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In 2013, Lexington-based Lexmark International has spent more than $200 million acquiring companies that its chairman and CEO Paul Rooke hopes will help keep the business viable as much more than a company reliant on the use of ink and paper.

“Each of those had a very targeted reason to fit into our puzzle,” Rooke said.

Screen Shot 2013-11-26 at 2.47.20 PMIn October Lexmark announced it had purchased Pacsgear, a California-based software company that focuses on medical imaging and document transfer, for around $54 million. In August, Lexmark acquired Germany-based software developer Saperion for a cash purchase price of approximately $72 million. There were also March acquisitions of San Francisco-based Twistage and Seattle-based AccessVia, for a combined investment of approximately $31.5 million, and in January, Lexmark purchased Acuo Technologies, LLC, a Minneapolis-based company that specializes in streamlining health-care imaging onto one system, for approximately $45 million in cash.

Screen Shot 2013-11-26 at 3.34.37 PMEach of these newly purchased businesses — with the exception AccessVia, which produces retail signage — now fall under Perceptive Software, a suburban Kansas City-based company acquired by Lexmark in 2010.

The role of Perceptive Software

The $280 million purchase of Perceptive Software was a major foray for Lexmark into its new mission of structuring data, the compartmentalizing of information into workflow and computerized business processes.

The battle against unstructured data — which can be a paper invoice, or even a digital one that is not capable of flowing easily through a payment system — has been the major push for Rooke since he took over for Paul Curlander first as CEO in late 2010 and as Chairman in the spring of 2011.

Screen Shot 2013-11-08 at 12.42.28 PM“While we’re investing organically to grow our capabilities, hardware and software, there are gaps, so these acquisitions reflect on some of the gaps we need [to fill],” Rooke said in an extensive interview with Business Lexington. “Some of [the companies we’ve purchased] have to do with technology; some of them have to do with deeper industry expertise.”

Perceptive Software had both.

“When we acquired Perceptive back in 2010, they brought a depth of health care and education that we didn’t have as much in, which was a nice complement,” Rooke said.

Lexmark went about looking at the industries they already had a strong foothold in with what is called managed print services (MPS), the streamlining of printing on shared devices as opposed to allowing employees to each have a desktop printer. The next step, finding hang-ups their customers continued to battle and looked to solve, proved fairly easy to find. The customers tended to come right out and ask for help in solving these problems.

“These are adjacencies for us. It’s not something we’re jumping out into left field to do,” Rooke said.

The MPS portion of Lexmark has earned multiple recognitions for the company as a leader in the industry by Gartner, an analyst firm. But this year Perceptive Software joined Lexmark in being lauded by Gartner as a member of the leader quadrant in enterprise content management solutions, the process of structuring data in a company’s computer system.

“But being named a leader in these segments is not the secret sauce — it’s how we put them together,” Rooke said. “Synergies, whether it be between imaging and Perceptive Software — that’s one synergy — but there’s also synergies within Perceptive.”

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