Open Text Corp. - Content Management Systems -  Category Directory

(519) 888-7111

185 Columbia Street West
Waterloo, Ontario, N2L 5Z5, Canada
www.opentext.com

Sales

$291 million

Business Description 

Open Text™ is an enterprise content management vendor licensing Web-based software that provides a collaborative work environment and an integrated knowledge management system to enable organizations to capitalize on their collective knowledge, work more effectively across geographies and functional boundaries, and leverage best practices across the enterprise. The Company’s software enables organizations to effectively address a diverse range of business needs including managing information, unifying globally distributed teams, capturing market opportunities, accelerating product cycles, improving customer and partner relationships, and altering business strategies.


Open Text develops, markets, licenses and supports collaboration and knowledge management software for use on intranets, extranets and the Internet. The Company’s principal product line is Livelink®, a leading collaboration and knowledge management software product for global enterprises. The software enables users to capture as well as find electronically stored information, work together in creative and collaborative processes, perform group calendaring and scheduling, and distribute or make available to users across networks or the Internet the resulting work product and other information. This collaborative environment enables ad hoc teams to form quickly across functional and organizational boundaries, which enables information to be accessed by employees using any standard Web browser. Fully Web-based with open architecture, Livelink provides rapid out-of-the-box deployment, accelerated adoption, and low cost of ownership. Open Text provides integrated solutions that enable people to use information and technology more effectively at departmental levels and across enterprises. The Company offers its solutions both as end-user stand-alone products and as fully integrated modules, which together provide a complete solution that is easily incorporated into existing enterprise business systems. Although most of the Company’s technology is proprietary in nature, the Company does on occasion include certain third party software in its products.

The Company believes two key factors distinguish Livelink from competing alternatives. First, unlike collaborative software developed for client/server environments, Livelink was designed from the outset to run on the Internet. As Web-based technology, Livelink scales easily and rapidly to thousands of users, gigabytes of data, and millions of documents. Second, unlike solutions offering tools for users to build custom collaborative applications, Livelink is a ready-to-install application. It has open architecture, is easy to customize and requires no special development for project teams to quickly become productive. As a result, time required to deploy the software is shorter than competing alternatives, allowing companies to enhance their ability to realize their return on investment quickly.

As an extension to its solutions-based offerings, the Company also provides professional services, training, documentation and technical support services to accelerate its customers’ implementation of, and satisfaction with, its products. Open Text believes its ability to offer a high level of customer support and service is critical to its success. The Company’s major products are typically licensed with an annual maintenance contract, which for a fee of approximately 20% of the list price of the licensed software system, entitles the customer to remote support, product updates and maintenance releases. For additional fees, Open Text also offers training and consulting services and provides integration services for the purpose of customizing the Company’s software to specific customer needs. Open Text also maintains a “business partner support program” that provides training and support for systems integrators, independent software vendors (“ISVs”) and value-added resellers (“VARs”).

In the seven years since the introduction of the Livelink product line, Livelink has achieved significant market acceptance. Organizations with tens of thousands of users are deploying Livelink for business-critical applications. Numerous Value Added Resellers (“VARs”), solution providers, technology partners, application service providers (“ASPs”), and systems integrators have joined Open Text’s Livelink Affinity Partner program since its inception. The Affinity Partner program is comprised of a collection of “best of breed” organizations who partner with Open Text to offer value-add services to the Company’s customers and prospects who are implementing Livelink and other of the Company’s products. Business, technical, and marketing relationships have also been formed with industry leaders such as Adobe, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Netscape, Oracle, Sun, Bearing Point, Siemens Business Services, and SAP. Open Text’s Affinity ASP program offers organizations a cost-effective way to deploy and support mission critical applications. ASP’s provide specialized hosted collaborative applications to inter-company communities under a subscription-based business model. As an ASP, the Company is responsible for demand creation and should have preferential access to target communities.

Open Text has consistently sought to broaden its technology base and product offerings and to strengthen its sales and customer support capabilities through acquisitions. Open Text assesses each potential acquisition target with specific emphasis on three main factors. First, the Company seeks to acquire businesses with technologies that
 
can be integrated with its existing technologies to create new products and enhance the existing product family. Second, the Company seeks to acquire businesses with experienced IT development and management personnel that may have specific domain expertise. Third, the Company seeks to acquire businesses that offer a new distribution channel or customer base for Open Text’s products.

