Top Image Systems Completes Acquisition of Cloud Software and Solutions Company eGistics

Acquisition to deliver on numerous TIS strategic growth initiatives and provide meaningful financial benefits

Tel Aviv, Israel/New York, N.Y., 16 July, 2014 -  Top Image Systems, Ltd. (NASDAQ:TISA),  a leading Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Business Process Management (BPM) solutions and Mobile Imaging Platform (MIP) provider, today announced that it has completed its acquisition of eGistics, Inc. in a transaction valued at $18 million.  TIS paid the purchase price 50% in cash and 50% in TIS shares.

“We are pleased to announce that we have closed on this transaction, and we are excited about the opportunity to cross-sell and integrate our complementary product portfolios to grow market share, increase revenues and strengthen our market presence,” said Izhak Nakar, Founder and Active Chairman of Top Image Systems. “Our combined offering provides cutting-edge technologies that will enable more advanced next generation solutions for document and data management and content-driven business process automation.  In particular, we will be better able to offer solutions leveraging the secure, on-demand cloud-based eGistics’ CloudDocs framework, which offers physical and cyber security, utilizing multiple encryption technologies and best-in-class intrusion detection.   Combining TIS’ industry-leading  enterprise capture and workflow solutions, mobile image processing platform and broad global install base with eGistics’ innovative cloud-based platform and world-class clients in the U.S. financial sector make this a very valuable and positive transaction from strategic, geographic and technological as well as from financial perspectives.”

Don Dixon, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Trident Capital, the largest shareholder of eGistics, has joined the TIS Board of Directors.

Canaccord Genuity acted as exclusive financial advisor to Top Image Systems in connection with the transaction and Needham & Company acted as financial advisor to eGistics.  Schwell Wimpfheimer & Associates LLP and Choate Hall & Stewart LLP acted as legal advisors to Top Image Systems and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati acted as legal advisor to eGistics.  

About eGistics, Inc.

eGistics is a leading provider of private cloud solutions that streamline payments business processes. The eGistics private cloud solution automates the capture, management and delivery of documents and data in a highly secure, highly scalable and compliant environment. Today, the eGistics private cloud solution supports paper and electronic transaction processes for many of the largest financial institutions and third-party processors in the U.S. To learn more, visit www.egisticsinc.com.

Caution Concerning Forward-Looking Statements

Certain matters discussed in this news release are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause our actual results to be materially different from any future results expressed or implied in those forward looking statements. Words such as "will," "expects,", "anticipates," "estimates," and words and terms of similar substance in connection with any discussion of future operating or financial performance identify forward-looking statements. These statements are based on management's current expectations or beliefs and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially including, but not limited to, the ability to retain the customers, employees and business relationships of eGistics after the closing, risks in product development, approval and introduction plans and schedules, rapid technological change, customer acceptance of new products, the impact of competitive products and pricing, the lengthy sales cycle, proprietary rights of TIS and its competitors, risk of operations in Israel, government regulation, litigation, general economic conditions and other risk factors detailed in the Company's most recent annual report on Form 20-F and subsequent filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. We are under no obligation to, and expressly disclaim any obligation to, update or alter our forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

The Future is Past: Cloud Services Come of Age for Banks

For some, the future lies behind.

by Randy Davis, VP Sales and Marketing Operations

Banks and bankers are not, I suppose, usually perceived as harbingers of trends in technology, but kudos go to +Michael Harte, CIO at Commonwealth Bank of Australia, for getting it right back in 2010.

In our blog post at the time, Putting the Kibosh on Soaring Software and Maintenance Costs, we noted that Michael had recognized that select cloud vendors had solved his hardware/software problem, and that he didn't need to:

"We're saying that we will never buy another data center. We will never buy another rack or server or storage device or network device again. I will never let any organization that I work for get locked into proprietary hardware or software again. I'll never tell my teams in the business that it will be weeks to get them hardware provision. I'll never pay upfront for any infrastructure and certainly would never pay for any, or rent any, infrastructure that I would never use. I will never implement an internal solution for a common problem that I could procure on subscription across the Web (emphasis mine)."
                                                                                                  (Reported by Finextra.)

