Image and data capture specialist Kofax has announced an OEM agreement and minority stake in Massachusetts-based mobile apps firm MobiFlex Inc. The deal sees UK-listed but US-centric Kofax putting $500k into tiny Mobiflex and entering into what it describes as a “long term strategic partnership between the two companies”.
Mobiflex’s raison d’etre is a simple mobile app creation platform called ViziApps. For Kofax, however, this deal is all about enabling its capture software and associated workflows to seamlessly receive and process information from smartphones and tablets. You could hardly accuse Kofax of being early to the mobile party, but the company is putting its money in a wholly sensible place by investing in mobile capability. The variety of devices in the enterprise – iEverything, Android this and that, and so on – will keep on growing, as will users’ expectations around the compatibility of their devices with business systems. Naturally the BYOT (Bring Your Own Technology) trend can only bring more.
All in all, it makes a pleasant change to be commenting on something other than missed targets and profit warnings from Kofax (see Kofax warns). The MobiFlex tie-up may prove to be one of the few things about the second half of 2011 that it wants to remember.