M-Files Expands Content Sharing, Collaboration With Hubshare Acquisition

‘Knowledge companies like tax consultants need to provide knowledge-intensive information to their clients. M-Files is an important tool inside these organizations and is focused on the needs of their employees. With Hubshare, that collaboration is extended to outside the company to include clients or other stakeholders,’ says M-Files CEO Antti Nivala.

Information management technology developer M-Files Tuesday unveiled the acquisition of Hubshare in a move it said would give its end customers the ability to do cloud-based collaboration both internally among employees and externally with their customers.

M-Files offers a next-generation enterprise content platform that enables the management of documents and other information in context with other objects to employees inside a business when and where needed, said Antti Nivala, CEO of the Tampere, Finland-based company, which has U.S. headquarters in Austin, Texas.

The acquisition, for which no financial details were released, closed March 31.

[Related: The 20 Coolest Data Protection Companies: The 2020 Storage 100]

Hubshare adds a customer-focused expansion of those management capabilities, Nivala told CRN.

“Knowledge companies like tax consultants need to provide knowledge-intensive information to their clients,” he said. “M-Files is an important tool inside these organizations and is focused on the needs of their employees. With Hubshare, that collaboration is extended to outside the company to include clients or other stakeholders.”

M-Files generates about 40 percent of its revenue via a network of about 300 channel partners worldwide, primarily in Europe and North America, Nivala said.

“Hubshare also has channel partners, but our intention is to bring Hubshare to all our 300 channel partners,” he said. “We see this as an extension to our product portfolio. Partners have been telling us customers need ways to share and collaborate with information. And some partners work with both of us already.”

The integration plans for the two companies are already in place as the two have cooperated on opportunities in the past and already have some common customers, Nivala said.