News Analysis
Enterprise content management stalwart Hyland announced an evolution of its brand strategy in mid-March to emphasize AI-driven automation, cloud-native enterprise content intelligence and enhanced user experience.
It didn't take long for the company to introduce the changes behind the new brand promise. On April 1, Hyland announced significant updates across its product portfolio, with enhancements to its unified content, process and application intelligence solutions.
What's Inside the Hyland Updates
Hyland has been delivering enterprise content management (ECM) solutions since it set up shop in 1991. Founded by Packy Hyland Jr., the company's flagship product, OnBase, focused on document management and workflow automation across industries such as healthcare, finance and government. The company rebranded itself back in 2014 to OnBase by Hyland to signal its commitment to its core product.
While the brand announcement last month didn't involve a name change, it aligned the company with current customer demands for AI-driven automation, cloud-native enterprise content intelligence and enhanced user experiences. At the time of the branding announcement, Hyland teased forthcoming updates including:
- AI-Enhanced Content Management: Advanced AI for analyzing and categorizing unstructured data.
- Cloud-First Innovation: A modern, scalable and secure cloud-native approach.
- Federated Content Unification: Seamless content integration without large-scale migrations.
- User-Centric Experience: A redesigned, intuitive interface.
The April 1 launch made good on a number of these promises, with the introduction of new AI capabilities across Hyland Automate, Hyland Knowledge Discovery, OnBase and Alfresco, including the introduction of AI agents. These updates are designed to support content intelligence and AI-driven automation, so businesses can more easily extract insights from enterprise content and automate key processes.
Key enhancements include:
- Hyland Knowledge Discovery: The update introduces natural language queries, AI agents and dynamic filtering to improve search results and generate accurate, actionable business insights.
- Hyland Automate: AI-powered capabilities allow users to convert natural language prompts into process workflows, integrate with OpenAI and Microsoft email, and accelerate automation.
- Hyland OnBase and Alfresco: OnBase 25.1 includes AI-driven insights and scalable app-building features, while Alfresco 25.1 enhances content management with improved performance and scalability.
Hyland also expanded security controls for Hyland for Workday, a solution for managing content linked to Workday records.
What Drove the Hyland Evolution?
Hyland president and CEO Jitesh Ghai explained in an email interview how the changes fit into a broader strategy to scale the company’s business.
"As a company known for its Ohio roots for over 30 years, Hyland’s brand evolution is an instrumental part of continuing to scale beyond a local software company to the billion-dollar global enterprise it truly is," he told Reworked.
Hyland's Response to the LLM and Agentic AI Era
Hyland’s Content Innovation Cloud, which Hyland unveiled at its annual CommunityLIVE user event in September 2024, included advanced content services, intelligent document processing, knowledge discovery and intelligent automation to help organizations harness fragmented data. With the addition of the new AI capabilities, it believes it can offer organizations exactly that.
“LLMs and agentic AI are dominating conversations nowadays, but it is being done in the wrong way,” Ghai said. He argued that organizations must first gain access to mission-critical, unstructured data, which informs key business decisions and automates workflows. “This next step in Hyland’s journey is simply an emphasis of an already-established message to continue educating customers globally on the power of unstructured data,” he said.
Hyland’s AI-powered solutions aim to eliminate the need for multiple tools across different vendors. According to Ghai, this extends beyond traditional content management by offering end-to-end solutions — including content capture, intelligent automation, application development, governance and collaboration — within a single AI-driven platform.
A Custodian of Unstructured Data
The federated content approach integrates AI and cloud capabilities across various repositories, and allows businesses to embrace data fragmentation rather than view it as a challenge. Ghai stressed that Hyland remains a custodian of unstructured data, helping businesses automate workflows and enhance collaboration.
“The future of Hyland is that it’s an AI-powered agentic company that is AI-powering content, mission-critical business processes, and resulting application and consumption experiences,” he said.
AI-driven automation, Ghai added, will provide customers with greater transparency, particularly for critical data such as patient records, and help them streamline workflows through AI-powered insights.
As part of its cloud-first approach, Hyland continues to offer customers secure and seamless access to data across hybrid, multi-cloud and on-premises environments. "The challenge lies within educating customers on that reality," Ghai concluded.
