OpenText
More info
- Released
- 1991
- Type
- Software company (content management)
- Website
- opentext.com
Canadian software company that got big on document management and then bigger still by buying other people's mature software.
It started in 1991 as a spin-off from a University of Waterloo project that built search technology to digitise the Oxford English Dictionary. The search engine became a product, and the product became a platform for what the industry calls enterprise content management: archiving, versioning and records retention for the documents large organisations are legally obliged to keep.
From the 2000s onward, OpenText grew mostly by acquisition. Documentum came from Dell EMC in 2017, Carbonite and Webroot in 2019, and in 2023 it swallowed what was left of Micro Focus for roughly six billion dollars, inheriting the remains of Autonomy along the way. The business model is easy to read: buy software customers can't leave, then live off the maintenance contracts.