SER is a leader and pioneer in the enterprise content management (ECM) and content services market. Pulse 2.0 interviewed SER Group CEO Dr. John Bates about the company.
Dr. John Bates’ Background
What is Dr. John Bates’ background? Dr. Bates said:
“I’ve been the CEO of five different technology firms, and I’ve also worked in a number of public software companies as a C-suite executive, and always in a transformational context. I’m always looking to solve the problems of business by harnessing transformative technology to address those challenges.”
“I’ve also been fortunate enough to work in a diverse range of areas to tackle those complex challenges through the lens of transformative technologies. From the Internet of Things (IoT) to real-time analytics, from software test automation to harnessing generative AI for creating software tests, and utilizing AI-powered bots to execute those tests—even without access to the code, armed only with a screen and keyboard. Across all these domains, my approach has remained constant: What are the critical business challenges, and how can we leverage transformative technology to overcome them? And that’s precisely what we’re accomplishing at SER.”
Formation Of SER Group
How did the idea for the company come together? Dr. Bates shared:
“SER Group has consistently operated on the leading edge of innovation, but our whole pivot towards Intelligent Content Automation has been solely down to our experience with seeing what problems customers are facing in this era of unprecedented demand for document automation. This demand is driven by the huge influx of documents and the pressing need to bridge the gaps between all these enterprise systems and essentially get wisdom at an enterprise level.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Dr. Bates reflected:
“Having on-stage at SER Summit 2023 incredible global customers from diverse industries and with diverse use cases, each presenting their unique challenges and successes. It was a privilege to hear how our team is helping solve their large-scale document intelligence challenges, particularly when dealing with massive document repositories. In some cases, that’s as many as 60 billion document, by the way.”
Evolution Of SER Group’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Dr. Bates noted:
“For 40 years, we’ve been in the business of document and content management and we have always been at the cutting edge of it. But when I joined the company, I realized that we had market-leading technology, but maybe we weren’t telling people about it in the way that truly resonated with their needs and challenges.”
“As a result—and I would argue especially since we launched the idea of Intelligent Content Automation around three years ago—slowly but surely, I’d like to think that perception’s changing. We’ve been telling people a story about the power of AI in content and the need to bring together AI-powered document understanding with process automation around documents. We’ve highlighted the imperative of integrating these capabilities with the management of documents at a massive scale, for search, storage, and archival processes. This approach is crucial for organizations to be able to deal with the explosion of content explosion and content silos.”
“So, for the past three years, our mission to evangelize Intelligent Content Automation has propelled us on an exhilarating journey akin to that of a startup venture. We have doubled down on harnessing the power of AI, which we believe is the gateway to truly ‘sentient’ documents, and we’ll just continue on that path.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Dr. Bates explained:
“At the heart of everything we do is our AI-powered Doxis Intelligent Content Automation platform, which truly is the next level of enterprise content management.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Dr. Bates cited:
“While the past three years have witnessed the landmark launch of Intelligent Content Automation, we’ve also made significant strides with our Content Apps, which are our new smart solutions that can be configured and integrated through a low-code/no-code approach. This empowers users to quickly compose applications using AI prompts—you really can just describe your application and it gets automatically built. And I think the Doxi Bot, our new smart content assistant, stands out as another major milestone. Doxi enables natural language questioning and answering as if a document is a sentient being. ‘Who is the policyholder?,’ ‘does this contract conflict with any others?’ or ‘does this patient have cancer?’ are all possible interactions.”
Customer Success Stories
After asking Dr. Bates about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“One that I love to talk about is SEW-EURODRIVE, an organization that’s a global leader in industrial automation.”
“If you’ve ever journeyed from London through Frankfurt, you’re likely familiar with this company, as all luggage transport systems at Frankfurt Airport are powered by its drive units. SEW-EURODRIVE efficiently automates over 5,000 custom orders daily with our Doxis system and operates more than 90 different Content Apps on the platform.”
“Essentially, this organization has been leveraging AI for document processing automation for several years. And like many large organizations, this occurs within the context of extensive enterprise systems. The company’s applications span various departments, from Finance to Purchasing to Sales to Production—comprising a total of 80 to 100 different applications of varying sizes and with diverse use cases, all of which must be accessible and functional worldwide.”
“We can share that Forrester Consulting studied the total economic impact of Doxis Intelligent Content Automation at SEW-EURODRIVE and independently decided that it has achieved an ROI of 336% using our software.”
“Another one of our customers is the global leader in logistics, DHL Express. This is an important use case as every document from its logistics workflows are archived—which is already 60 billion and counting, and millions more are added every day.”
“When you think about it, every shipment may only require five or six documents, but you have two or three million per day over 250 working per year. DHL pointed out to us that in logistics, it’s not necessarily about the quality of the data necessarily—it’s primarily about the volume of the data. And when you have to make a huge number of standardized shipments every day, you really need to be able to work at that kind of volume and speed.”
“DHL told us at a recent user conference, ‘We had to find a solution to document, store, and manage all the documents around all of those millions of shipments that need to go all over the world. So, we first set up the logic between these documents. We always had to store these documents, of course, but we used to do that country by country. But when a shipment from country A had to go via country B to Country C, each document had to be stored three times in the three different countries. That was inefficient, so we decided we wanted to implement just one common single source of truth.’”
“By working with SER Group solutions, DHL Express has achieved that single source of truth. DHL also told us that while sophisticated reports and machine learning capabilities are desirable, they’re of no real value without a robust data foundation. The customer emphasized that data is the driving force behind everything they do.”
“We’re also honored to collaborate with one of the world’s most esteemed scientific research institutions, London’s Natural History Museum. The museum has selected SER as its partner for its special RECODE project, which involves digitizing the collections management system. This system oversees the Museum’s digital repository, comprising an astounding 80 million items that collectively represent 4.5 billion years of Earth’s natural history.”
“Our website showcases numerous other remarkable engagements, and I’m pleased to highlight how we’re assisting customers across various sectors, including financial services, travel transport logistics, and also the public sector, such as Deutsche Bahn.”
“The common denominator among all these organizations is their adoption of Intelligent Content Automation to streamline document-related processes, comprehend document content, and effectively store, manage, and search documents.”
Funding
When asking Dr. Bates about the company’s funding details, he revealed:
“We’re one of the largest providers in the ECM (Enterprise Content Management) space. We’ve just acquired a major new investor, TA Associates (TA). TA is a leading global private equity firm and in March it agreed to make a strategic growth investment in the company. Our organization and The Carlyle Group, which has been a significant investor in SER since 2018, very much welcomed TA as the new lead investor.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Dr. Bates assessed:
“The core enterprise next-generation Enterprise Content Management is believed by analysts to be at least $20 billion.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Dr. Bates affirmed:
“The fact that we bring together capabilities from adjacent markets into one platform with one seamless interface, enables us to solve problems that others can’t.”
“Actually, that means we are currently experiencing an overwhelming demand, replacing many well-established legacy vendors in very large deals.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Dr. Bates concluded:
“We want Doxis to be the next-generation content platform for the enterprise. And we think it will be because it understands content and automates intelligently even the most complex business processes for you so that you can scale human productivity by a factor of 10 to 100 times. By having an army of intelligent content robots assisting your people with their work, pointing out challenges and opportunities that may have gone unnoticed, and streamlining workflows, Doxis opens up a realm of transformative possibilities that were previously unattainable.”
“By adding intelligence to end-to-end content processes, we want to empower the human spirit to be massively more productive.”
“That’s what gets me out of bed every day. And I’m confident that’s what the entire SER family is dedicated to achieving as well.”
