It is worth noting, that what OpenText is doing is in stark contrast to its nearest competitor Hyland (backed by PE firm Thoma Bravo). That has over the past couple of years acquired a blockchain startup (Learning Machine), an RPA vendor (Another Monday) along with open source DAM/ECM vendors (Nuxeo & Alfresco).
A cheap and straightforward to install and use blockchain add-on/plugin to systems like SharePoint and Salesforce. I rarely call out a specific vendor in an analyst note, and I only do so here to ask why it took so long?
etc.) compliant. Except this is not true. What has usually happened is that somebody within an enterprise has read an article somewhere by a legal ‘expert’ that has stated that blockchain is not GDPR compliant.
2021 is now just around the corner, and Information Management is in for a big year of change, disruption, progress, and innovation; that’s not a prediction, it’s a promise.
Even though analysts need to label and sort enterprise technologies into neat silos, this practice has always been of limited value. As it often makes navigating a buyer toward the right product for their needs much harder than it should be.
2020 has been a year of misery, economic crisis, hardship, political upheaval, and of course, COVID 19. So we want to close this year out with a positive, socially distant, and safe celebration of our industry. To that end, we will soon be launching our Innovation Index Report; in this report, we highlight the technology vendors that have stood out and moved the needle for us.
Blockchain projects are different from typical IT projects in the areas of: business model, external relationships, skills, data, value chain, application development, risks, information and technology, cost model, and blockchain pillars.
This past week Peter Brooks and I finished up some client research on the topic of Enterprise Blockchain. The fact is from a year or two of POC’s and poking around; real-world implementations are now underway. What’s interesting to us is that there are two ends to the spectrum of Enterprise Blockchain. At the one end, significant ambitious projects, like transforming entire global supply chains, and the other end, the transformation of under-appreciated but critical tasks. Oddly though, on the surface, there doesn’t seem to be much in between.
The price has not been disclosed, but off the record, estimates tell me that TH Lee has made a tidy profit on their investment and that Hyland has not overpaid. However, as always, it is essential to note that no M&A transaction is without tears. Alfresco ran a long and steady race as an independent championing open source ECM
Although as analysts we try our best to be ‘opinionated’ pragmatists so one thing we know for sure is that the numbers don’t lie. So we can state with certainty that Enterprise Blockchain is a growing market and is set to continue to grow substantially…. Even though it will face plenty of challenges along the way.
