News Analysis
Something's up at Hyland. The 30-year-old enterprise content management (ECM) software maker has not only rebranded itself as a provider of intelligent content solutions, but it’s also given its website a fresh look. Gone is the familiar golf course green and mention of its sponsorship of a professional golfer.
But this isn't just semantics and window dressing. Hyland is in the midst of delivering on a multi-year vision that promises to redefine the market and unveil new value for customers. The company is transforming from content management to content innovation, leveraging AI and large language models to make the 80% of enterprise data that sits unstructured finally accessible and actionable through its Content Innovation Cloud.
Consider that since Hyland's early days 30-plus years ago, the company has moved beyond storing documents on optical discs to document management, enterprise document management, enterprise content management to content services to its current focus, content intelligence. (Both Hyland and Box seem to think this is the future.)
What is also new is most of Hyland's management team. The recently hired C-level executives at the Cleveland-based company don't come from document or content management backgrounds: they're product and business builders whose expertise comes from analytics, augmented reality, enterprise software and beyond.
They've come to build, content management experience not required.
Flashback: An Enterprise Content Management Empire
"ECM expertise. That's one thing we don't need," Hyland CEO Jitesh S. Ghai told Reworked. The ex-Informatica executive was hired in May 2024 to replace 27-year Hyland veteran Bill Priemer.
Much of Hyland's growth during Priemer's tenure came via acquisition, including Acrosoft, Alfresco, Another Monday, ANYDOC, ECP, eWebHealth, Hershey Systems, LawLogix (sold to Equifax in 2022), Learning Machine, Liberty IMS, Matrix Imaging, Nuxeo, Perceptive, The CSC Group and Valco Data Systems. Some of Hyland's vertical market offerings in areas like Education, Financial Services, Government, Healthcare and Insurance came via these acquisitions as well.
Ghai didn't join Hyland 12 months ago to deliver more of the same. "We are (already) the trusted custodians of ECM," he told Reworked, adding that they are the largest pure-play in the space. "Our interests aren't spread across other areas like cybersecurity," he added, a potential reference to competitor OpenText.
The "trusted custodians" claim is something that Hyland challengers may want to protest, but with 14,000 customers and $1.2 billion in annual billings, Deep Analysis founder and analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe is willing to buy it.
"Hyland is probably the largest pure play," he told Reworked, adding that new customer acquisition for every vendor in the space is probably limited. "Most everyone who wants (an ECM) to manage their content already has one," he added.
If Hyland were to do nothing substantially new, that could leave management in trouble given that its majority owner Thoma Bravo is heavily invested. The private equity firm put it up for sale in 2013 without finding a buyer. It then recapitalized it in 2015. In 2023, it received a unitranche facility including a $3.25 billion term loan and a $150 million multi-currency revolver from Golub Capital. There's little doubt that investors will want a return.
That doesn't seem to worry Ghai, who not only has praise for what he inherited but also big plans for leveraging the large footprint to the hilt. "We're going to redefine what Hyland brings to market and radically transform the industry," he said. And get this: he's aiming to do this with minimal disruption to what customers currently have in place. More on this later.
A Customer Base Ready for Change
"Hyland's large install base is hungry for innovation," Forrester principal analyst Cheryl McKinnon told Reworked. This includes across product lines where Hyland may have been slower than its competitors to modernize. But it's not just that. "Hyland has struggled to deliver on a consistent product vision and pace of innovation in recent years," McKinnon wrote in the Forrester Wave: Content Platforms 2025 report. That said, McKinnon believes that has begun to change.
Pelz-Sharpe told Reworked that though Hyland had a long-standing tradition of innovation and leadership, "It had lost some intensity," he said. When it comes to moving to the cloud, some of Hyland's customers were/are in no hurry. Here's what he wrote in a Deep Analysis blog post two years ago:
"Though Hyland, like all their competitors, has been pushing their customers to move to the cloud for over a decade, it's not easy, as it's not seen as a priority for the customer. It's Martec's Law in action; though technology advances quickly, adopting those newer technologies proceeds much slower."
New Hyland Leadership for New Challenges
To drive this transformation, Ghai has assembled a leadership team that brings expertise from the world of structured data and enterprise software. Chief Financial Officer Prasenjit Dasgupta joined in December 2024 from Digital.ai, where he successfully consolidated multiple acquisitions and financial systems while driving sustained earnings growth. Chief Commercial Officer Rob Kaloustian arrived in March 2025 from Cloudera, bringing deep experience in data management and analytics.
The technical leadership reflects the same pattern. Chief Technology Officer Tim McIntire joined in May 2025, coming from his role as SVP at Teradata and co-founder of StackIQ. Chief Product Officer Michael Campbell also arrived in May 2025 from his CPO position at Bentley Systems, where he managed complex engineering workflows, having previously served as General Manager at PTC.
The one notable exception is Chief Innovation Strategist John Newton, the ECM pioneer who co-founded both Documentum and Alfresco. Newton joined in May 2025, bringing deep content management expertise to complement the team's structured data backgrounds.
Leap-Frogging to the Future
When Ghai took the reins from Priemer in May 2024, he didn't waste time. By September, he and then-Chief Product Officer Leonard Kim laid out a new vision at Hyland's CommunityLIVE conference. At the center? The Content Innovation Cloud, an AI-driven platform designed to modernize enterprise content management, streamline operations and drive innovation. It promises to automate workflows, ensure security, and connect content across applications and repositories.
In the case of the latter, this means wherever the content sits — be it in Hyland's Alfresco, Nuxeo, OnBase, Perceptive, or in Microsoft SharePoint, OpenText Documentum, etc. — Hyland Intelligent Document Processing can extract data found in Hyland's federated cloud and make it available for knowledge discovery and decision-making.
The platform's workflow capabilities extend across industries, from automating invoice processing and contract approvals in financial services to streamlining patient record management and regulatory compliance workflows in healthcare. In government, the system can orchestrate document routing and approval processes while maintaining strict security and audit trails.
Pelz-Sharpe was struck by the level of excitement among CommunityLIVE conference attendees, who witnessed something that couldn't have been done a few years ago was now possible, and that they would be part of it.
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"It will be exciting if they (Hyland) pull it off," said Pelz-Sharpe. "They'll be able to compete with the biggest (software companies) in the world." He used Salesforce as an example.
Editor's Note: Catch up on more trends in the intelligent content space:
- Enterprise Content Management Gets Disrupted, Again — Keeping up with all the name changes ECM has gone through over the years is hard. But the latest – intelligent content services – might just have holding power.
- Box Is Building Its AI Agent Vision, One LLM Integration at a Time — Box has been incorporating new LLMs as fast as vendors release them. A look at how this fits into the company's vision of the AI-first enterprise.
- Market Trends: Predictions for 2025 — Legacy ERP systems will feel the heat, agentic AI's definition will be up for grabs and more predictions for the year ahead.