Products and Technology

In August 2003, Open Text released Livelink 9.2, the latest release of the Company’s flagship product. The Livelink Web server runs on a variety of computing platforms, including Microsoft™ Windows NT™, Microsoft Windows 2000™, Sun SPARC/Solaris™, and Hewlett-Packard HP-UX™ operating systems. Livelink provides a comprehensive combination of collaborative knowledge management services, custom workspaces, and a modular architecture with value-added application modules. This latest release of Livelink includes English, French, German, and Japanese language versions. Livelink is certified with a variety of relational database management systems: Microsoft SQL Server™, Oracle 9i™, and Sybase Adaptive Server™, HTTP servers (iPlanet Web Server Enterprise Edition™ and Microsoft Internet Information Server™), and Web browsers (Netscape Navigator™ and Microsoft Internet Explorer™).

Livelink 9.2 significantly improves the ease of use of the system by providing an improved look and feel, more personalization of appearance options, new one-click links, one-click “breadcrumbs” that make re-tracing the navigation path obvious, additional wizards that easily guide users through the project creation process, and improved project status and reporting capabilities. Additionally, many other areas of the product, such as Livelink MeetingZone™, received incremental improvements and corrections to identified software deficiencies.

In June 2003, the company released Coreport 6.0, an enterprise portal framework that unifies content from Livelink, other repositories, and a wide range of enterprise systems in a single interface. The technology for Coreport was acquired by Open Text from Corechange Inc., and extends Open Text’s overall Enterprise Content Management and content integration capability.

In June 2003 the company released Livelink LaunchForce™ an application that offers closed-loop distribution of critical information to distributed organizations, particularly field-sales groups. This product based on rich-media technology acquired by Open Text from Eloquent, significantly speeds up training for sales forces, provides a training and certification solution for compliance applications, and simultaneously helps large organizations save money.

In February 2003, the company released FirstClass 7.1, an integrated suite of messaging and communications software. This product is the latest version of the FirstClass Communications Platform, based on technology acquired from Centrinity Inc., and provides unified email, voice mail and fax mail management.

In November 2002, the Company released Livelink MeetingZone™ 2.0 at its annual user conference. Livelink MeetingZone adds real-time collaboration capabilities to Livelink’s already extensive asynchronous collaboration capabilities. It enables members of geographically dispersed teams, to attend real-time virtual Web meetings, regardless of their location, using a standard Web browser. During a live meeting session, attendees can view applications shared by the presenter, conduct group chats, have private conversations, draw on the whiteboard, and create and view agenda items, notes, tasks, and Web links. When the meeting ends, all of this information, including a meeting summary, is captured in Livelink automatically, becoming a permanent part of an organization’s knowledge capital and providing benefits long after the meeting is over. Additionally, those invitees who missed the meeting can consult the meeting summary to catch-up on what they missed, and determine the context of new action-items that have been assigned. Livelink MeetingZone 2.0 specifically provided more flexibility to improve planning prior to a meeting and to improve follow-up afterwards. Meeting attendees receive notice prior to the meeting on agenda topics and required preparation. Additionally, any meeting can be easily reconvened at a later time enabling participants to address unfinished agenda items and carry over all the context of the prior meeting sessions.

IT Solutions Based on Livelink

Open Text offers a range of products based on the Livelink software platform. Each of the Livelink products have the Livelink server and repository at its foundation and adds to it a set of specialized capabilities designed to address a particular IT business problem.


• Livelink Enterprise Suite™ provides full range of tightly integrated capabilities, including document management, team collaboration, business process automation, records management, content management, learning and skills management and more.

• Livelink for Knowledge Management™ enables companies to gather, capture, organize, and search all of your organization’s explicit and tacit knowledge assets from a central point of access, no matter where they are located.