A Profound Shift and a Pragmatic Approach to Innovation
Digital Frontier Company founder and CEO David Thompson views this announcement as the day Hyland — a name synonymous with enterprise content management (ECM) for over three decades — shed its legacy identity, and positioned itself "to spearhead the AI revolution in enterprise automation." For industry observers, this isn't a superficial facelift, it's a profound strategic shift.
Hyland isn’t merely trying to adapt to the digital age; it's determined to lead it, Thompson told Reworked.
He views the rebrand as a response to changes in the markets, not a reflection of weakness in the company. "Hyland isn't struggling. With annual revenues consistently surpassing $1 billion and serving over 19,000 customers worldwide, Hyland has become a cornerstone of intelligent content management, robust infrastructure, and outstanding user experiences," Thompson said.
Staying recognizable doesn't equate to staying relevant, he added. Hyland had to evolve from a respected ECM provider into a visionary champion of AI-driven enterprise automation to remain a leader in managing organizational content. The rebrand proactively addresses these challenges with outcome-oriented solutions emphasizing faster automation, superior compliance and simplified user experiences.
Thompson believe Hyland has an advantage in this context. "Hyland’s solution doesn't demand 'rip-and-replace,' it harmonizes and automates across these varied systems. In contrast, many competitors still push monolithic 'one-size-fits-all' solutions. Hyland’s practical, integrative approach places it at the forefront of pragmatic innovation,” he said.
The change happens at a time of radical transformation for the enterprise. Gartner forecasts the global AI software market will reach $134.8 billion by 2025, a leap from $62 billion in 2022. Content has exploded exponentially, with IDC estimating the volume of data worldwide to soar beyond 175 zettabytes by 2025. Unstructured data alone now accounts for 80%-90% of all enterprise data, proliferating like bacteria in a petri dish.
Hyland's Update Brings Clear Benefits and New Challenges
Hyland’s approach to cloud federated content and federated search isn't new, Brian DeWyer, CTO and co-founder of Reveille Software, told Reworked. IBM with ImagePlus, EMC with Documentum and M-Files have all designed solutions that took the same or similar approach.
Cloud scaling, faster and more extensive broadband connectivity and advancing AI to understand the valuable content improve the odds of Hyland's success, he said. The AI content consumption approach is a clear improvement to the time-consuming and money-sucking ROT (Redundant, Obsolete, Trivial) manual content analysis.
New Tech Brings New Challenges
However, DeWyer noted that with new technologies come new challenges including:
- What information is being sent outside firewalls?
- What is the weakest link in the solution? (Especially if third-party components are involved)
- Where is the data residing? What regulatory standards (SOC, ISO, NIST, etc.) are met?
- Is there end-to-end encryption, including data at rest?
- Is it auditing information to meet expanding internal and external audit and compliance requirements?
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Business-critical content will feed AI for examining and fulfilling search result queries, DeWyer added. That necessitates a management and observability layer to understand the overall federated cloud hybrid solution's service levels, performance and operating health.
AI-Driven Automation
AI-driven automation can accelerate the implementation of more efficient and effective automated business workflows, he added. Generative AI with natural language prompts can generate targeted workflows that are ready to test in minutes versus the traditional Visio process design, business design reviews and manual Hyland OnBase workflow option configuration.
He cited Hyland Automation as an example here. “Asking Hyland Automation to 'generate a support ticketing workflow for high-value customers with a one business day service level' is game-changing,” he said. Line of business analysts can offer quick process improvements as a result.
However, it doesn't alter the need to understand existing process flows and anticipate change resistance. "If the impacted participants are not involved in the automated process creation, the adoption will be stalled, time-consuming or face considerable resistance," DeWyer concluded.
Editor's Note: Read more about the evolving content management landscape below:
- Enterprise Content Management Is Evolving (Yet Again) — While generative AI and content services are changing ECM, it's just the latest in a long line of evolutions.
- 2025 Workplace Technology Market Predictions — Legacy ERP systems will feel the heat, agentic AI's definition will be up for grabs and more predictions for the year ahead.
- What's Next for Enterprise Search? AI Knows — People don't want to search, they want to find information. A new breed of solutions are changing the boundaries of enterprise search.