By: Mukul Krishna, Global Head of Practice, Digital Media
OpenText has chosen a strategic, inorganic growth path through acquisition over the years. OpenText was one of the first vendors to recognize the critical role managing enterprise information will play in any workflow across verticals and geographies. Instead of building out the many components required to become a one-stop shop for enterprise information management, the company launched an aggressive M&A strategy to buy most of the prominent digital asset management, enterprise content management and business process management companies as well as other acquisitions in adjacent markets. Some acquisitions have been more successful than others and, over the years, the company has amassed a vast product portfolio and customer list. The Carbonite acquisition is in line with the company’s apparent strategy to be the largest end-to-end enterprise information management platform. According to Frost & Sullivan research, the four pillars of an effective enterprise content/information strategy that are continuously validated by CXOs are:
- Information management
- Data transformation
- Content protection
- Business intelligence and monetization
The Carbonite acquisition enables OpenText to fill a gap on the content protection side, which is important as companies today have much of their branded IP residing on their network as some form of a digital asset that needs comprehensive protection. This is definitely not the end of OpenText’s appetitive to inorganically add technologies and customers to its portfolio. It will be interesting to see how deep the company will foray into the BI and analytics side and how it plans to consolidate its acquisitions into a seamless and unified offering.