• Livelink for Collaboration™ enables the best minds in an organization to form virtual teams to work together more efficiently—to share information, create project workspaces, conduct online meetings, coordinate schedules, automate collaborative processes, assign tasks, discuss issues, and much more—enabling an organization to make better decisions faster.

• Livelink for Business Process Management™ provides organizations with powerful tools for automating business processes from end to end, including sophisticated workflow capabilities, electronic signatures, and a complete solution for designing and managing electronic forms.

• Livelink for Content Management™ is a complete, collaborative solution for the authoring, management, and dynamic assembly and delivery of content to the Web. Livelink for Content Management places content creation in the hands of everyday business users, enabling companies to manage any number of corporate sites.

• Livelink for Document Management™ is a secure, Web-based solution for managing any type of electronic document. Livelink for Document Management provides access control, version control and history, full audit trails, compound documents, renditions, workflow for document review and approval, full indexing and searching of content and metadata, and much more.

Business Solutions Based on Livelink

Open Text offers a selection of business applications built on the Livelink platform that enables organizations to address particular business needs. The following Livelink-based applications are available:

• Livelink for Corporate Governance™ provides for the creation, maintenance, testing, remediation and automation of organizational processes and their associated risks. The system provides a specialized workspace for managing Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404 compliance, and also integrates employee training and certification to ensure that the latest internal controls, policies, and procedures are followed throughout the organization.

• Livelink for Learning Management™ delivers a comprehensive application for training management within Livelink. It allows organizations to provide a virtual classroom and collaborative environment with the advantages of a Web-based training experience.

• Livelink for Program Management™ is a Web-based enterprise program management application based on Livelink that integrates all areas of an enterprise-level project into one comprehensive solution. It enables organizations to automate proprietary program management methodologies according to predefined “stages” and corresponding “gate” review cycles.

• Livelink for Regulated Documents™ was originally designed to meet the stringent requirements of the pharmaceutical industry. Livelink for Regulated Documents is a complete solution to securely manage key documents throughout a controlled lifecycle in compliance with all relevant regulatory requirements.

• Livelink for Sales Readiness™ provides a closed loop training system aimed specifically at large and distributed field-sales organizations. Based on rich-media technology this product speeds up training for sales forces and simultaneously helps large sales organizations save money on distributing information to their sales force.

• Livelink for Skills Management™ provides the ability within Livelink to catalog, maintain, and assess levels of expertise possessed by employees. It allows an organization to determine where knowledge required to meet business objectives already exists within the organization and identifies where shortfalls exist and training is required.

Industry Specific Solutions Based on Livelink

Open Text offers a selection of industry-specific applications built on the Livelink platform that enables organizations to address industry-specific business needs. The following Livelink-based applications are available:

• Livelink for Clinicals™ provides the knowledge management and collaboration infrastructures that enable pharmaceutical employees to share, manage, and analyze clinical trial data throughout the entire clinical trial process.

• Livelink for Construction Management™ is a collaborative Web-based environment that primary contractors on construction and engineering projects can use to coordinate the work of many dispersed sub-contractors and vendors to streamline the design, building, operation, and maintenance of any construction-related project.

Livelink Development Tools

Livelink is highly scalable, extensible and customizable through the use of the Livelink SDK™ (Software Development Kit). The Livelink SDK consists of the Livelink Application Program Interface™ (“LAPI”) and the Livelink Builder™, an object-oriented application development environment designed specifically for building collaborative intranet solutions. Livelink Builder offers customers the ability to customize and extend the features of Livelink to meet their particular needs. Additionally, the Livelink SDK includes LAPI Web Services, which supports application development in Microsoft .NET and J2EE environments.

Livelink Optional and Embedded Modules

Open Text offers a wide selection of modules that allow organizations to easily extend and enhance the functionality of Livelink to suit their evolving business requirements. The following modules are available separately or bundled as part of a solution offering described above:

• Livelink Activator™ for BASIS® enables organizations to integrate their corporate library into a collaborative enterprise knowledge network. This module provides an ideal solution for combining the collaborative features of Livelink with the data collection management features of BASIS.

• Livelink Activator™ for CORBA® Development Kit enables organizations to create applications that extend Livelink’s functionality and integrate Livelink with external systems using Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) services.

