Thursday, July 14, 2011

Why We Acquired Global 360


Yesterday, OpenText announced the acquisition of Global 360. As we are expanding our market reach into the business process management (BPM) market, Global 360 adds a complementary set of technologies to OpenText’s portfolio and strengthens the OpenText partnership with Microsoft. With the combination of Metastorm and Global 360, we are now the largest provider of BPM solutions for the Microsoft ecosystem. The BPM solutions complement our existing information governance and archiving solutions for SharePoint and Exchange. But what’s more important, Global 360 increases the critical mass of process management focus inside of OpenText.

The OpenText ECM Suite already included solutions for Transactional Content Management (TCM), which is a close cousin of BPM. OpenText has long provided offerings for scanning and imaging, our own optical character recognition (OCR) engine and fax server (RightFax). Many of the OpenText solutions offered in the SAP and Oracle ecosystems are based on TCM – Accounts Payable, Employee File Management or Travel Receipts Management, etc. And of course, OpenText provides the secure compliance infrastructure that many transactional solutions require.

Not long ago, OpenText acquired Metastorm which added BPM capabilities together with cloud-based process design, business process analysis (BPA) and enterprise architecture (EA) software. Now, Global 360 brings additional capabilities particularly around dynamic case management (DCM), cloud-based process discovery and process analytics and reporting.

The Global 360 acquisition is unique, though, as it allows OpenText to not only expand its offerings, but also reach a critical mass needed to establish itself as a serious contender in a new market. This is not a minor matter. Acquiring companies successfully is not easy, and for a billion dollar vendor like OpenText, acquiring a smaller company could easily result in “swallowing it up” without much tangible impact. One way to prevent this is to fold the acquired organization into an existing group that sponsored the acquisition in the first place.

That happens, for instance, when a company acquires a smaller vendor to accelerate its technology investment or to add services capacity. Such was the case with the recent OpenText acquisition of weComm. OpenText already had a mobility group that needed to address the challenge of cost-effectively supporting multiple mobile platforms. weComm addresses that problem and was naturally combined with the existing mobility group.

When a company branches out into an adjacent space, however, there may not be a group that would be a logical home for the acquired company. In fact, the acquired company is expected to become such group. By buying Metastorm in February 2011, OpenText made a move into the BPM market. According to the analysts, Metastorm is a leading player in BPM which represents a natural expansion opportunity for OpenText. After all, many BPM solutions depend on content.

And now, by combining Metastorm, Global 360 and the existing TCM solutions, OpenText has one of the broadest product portfolios and one of the largest and most experienced teams in the world of BPM. The acquisition not only puts us on the BPM map, it makes us one of the strongest players in terms of market share, number of customers, and market presence. And, the BPM products and people won’t go unnoticed within OpenText as the business process management DNA now represents a significant portion of the company.

That’s why we’ve acquired Global 360.

3 comments:

  1. I'm still confused as to when a client would need the existing BPM product, Metastorm or Global 360?

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  2. After reading this post I still have no idea why they acquired Global 360.

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  3. Hello,

    Thanks for reading my post. I do welcome comments and even criticism but negative comments posted by anonymous make me suspect an ill-wishing competitor.

    Anyway, please stay tuned for more info about OpenText strategy and the Global 360 acquisition in the future.

    --Lubor

    ReplyDelete