This past week, Utah-based NetDocuments ownership switched from Clearlake Capital Group to private equity firm Warburg Pincus, reportedly, for reportedly, over $1B documents. It’s an exciting move for NetDocuments, whom we know pretty well, for several reasons. Firstly, such a large deal will surprise many in the industry as NetDocuments, as the saying goes, flies beneath the radar.
Today there was important news in the Cognitive Capture market. ABBYY, a privately-held company, announced an investment from Marlin Equity Partners, which will make Marlin the largest shareholder. Terms of the investment were not revealed. Marlin is a global private equity firm that acquires businesses across diverse industries and has built a significant portfolio of software companies.
We attended OpenText World Europe this April to learn where the ship is headed. OpenText made it very clear that it is staking its content management future on the cloud. The company announced Cloud Editions 21.2, an all-encompassing, all-in effort to achieve that long turn away from on-premise legacy software. Mark Barranchea, CEO, pledged an R&D investment of over $1 billion in R&D in their diverse stable of products. For a company with $3 billion in sales last year, that is a very impressive number.
For existing customers and community members of Nuxeo, Hylands continued approach to managing the open-source community and all that stands for will also be something to watch closely. Probably the most intriguing acquisition of the last year for us, it’s an odd one for sure, and very likely not the last of 2021.
Though one can speculate that these deals may not have gone through had they been delayed a week or two, the fact is they did, and the industry continues to move forward. Recently Hyland acquired Learning Machine, OpenText bought xMedius, and Alfresco closed their first significant deal by catching TSG (Technology Services Group. Each is interesting and significant deals that may well herald more similar deals in the future.
Once again, I have to spend time with Law Enforcement and Lawyers; fortunately, this time around, it’s at the EnFuse OpenText conference in Las Vegas. It’s the security conference that isn’t – in the sense that it’s more about compliance, legal and forensics than an RSA conference would be. Though we don’t specialize in security …
OpenText to bridge the governance vs security divide? Read More »
This past week OpenText announced a partnership with Google Cloud (GCP), that announcement lifted OpenText’s share price to his highest ever level. At first blush, the excitement seemed odd, as frankly, everyone has a partnership with Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Working to unpack the real relevance of this deal for both OpenText & Google reveals an intriguing partnership strategy.
I find the world of OpenText observers fall into two well defined camps. The first camp believes that OpenText’s business is in serious decline and dependent almost entirely on maintenance fees from legacy products. The other camp sees OpenText as steady, slow, profitable but dangerously reliant on maintenance fees from legacy products. Though there are threads of accuracy in both camps, the reality is somewhat different. As of 2019 OpenText is a major player undertaking a key, and to date, pretty successful, pragmatic pivot.
To be fair, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have been used for a long time in enterprise applications but their usage has really been for really complicated scenarios such as enterprise search (e.g., for for proximity, sounds etc) or sentiment analysis of social media content. But it has never been easy to use machine learning for relatively simpler use cases. Additionally, no vendor provided any SDKs or APIs using which you could use machine learning on your own for your specific use cases.