• Livelink Activator™ for Lotus Notes® makes indexing and retrieving information stored within Lotus Notes quick and easy.

• Livelink Activator™ for SAP/R3® allows users to leverage their existing legacy systems, providing seamless connectivity between the Livelink Server and the R/3 System.

• Livelink Archive™ for SAP® R/3®: Certified by SAP, Livelink Archive for SAP R/3 is based on SAP’s ArchiveLink® interface, which links SAP applications to external storage systems such as Livelink. Livelink Archive for SAP R/3 enables Livelink to be used as the archive for SAP R/3 documents.

• Livelink Brokered Search™ allows users to submit a single search query to multiple data sources and receive a unified set of results. Brokered Search combines results from multiple Livelink repositories, Microsoft® Exchange Public Folders, public and internal search engines, as well as from legacy data sources and other authenticated sites.

• Livelink Cataloged Library™ allows organizations to extend the reach of their library and its functionality by making it an integral part of their enterprise knowledge architecture.

• Livelink Classifications™ allows Classification Librarians to define a taxonomy of classifications in Livelink. When documents are added to the Livelink repository, they can be associated with a particular classification by one of the following means: manual, assisted, or automatic.

• Livelink Directory Services™ allows organizations to administer users and groups for each Livelink server from within a central directory. This module synchronizes with a central directory service and provides single logon access for network users.

• Livelink eLink™ can be integrated with any standard e-mail application and enables users to participate in Livelink discussions and receive enhanced e-mail notification of Livelink events.

• Livelink eSign™ adds electronic signature capabilities to Livelink and also provides enhanced audit trails for signing events, enhanced security features such as the ability to lock users out after multiple failed log-in attempts, and the ability to initiate a signing approval workflow from a document.

• Livelink Explorer™ provides Livelink users with access to Livelink content and functionality from their Microsoft Windows® desktop. In Microsoft Windows Explorer, users can navigate the Livelink hierarchy and perform all Livelink functions. Users also have direct access to Livelink from popular desktop productivity tools, such as Microsoft Word®, Excel®, and Outlook®. In addition, mobile users can also mark content in Livelink for offline viewing in Microsoft Windows Explorer when they are not connected to the corporate network.

• Livelink MeetingZone™ enables members of geographically dispersed teams, including customers, suppliers, consultants, and other trading partners, to attend real-time virtual Web meetings, regardless of their location, using a standard Web browser, and then save the virtual meeting content in Livelink automatically.

• Livelink OnTime™ allows users to schedule group and project team meetings. Fully integrated with Livelink, this module provides users with secure access to other users’ personal calendar information, project team calendars and resources.

• Livelink PDF Forms Professional™ enables organizations and users to collaboratively create, manage and track electronic forms and data integrating them into standard corporate business processes by creating an e-form warehouse in Livelink, reducing costs and improving customer satisfaction.

• Livelink Prospectors™ allows users to create their own personalized, virtual research assistants. Based on custom user preferences, prospectors scour internal networks and targeted Web sites for information users need to get their jobs done.

• Livelink Records Management™ adds records management functions and capabilities to Livelink, enabling it to become the first comprehensive, Web-based, full lifecycle knowledge management and records management solution for the entire enterprise.

• Livelink Remote Cache™ reduces network traffic and improves access speed for remote users by caching documents, HTML renditions and graphical content at remote sites.

• Livelink Secure Connect™ secures user communications between the Livelink server and non-Web clients such as Livelink Explorer using industry-standard cryptographic encryption technology.

• Livelink Spider™ crawls across an organization’s intranet and/or targeted sites on the World Wide Web and automatically finds and indexes new or modified documents, enabling Livelink to maintain an up-to-date, searchable knowledge base.

• Livelink UNITE™ provides users with a unified, personalizable interface to one or more Livelink systems. With Livelink UNITE, users can filter access to Livelink content and services, including workspaces, documents, meetings, discussions, search, and more, by organizing them into a personalized set of virtual workspaces and context maps arranged on a series of tabbed pages.

• Livelink WebDAV™ provides a standard-based gateway to Livelink via the Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) protocol. Livelink users can access, create, and manage Livelink folders and documents directly from popular desktop applications that support WebDAV, including Microsoft® Office and WebFolders and Adobe® applications.

