OpenText

Open Text Corporation

Open Text Corporation
Company type	Public (NASDAQ: OTEX; TSX: OTC)
Industry	Computer software
Founded	1991
Founder	Tim Bray
Headquarters	Waterloo, Ontario
Key people	John Shackleton, CEO Tom Jenkins, Chairman
Products	Content management solutions
Revenue	US$595.7 million (2007)
Number of employees	2100+
Website	www.opentext.com

Open Text Corporation (TSX: OTC Nasdaq: OTEX) is a Canadian high-tech company based in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. It produces and distributes computer software applications designed to enable enterprise content management solutions for large corporate systems. Its flagship technologies are, Livelink ECM - Enterprise Server and Livelink ECM - Archive Server, both core of many ECM products. It employs over 300 people in its Waterloo office and over 2800 people worldwide. It is a publicly traded corporation.

On July 5, 2006, Open Text made an unsolicited bid for Hummingbird Ltd of Toronto (North York), ON, another company that produces enterprise content management software. Hummingbird had previously agreed to be acquired by Symphony Technology Group. Open Text announced it owned 4.3% of Hummingbird, and had support of approximately 36% of the other shares (of which 18% were through lock-up agreements). It eventually negotiated a "sweeter" deal with Hummingbird, and acquired Hummingbird in October 2006 for approximately US$489 million. Open Text is now the the largest Canadian-based software-centric company.

History

In 1995, Open Text Corporation acquired InfoDesign Corporation in which David Seaman became an executive officer and VP of global professional services.

InfoDesign Corporation had been created in 1990 by David Seaman, Ludo Van Vooren and Jane Briscoe. David and Ludo were working at SoftQuad in the early SGML days. As SoftQuad concentrated on the creation of software for the editing of SGML (Author/Editor) and the publishing of SGML (SQTroff and assorted programs), there were no companies that provided an integration and deployment of these technologies.

InfoDesign was established to provide consulting and integration services, training and SGML database software. The company was incorporated in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and quickly grew to establishing offices in Alexandria, VA, USA and Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

One of the products of InfoDesign was WorkSMART, an SGML document management system. Its development was started in late 1990. WorkSMART eventually became a key component of the US department of defence Joint CALS program.

In 1995, Open Text purchased Odesta, producer of Livelink, an electronic document management system. This system was converted to a Web-based system.

In September 2002 Open Text bought Centrinity and their FirstClass groupware for CA$19 million. Open Text was developing a suite of online collaboration products through a series of mergers, and FirstClass's strong educational background fit in particularly well with some of their other offerings. At the time they stated they were planning to integrate FirstClass into their LiveLink internet information collection engine, but it is unclear if this integration has taken place. The product is still under development in what is now their FirstClass division.

Open Text completed several corporate acquisitions in 2002 and 2003, the largest of which was its acquisition of IXOS — a German company nearly as large as Open Text itself — in October 2003. In 2004 Open Text acquired the digital asset management vendor Artesia Technologies.

By acquiring Hummingbird Ltd. in 2006, Open Text added several more businesses to its portfolio, including Hummingbird Connectivity and RedDot Solutions Inc..

Offering

Open Text is a Independent software vendor which sells software licenses including support and maintenance. To help customers and partners in deploying and run the software, Open Text offers worldwide consulting services, software training and individual support packages.

Search technology

Open Text originated from the Oxford English Dictionary project at the University of Waterloo, a project led by computer scientist Gaston Gonnet. From 1984 to 1989, this project sought to create an electronic OED. One of the chief necessities for such a massive undertaking was the development of effective search technologies which could be used to quickly index and retrieve information. The search technology that was developed for this project was recognized as being useful for many electronic applications, and was the basis for the founding of Open Text Corporation in 1991.

With the advent of the information age, and the growing importance of the Internet, the company grew as organizations discovered the need to be able to index and search their existing and growing stores of information. In 1994, Open Text began hosting their Open Text 4 search engine on the World Wide Web, competing directly with the AltaVista Web search engine. For a brief period in 1995, Open Text provided the search technology used by Yahoo! as part of its Web index.

Livelink

Livelink was marketed as a business solution for "collaborative knowledge management". Livelink was the basis for Open Text's second phase of growth. The system was integrated with Open Text's search technology, as well as a business process management solution. Much of Open Text's growth during this second phase was gained through the acquisition of smaller companies and integration of their technologies with Livelink. With Livelink, Open Text was an early proponent of using Web technology for corporate intranets.

Livelink ECM

Livelink ECM is the combined offering of integrated products — many of them gained through mergers and acquisitions - packaged to meet specific needs, the core of all ECM solutions.

With the acquisitions since 2003 and later, Open Text positioned itself as one of the leaders in the enterprise content management market. Enterprise content management is a conjunction of solutions designed to meet many of the information needs and duties of large corporations. Some of the important requirements include content management in general as document management, transactional content management, knowledge management and web content management but also business process management, collaboration and online meeting. All, if needed, controlled by records- and storage management to achieve information governance for regulatory compliance.

Competitors

Some of Open Text's key competitors in the enterprise content management market include:

• IBM / Filenet
• EMC Corporation/Documentum
• Interwoven
• Hyperwave
• ZyLAB

See also

• Tim Bray - a co-founder of Open Text Corporation
• Open Text FirstClass division
• Hummingbird Connectivity, a division of Open Text
• RedDot, The Open Text Web Solutions Group
• BRS/Search - now marketed as Livelink ECM Discovery Server

External links

• Official website
• Open Text on CMS Watch
• [2]
• Open Text solutions for Microsoft environments
• SAP AG and Open Text Corporation announced a joint worldwide offering, News 20070502