Now we read in an article by Bank Technology News titled, "Banks Are Finally Embracing Cloud Computing," that "banks are warming to cloud computing after nearly a decade of hesitation about trusting their data to outsiders." Michael Harte might say, "Welcome to the past, boys and girls."

However, the Institute of Financial Operations just published a report on "2013 Trends in Cloud-based and Mobile Technology in Financial Services," sponsored by eGistics (click the link and look under Media>Brochures). This study shows that many financial services companies still have a long way to go in recognizing the benefits of cloud-based services. Concerns about security, perhaps based on misinformation or misplaced fears, still prevent some FS organizations from embracing cloud solutions that have been carefully vetted by other banks and or bank servicing companies. This is an example of "The Emperor's Clothes" in reverse.

Rather than "seeing" what's not really there (higher security risks in proven cloud service providers), many banks may be ignoring what's really in plain sight (higher security capabilities provided by cloud providers consumed with protecting data).

Our view, of course, as a provider of "hosted" or "cloud-based" solutions to banks for almost 20 years, is that carefully vetted and chosen cloud-providers can (and do) deliver superior security and data management services. In our blog post, "Cloud Security Concerns Are Dead..." we argued that just as we have come to trust third-parties (banks) with our money, we will also come to trust third-parties (data banks) with our most sensitive data. It is the way of things.

So what should you do if you are hesitating to use cloud services? Here are some suggestions:

• Recognize that there are different kinds of cloud service providers. Understand the difference between general practitioners and specialists in handling financial services data
• Determine your requirements: Tier 4 data centers, certifications, experience with banking practices and operations, regulatory compliance, SLAs, scalability, etc.
• Visit the facilities and meet with the staff of prospective cloud service providers
• Talk to banks and FS companies that are using cloud services
• Don't focus just on high-profile cloud service providers. Consider that you may not want your cloud service provider to be "well known"

Post your comments about banks using cloud-services below.

Headlines Provide Reminders on the Importance of Disaster Recovery Planning

By Bob Lund

Speaking Wednesday on ABC TV's Good Morning America, Craig Fugate, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said, "We don't always get to pick the next disaster."

Fugate was referring, of course, to the magnitude 5.9 earthquake that shook surprised residents in the Northeast Tuesday, and the strengthening hurricane that could hit the Eastern seaboard this weekend.

For some businesses, these headlines are a wake-up call to get their disaster recovery plans in order. The good news: cloud services make disaster recovery preparations more affordable than ever.

Higher Stakes
Although disaster recovery was once considered an expensive insurance policy for rare but catastrophic events such as earthquakes and hurricanes, enterprises are expanding their plans to address all sources of downtime, including mundane power outages (the number one cause of data loss for small businesses, according to research from Aberdeen Group), application failures (the top cause of data loss for large enterprises), network outages and human error.

And downtime occurs a lot more frequently than most people think: more than two-thirds of large enterprises (69 percent) need to recover data on a weekly or daily basis, Aberdeen Group reports.

With information technology now such a critical part of daily business operations, even brief business disruptions -- which may begin harmlessly, involve only one part of a company, and not appear as a more commonly thought of "disaster" -- can have a significant impact on a business, not to mention its customers. Consider the consequences of a lockbox processor missing bank deposit cut-offs on behalf of its customers. More often than not, it is these "quiet catastrophes" that generate the most significant threat to a business and its brand, according to research from Forrester.

Quite simply, there is less and less tolerance for downtime in a 24x7 economy, warns Forrester's Stephanie Balaouras.

By making disaster recovery planning a priority, operations can protect themselves from disasters big and small. Businesses get it. Improving business continuity and disaster recovery is the No. 1 priority for small and medium-sized businesses and the second-highest priority for large enterprises in 2011, according to research from Forrester. Similarly, AT&T's 2011 business continuity study reveals a trend towards greater emphasis on planning and responding to potential threats.

The problem for many of these companies is that it's hard to make capital investments in disaster recovery capabilities when they are under pressure to cut IT costs.