• Livelink Wireless™ gives mobile professionals access to Livelink’s Web-based collaborative features using a variety of handheld and wireless devices, including a Web-enabled WAP or iMode cellular telephone, Palm OS® device or RIM Blackberry™ pager.

Information Retrieval is Pervasive

Open Text’s heritage is rooted in information retrieval, and that heritage is pervasive throughout the Livelink product. Livelink’s Information Retrieval functionality helps users find and access information from anywhere throughout the enterprise—including the corporate information repository, corporate Web sites and across the Internet. Authorized users have on-demand access to information even if their knowledge-base spans distributed and diverse network environments. More than full-text search and retrieval, Livelink provides an integrated set of information retrieval tools, including intelligent agents and sophisticated reports that give users unprecedented insight into the knowledge, actions and activities being developed throughout an organization.

Livelink’s Information Retrieval provides high performance and linear scaling, even across millions of documents and terabytes of information. Livelink allows an organization to build searchable databases of virtually any size by indexing documents, files and other objects in any standard format, including XML, HTML, PDF and other popular file formats. It recognizes that documents are often characterized by complex structures. For example, documents often contain titles, headings, sections, subsections and paragraphs. Open Text’s search engine can search any number of different user-defined document structures. It supports SGML and XML, the key international standards for structured documents.

Sophisticated search features include the ability to search a subset of the index (“slices”), contextual/proximity searching, an advanced query builder interface, thesaurus support, word stemming, “sounds like” searching, and a powerful end-user query language. Livelink’s Data Flows facilitate moving information between Livelink and other data sources (e.g., a user could create a data flow which crawls a number of competitor’s Web sites, converts all the information to PDF format, and indexes it as different slices for searching).

Specialized Products and Solutions

Open Text provides a series of specialized collaboration, content, and knowledge-based product technologies that are sold independent of, or integrated with, the Livelink platform. Customers of these products have the confidence of moving forward with these more specialized products knowing that a single reliable vendor can deliver comparable functionality integrated into the broader Livelink platform as their requirements evolve to do so:

• Advanced Messaging and Communication Solutions—FirstClass® combines voice and fax messages to create a truly unified messaging system that allows users to communicate across a wide range of messaging formats and devices. As a highly scalable and feature-rich messaging and collaboration solution, FirstClass converges powerful features such as, e-mail, voice messaging, fax, shared online work- spaces and instant messaging, enabling users to effectively communicate and collaborate across a wide range of messaging formats and devices. Ideally suited for schools, school districts, higher-education institutions, government agencies, and service providers, FirstClass enables users to securely access and share information anywhere, anytime, using the device that is most appropriate to them at the time. Because it combines award-winning collaborative groupware and unified communications technologies into a single highly scalable message store, FirstClass provides organizations with one of the lowest total costs of ownership in the industry.

• Advanced Information Retrieval—In addition to the information retrieval capabilities that are part of Livelink, the Company also offers BRS/Search™ and Query Server™ from the Company’s BRS Products division. BRS/Search is a search engine for publishing large quantities of dynamic, customized information in all Web-based applications requiring sophisticated functionality and appearance. BRS/Search incorporates flexible filtering and state-of-the-art search, control, and presentation tools for enterprise information retrieval. It has been used by thousands of organizations to quickly design, prototype, and develop applications that provide real-time access to the organization’s islands of information, memos, reports, competitive intelligence, documents, or any other type of unstructured data. Query Server is an advanced meta search tool that broadcasts a single query across a set of Web-enabled search engines, unifying access to multiple information sources, including repositories, news feeds, document management systems, intranets, and the Internet.

• Archived Document Collections Management—Open Text also offers the BASIS® software product line to support the management of specialized corporate and government document collections. Designed for comprehensive library control, BASIS provides a solution for companies who need sophisticated searchable access to hybrid document collections consisting of both documents and metadata. Used by information professionals in major commercial and government information centers, BASIS provides library automation, research management, litigation support, intellectual property protection, content management and competitive intelligence.

