I recently attended OpenText’s analyst day at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston where I gained my first broad introduction to the company, its solutions, and executive roster, including President and CEO Mark Barrenechea. OpenText (Ticker: OTEX) is a Canadian-based provider of technology and services that reported $1.5 billion in revenue last year and focuses on the management and movement of information/data in a solutions category that it calls “Enterprise Information Management,” Barrenchea described this business as one that “helps unlock the value of the 20% of enterprise data that resides in ERPs and the 80% of data that resides in other systems.”
OpenText has a broad solution footprint and has been an active acquirer through the years, but since it frequently plays behind the scenes as an integration solution or as a solution sold by its partners (including SAP & Oracle), it is a less familiar name to most who work in or follow the supply management space. Some of our readers will be familiar with OpenText as a solution that supports the processing of invoices within SAP’s systems of record while others may know the company because they use GXS, a B2B backbone/network and managed services provider that Open Text acquired for slightly more than $1.2 billion in January of this year. Scott Cravotta, formerly of GXS and now OpenText’s SVP Managed Services, gave an example of his team’s work in B2B managed services when he presented a case study of a food manufacturer where Scott says his team helped migrate 25% of teh company’s suppliers to a new SAP system and has streamlined new supplier enablement from 6 months to 1-2 weeks.
Barranchea says that OpenText is focused on delivering the “world’s largest business network” and stated that it has 600,000 current trading partners. OpenText’s “network’ today supports EDI and in many ways resembles an integration service or collection of services rather than the kinds of business networks we usually discuss on these pages. When referencing its network, OpenText also includes a fax service that supported 2 billion pages last year.
While OpenText doesn’t play in the traditional world of supply management solutions that we follow today, it has clear designs to do so. And, with its application development (P2P, invoicing and contracts) and network growth strategies and an appetite for acquisitions, OpenText is a company to watch. As such, it will be interesting to track the company’s move beyond B2B integration into supply management applications and networks, particularly since this strategy puts it on a collision course with its ERP partners, SAP in particular.
