three are, but most lists include UiPath Inc., Blue Prism Group plc and Automation Anywhere Inc. The product that is being made available immediately is essentially a rebranded version of the Another Monday product. “Probably the biggest thing that we’ve done is often the least valuable but it’s really about branding,” Phelan said.

Pricing wasn’t specified.

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