BASIS is available as a stand-alone product or as part of a fully integrated solution with Livelink. The Livelink Activator for BASIS™ integrates the collaborative features of Livelink with the collection management features of BASIS. This module extends BASIS information management and library automation functionality to fully exploit Livelink’s rich collaborative features, enabling users to easily access BASIS library objects and incorporate them into the Livelink environment.

• Certification Management—In order to provide highly effective corporate management and training solutions for the Financial Services sector, EDC® from Open Text gives users the ability to provide corporate learning and training programs that will meet regulatory compliance objectives. The EDC product suite is designed to address a number of needs, including growth in regulatory reporting requirements, leveraging existing investments in training content and programs, maintaining detailed registration and licensing records for compliance management, and the need to manage all of the detailed records necessary to achieve regulatory compliance.

• Knowledge Delivery -LaunchForce™—an enterprise-class application for certified knowledge delivery— uses rich media and rich tracking to quickly deploy mission-critical information to corporate audiences, whether it be preparing your sales force to sell a new product line, educating employees about new policies and procedures, or certifying compliance with complex regulations. LaunchForce enables closed-loop communication between
end users, subject matter experts, and management—allowing management to measure the effectiveness of materials, identify gaps in the preparedness of speakers, drive return on communications investment, and ensure that corporate initiatives are effective. LaunchForce leverages leading-edge rich media technology and revolutionary closed-loop content publishing, tracking, and remediation capabilities to manage and measure the delivery of information to globally distributed audiences.

• Library Automation—The Techlib® product is a specific application that utilizes BASIS to automate and integrate the main functions of a corporate or government library. Techlib is an integrated, Web-based solution for managing, automating and delivering a complete range of library services. From access and cataloging to circulation, serials control and acquisitions, Techlib provides users with the ability to manage digital collections and make the corporate library the focus of an organization’s knowledge resources.

Techlib can be implemented as a component of BASIS, or as an integrated solution with Livelink, as the Livelink Cataloged Library™ module. Techlib and Livelink integration gives users consolidated access to knowledge resources on the intranet, extranet and in the corporate library, to support decisions, smooth workflow and automate processes.

Web browser and JDBC interfaces have made BASIS applications more economical to deploy since more people can easily access and exploit the available information. Furthermore, as organizations continue to encounter information overload, library science expertise in subject categorization and classification is being deployed to improve the usability of enterprise intranet and extranet applications.

• Portal Solutions—Coreport® enables organizations to rapidly deploy a single enterprise integration portal to serve all stakeholders, employees, customers, investors, partners and others, effectively and securely. Coreport provides a single, open, strategic framework for deployment, integration and management of all your enterprise assets. With Coreport portals, users can create their own portals, add specialized content, assemble dynamic business processes, and manage online communities. Livelink Unite is used to connect the Livelink environment to Coreport and portal frameworks provided by other vendors.

• Records Management—Livelink for Records Management gives users comprehensive, full lifecycle management of all corporate records and information holdings, in both paper and electronic format. Livelink for Records Management allows users to access records management functions from any standard Web browser. By providing a common interface to access all forms of information, such as images, paper records and other physical objects, word processing, spreadsheets, and e-mail, Livelink for Records Management provides an automated system that removes the complexities of electronic records management and streamlines processes for end users. Livelink for Records Management helps global enterprises to secure critical information, ensure file control, consistency, and collaboration by supporting record classification, retention and disposition rules, searching, reporting, and security access. Livelink for Records Management brings the control of records management into a large intranet or extranet environments, allowing individuals or groups to easily access and share corporate information. This records management capability is available on a stand-alone basis (iRIMS™) or fully integrated into Livelink.

• High-Volume Workflow and Imaging Solutions—Through its Bluebird Systems division, the Company offers ODOC® and Open Image®, which provide high-volume workflow and imaging solutions. ODOC is a powerful, Window NT-based, Web-enabled object management and workflow system designed to give organizations the ability to replace labor intensive paper-based work processes with highly efficient PC-based ones. Offering tight integration with PeopleSoft® technology, the client/server, multi-tier, open architecture of the ODOC suite enables organizations to achieve the performance and security they demand in mission-critical, high volume, and highly distributed environments. The product is particularly well suited for Accounts Payable applications. Open Image is a high-volume workflow, imaging and document management solution designed for the financial services industry.
 