A New Model
Cloud-based archive and document management services offer a way for businesses to safeguard critical content and protect against a disruption in service, at an affordable, transaction-based price that requires no upfront capital investment or ongoing maintenance contracts. What's more, with some cloud services, businesses can leverage an infrastructure that includes mirrored, geographically dispersed data centers for real-time business continuity and automatic fail-over.

More businesses are recognizing the benefits of incorporating cloud technologies in their disaster recovery planning. A majority (54 percent) of organizations surveyed by AT&T currently use or are considering using cloud services to augment their business continuity and disaster recovery strategies. These businesses recognize that cloud services offer tremendous affordability and functionality for business continuity and disaster recovery planning.

The Bottom Line
Businesses can't pick when they'll be impacted by a disaster. But they can control how their organization plans for, and responds to, these events. Using cloud services, such as those for electronic document management, can be a critical element to preventing a disruption in service, protecting client data, and safeguarding the organization's reputation.

Bob Lund is chairman and CEO of eGistics, Inc., a leading provider of cloud-based document management solutions. Lund can be reached at 214-256-4610 or via blund@egisticsinc.com.

Process efficiency top IT objective

by Mark Brousseau, guest blogger

Making business processes more efficient and effective is the top objective of IT investments for 90 percent of the private companies surveyed for PricewaterhouseCoopers' latest Private Company Trendsetter Barometer. Streamlining business processes topped better management of enterprise data (identified by 75 percent of respondents), optimizing business information and analytics (73 percent), making business more agile (58 percent), and attracting new customers (58 percent).

And how do the companies hope to improve their business processes? Forty percent say they are likely to invest in cloud computing. What's more, over half of these companies stated that their investments in cloud-based solutions will be focused on "innovation," rather than "maintenance."

I think these companies have the right idea.

Technology plays a critical role in transforming operations and driving competitiveness for private and public companies. As companies look to better position themselves to take advantage of the economic recovery, they'll need a digital platform in place to capture, manage and deliver mission-critical data as efficiently and effectively as possible -- an area where cloud-based solutions shine.

Leveraging cloud-based solutions enables organizations to take a fresh approach to labor-intensive and error-prone document-driven business processes. For instance, eGistics' CloudDocs on-line document management solution eliminates the burden of determining where to store documents -- in terms of files and folders. It can recognize bar codes, which many businesses use to organize packets of documents, or even load documents into the system for indexing later. And once documents are loaded into CloudDocs, users don’t have to worry about where they are located; with a simple command, CloudDocs retrieves them instantly.

This type of functionality can streamline a wide range of applications -- accounts payable, accounts receivable, human resources and legal, to name a few -- freeing staff to focus more of their time on core competencies, servicing customers or developing innovative new products or services.

In my opinion, that makes IT investments in cloud computing money well spent.
_________________________________

Mark Brousseau, Brousseau & Associates
Mark Brousseau is a noted marketer, analyst, speaker, and writer, with more than 16 years of experience advising leading providers of payments and document automation solutions.

Brousseau is president of Brousseau & Associates, a full-service marketing, PR and business development firm based in Central Pennsylvania. With the largest client base of any independent marketing firm specializing in the payments and document automation arenas, Brousseau & Associates counts among its clients many top solutions and services providers.

You can follow Mark on Twitter @markbrousseau

AP professionals see benefits to cloud computing

By Mark Brousseau

Accounts payable (AP) professionals see "minimal IT involvement" as the biggest benefit of using Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or cloud computing for AP processing, according the findings of the 2011 AP Automation Study by International Accounts Payable Professionals. Nineteen percent of survey respondents identified "no capital investment" as the biggest benefit of cloud computing or SaaS, while 17.5 percent cited "lower cost per invoice" and 14.3 percent identified "fast start-up."

Some 12.7 percent of respondents identified "no software or hardware " as the biggest benefit.

Randy Davis, vice president of sales and marketing operations for eGistics isn't surprised that these benefits would rank high in the minds of AP staff. "Cloud offerings have always touted minimal IT involvement, no capital investment, fast deployment, and no on-site software as benefits," he notes.

