BetterECM - russ stalters’ Blog on Exploring NextGen ECM

Alan Pelz-Sharpe has a good post discussing the acquisition of Tower Software of Australia by HP: HP expands archiving, e-discovery, and compliance portfolio with acquisition of Tower Software.

I have been anticipating Tower Software being acquired by somebody for over three years.  At one point, I thought HP would acquire Open Text. Hmm, I wonder if they went after Open text and the price was too high?

Anyway, I will be interested to see what HP will do with Tower combined with their Integrated Archiving Platform. I will be skeptical of the combined solution due to the limited scalability of Tower Trim. When I speak of scalability, I am referring to supporting a global organization with tens of thousands of users spread across the globe. This scenario is not easy to support.

I saw this announcement earlier this week and started to think about the Open Text acquisition rumors I’d heard about and wrote about last year.

I did not really feel the need to opine further until I caught the following post from C3 Associates today entitled “SAP Agreement to Resell Livelink the First Step in the Acquisition Tango?” and it made me think about the notion of Open Text being acquired by SAP more deeply.

Well, the more I think about it the more it makes complete sense. After IBM snapped up FileNet and Oracle bought Stellent who else could SAP turn to. SAP has established sound footing powering mission critical business processes in many Global 5000 customers but has never fielded a credible ECM solution to marry to the transactional ERP solutions built on top of SAP.

By buying Open Text, SAP can own and control the unstructured content management side of the enterprise information management equation with a credible solution that can be even more tightly integrated with SAP. It just makes sense. Especially since SAP is competing with Oracle and IBM for the remaining ERP business out there.

So, what do YOU think? Will Open Text be the next redwood to be taken down in the ECM forest?

Oh, by the way, I really like the Blog over at C3 Associates and recommend that you add it to your list of feeds.

Well Open Text completed the Hummingbird acquisition yesterday and put out a press release. The Hummingbird web site has already been rebranded and now looks like a clone of the Open Text Site.

Wow not wasting any time!

In a second press release yesterday, “Open Text Outlines Strategy Following Acquisition of Hummingbird”, Open Text made the following announcements:

Two key decisions have been made with the close: Hummingbird’s RedDot Solutions will be maintained as part of a comprehensive Web content management strategy that will be unveiled next week. And Hummingbird Connectivity will continue as a distinct business focused on delivering its market-leading services. Open Text also said that it will introduce several new product initiatives over the next few weeks and a product roadmap in November at its LiveLinkUp Phoenix global user conference in Phoenix, Arizona.

The addition of RedDot does help bolster the weak CMS capability of the Open Text LiveLink suite. Only, how will this be integrated and how long will it take?

Hummingbird will now operate under the Open Text name and the Hummingbird Enterprise product suite will be rebranded under the name LiveLink ECM – eDOCS.

The Hummingbird Chairman and CEO have left the building and now it will be interesting to see how this plays out for Hummingbird customers.

Sorry, but I am cautiously pessimistic.

Technorati tags: ECM, Open+Text, Hummingbird