Customer Support and Professional Services

Open Text provides most of its customer support activities through telephone support, since it is able to service most software problems remotely. The Company’s major products are typically licensed in conjunction with a twelve-month maintenance contract which renews each year thereafter at the customer’s option. The annual maintenance and support fee is typically 20% of the list price of the licensed software and entitles the customer to remote support as well as product updates and maintenance releases. Customers pay for their annual maintenance contracts at the beginning of the contract, and the Company recognizes revenues relating to these services ratably over the term of the related contract. As of June 30, 2003, the Company’s customer support team consisted of 140 employees.

Open Text offers both training and consulting services, as well as integration services for the purpose of configuring and adapting the Company’s software to specific customer needs. Although the Company’s software can be used “out-of-the-box”, customers may desire further specific configurations to their environment or working processes or similar work to further tailor the Company’s products to their specifications. Engagements performed by the Company’s professional services organization are typically billed on a time and materials basis. As of June 30, 2003, the Company’s professional service group consisted of 229 employees.

Competition

Open Text’s products and services compete in several market segments that are at various stages of maturity and each market has both distinct and overlapping competitors. These markets include collaboration and team support software, document management, business process management, content management, learning management, project management, and portals, each of which is intensely competitive and subject to rapid

technological change. A variety of different terms are used to describe these markets including Knowledge Management (KM), Enterprise Content Management, Smart Enterprise Suites (by Gartner Group), and the Knowledge Worker Infrastructure (by Meta). It is in the integration of functionality in these otherwise distinct market segments that the Company believes it differentiates itself.

The Company competes with repository-based collaboration software solutions such as IBM’s Lotus Notes/Domino, iManage and Documentum’s eRoom, collaboration service providers such as WebEx Communications Inc. and Centra Software, and with e-mail-based collaboration solutions from Microsoft Corporation, IBM Corporation, and Groove Networks. In the document management market, the Company competes with vendors such as Documentum Inc., FileNet Corporation, and Hummingbird Communications ltd.. Companies like FileNet Corporation and Staffware also offer business process management solutions similar to the forms and workflow capabilities provided by the Company. Content management vendors such as Documentum Inc., Interwoven Inc., Vignette Corporation, and Stellent Inc. compete aggressively with the Company to manage purpose-built content for web sites. In the learning management market, the Company competes with e-learning point solutions from vendors such as Saba Software Inc., Docent Inc., and Centra Software. In the portal marketplace, the Company competes with Plumtree and portal solutions from major infrastructure providers.

The Company expects competition to increase in the future as the markets for Open Text’s products develop and as additional players enter these markets. The Company believes that the principal competitive factors in these markets include the ability to provide:

• vendor and product reputation;

• versatility to provide a broad range of business solutions;

• full support for functionality required for compliance management solutions;

• scalable integration of document management, business process management (i.e., workflow), and related enabling technologies;

• product quality and performance;

• partner relationships with providers of IT infrastructure and information systems;

• quality of product support; and

• price.

The Company’s competitors can be expected to enhance their existing products or to develop new products that will further integrate workflow, document management and collaborative computing features.

Open Text’s markets are the subject of intense industry interest, and the Company is aware of numerous other major software developers as well as smaller entrepreneurial companies focusing significant resources on developing and marketing software products and services that may compete with Open Text products and services. Numerous releases of products and services that compete with those of Open Text can be expected in the near future. Moreover, certain of the Company’s current and potential competitors may bundle their products with other software in a manner that may discourage users from licensing products offered by Open Text.

Many of Open Text’s current and potential competitors in each of its markets have longer operating histories and significantly greater financial, technical and marketing resources, name recognition and installed product base than the Company. There can be no assurance that the Company will be able to compete effectively with current and future competitors. Increased competition from existing or potential competitors could result in the reduction of prices and revenues, reduced margins, and loss of customers and market share, any one of which would negatively impact the Company’s operating results.

 

Content Management Software - Category Directory

Content Management Solutions -  Category Directory

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