But Davis believes that the ability of cloud-based document processing solutions to remove paper management from AP processing could deliver even greater benefits to AP professionals. "Today's cloud-based AP solutions significantly improve on key usability factors such as electronic capture, structured indexing, search and retrieval, work allocation, data updates and corrections, and audit and tracking -- things that directly contribute to the smooth operation of an AP department," Davis says.

"eGistics believes that business users will increasingly appreciate and accept the benefits of SaaS and cloud computing for critical tasks such as AP processing and management, and that such benefits will soon be taken for granted. At the end of the day, AP departments are looking for solutions that help them do their jobs faster, more accurately and with better accountability," Davis concludes.

What do you think?

eGistics is showcasing CloudDocs at Fusion 2011 in Orlando!

eGistics is showcasing CloudDocs at Fusion 2011 in Orlando!

by Nathan Khani, CloudDocs Solution Specialist

eGistics’ flagship product, CloudDocs, is on center stage at Fusion 2011 with a focus on Accounts Payable! We are busy putting the finishing touches on our new AP Quick Template, which, along with the Human Resources Quick Template, provides users with a running start to take the sting out of business document management. We are very excited to provide a revolutionary way to manage business documents.

Why the focus on Fusion?

Fusion-istas, as I affectionately call them, love innovative ways that bring efficiency to accounts payable and/or accounts receivable. CloudDocs is right up their alley. It saves time and money with its truly innovative way to capture, index and separate documents. It allows users to focus on what they are doing rather than how they are doing it by providing a clean, easy to use interface, and completely relieving the user of the need to know where documents are located. Instead, users can focus on quickly locating documents required to complete the task at hand, whether it be part of an approval process or related to faster, better customer service.

Furthermore, CloudDocs securely protects your sensitive files in an environment that is Payment Card Industry (PCI) certified, compliant with SAS 70, supports HIPAA privacy requirements. For the last 14 years, we have provided secured hosting for major financial institutions. You can be confident that your documents are protected with the same level of security that we provide our banking customers—without the big price tag!

CloudDocs ensures that your AR/AP documents are safe from the threat of disaster. We’ve all heard horror stories about companies devastated by natural disasters. With CloudDocs, electronic copies of your documents are kept in a geographically redundant environment so that regional disasters cannot damage or destroy them.

Currently, we are offering a 30-day trial version of our Standard and Professional Edition plans! Please click here to find more information or to sign up for your free trial. You can also call me directly, and I will be more than happy to address any questions you may have, and help you plan a solution that best fits your company’s needs!

Nathan Khani

CloudDocs Solution Specialist

972.851.3135

nkhani@egisticsinc.com

CloudDocs Takes Air!



Visit egisticsinc.com/clouddocs to learn more!

 by Randy Davis, VP Sales and Marketing Operations

TAWPI Capture 2011 marks the official introduction of eGistics' new flagship product, CloudDocs^TM to the business world. World, meet CloudDocs. CloudDocs, meet world.

CloudDocs is the culmination of over 14 years' of experience in providing for the capture, storage, protection, finding and management of important documents and data for the nation's largest financial services companies. We now bring that experience to the service of the Small and Medium-Sized Business market.

Let me be clear. This is an introduction, not a launch. We want you to be able to learn about CloudDocs, visit the CloudDocs Web site, give us your feedback, and otherwise let us know if you want to be notified when it is available. To entice you a bit, if you register to be notified we'll automatically enter your name into our drawing for an Apple iPad, to be given away in April.

So what does CloudDocs do? In the simplest terms, it helps you complete document-oriented business processes. From your PC, you can scan documents, index them (for easy search and find), securely store them in our Tier 4 data centers, and then retrieve any document (or related documents) with one or more search terms and a click of the mouse.

CloudDocs organizes the documents for you, so you don't have to struggle with creating folders and sub-folders and sub-sub-folders. Nor do you have to worry about file names. By using one or more search terms, familiar to your business, you (or your authorized users) can be viewing documents in seconds, no matter how long they've been stored. No one has to "figure out the filing system." CloudDocs does that for you.

Please visit the CloudDocs Web site and give us the privilege of letting you know when CloudDocs is ready. There is, as they say, no obligation.