OpenText has completed the acquisition of Documentum and other assets from Dell EMC, in a $1.62 billion deal that gives the widely used content management software a new home at a vendor with a much narrower focus.
For its money, OpenText is getting 5,000 customers, 2,000 employees and more than 300 partner relationships, including one that will continue with Dell EMC. OpenText laid out its vision and rationale for the deal when it was first announced in September:
The acquisition is expected to deepen OpenText’s EIM offering with a substantial portfolio focused on Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Information Life Cycle Management. With strong industry offerings, expertise and footprints in healthcare, life sciences, and public sector, plus additional capacity in financial services, energy, and engineering, OpenText will further strengthen its vertical offerings, customer base, managed services, and geographical coverage.
Now the question comes of how OpenText will approach integrating the Documentum portfolio. Documentum's last major release, 7.2, shipped in January 2015, whereas OpenText more recently unveiled version 16 of its own content management platform. OpenText also uses an "enhancement pack" system that adds incremental features between major releases.
Documentum is a well-established CMS that is known for its scalability and has the benefit of a healthy community of IT professionals who are versed in it. Moreover, while Documentum sales have declined in recent years, the product's scalability has made it very sticky in customer environments due to the risk involved with migrating massive Documentum websites and document repositories to other platforms.
But Documentum—which EMC bought in 2003 for $1.7 billion, slightly more than OpenText paid nearly 15 years later—has grown to be seen as overly expensive, and it lagged newcomers and established competitors in providing cloud-based deployment options.
Meanwhile, OpenText has grown through a long series of acquisitions large and small, with Documentum being its biggest bet by far. OpenText executives have said they see cross-selling opportunities in both directions.
With the deal, OpenText is really now the "last man standing" in the traditional document management market, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. "The future of Documentum will have to support the new way of work within the electronic workforce, and OpenText will have to show traction and conversion of these customers to its new product architecture."
