Gimmal, Automation Anywhere & Darktrace – Our Thoughts

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Gimmal, Automation Anywhere & Darktrace – Our Thoughts

By Alan / May 6, 2021

Well completely unplanned, but acquisitions and investments are becoming a weekly theme of our analyst notes. It’s been a busy year so far on these fronts; just last week, we published a somewhat divisive note regarding the UIPath IPO.

This week two events caught our attention in the industry a board shuffle at RPA vendor Automation Anywhere and Gimmals latest of several acquisitions. Let’s start with the smaller of the two Gimmals acquisition of Sherpa Software. The Texas-based firm of Gimmal closed two deals in late last year, and as we predicted, more were likely on the way. Though another small deal, Sherpa brings more data governance functionality but specifically adds eDiscovery to the portfolio. And quite a Governance & Compliance portfolio it is becoming from physical records management through file analytics to now eDiscovery. However, we have known Gimmal for a long time, but it’s only in the past year or so that they have grown in market visibility in part to its acquisition. Fueled by investment from Rubicon Technology Partners, Gimmal may well be still on the M&A path and is emerging as a key player in the market.

On to AutomationAnywhere, and unsurprisingly, hot on the heels of the massive IPO rivals UIPath filed the other week, the firm has brought in a new COO, ex Salesforce Exec Mike Micucci, and CFO James Budge to further its IPO ambitions. The RPA market appears to be red hot, certainly in investors’ eyes, but recognizing its limitations in automating repetitive tasks. Undoubtedly the money raised in these public offerings will fuel further M&A. Our spidey senses tell us that Cognitive Capture vendors leveraging ML & AI ato automate document processing will be left right and center in their sights.

Finally, there is another movement that we are keeping an eye on, that of the recent IPO of London-based, Darktrace. Though strictly speaking, Darktrace is a security firm outside of Deep Analysis’s remit; it was founded in part by ex Autonomy executives. And Autonomy is a company we (and this analysts in particular) have a long history with….. interesting, to say the least. And as one of those most closely involved in the firm Mike Lynch the former CEO of Autonomy, is facing extradition charges to the US on 17 counts, including security fraud, probably the less said, the better.

Interesting times indeed