OpenText: Goodwill Search
August 26, 2022
I spotted a short item in the weird orange newspaper called “Micro Focus Shares Jump After Takeover Bid from Canadian Rival.” (This short news item resides behind a paywall. Can’t locate it? Yeah, that’s a problem for some folks.)
What Micro Focus and Open Text are rivals? Interesting.
The key sentence is, in my opinion, ““OpenText agreed to buy its UK rival in an all-cash deal that values
the software developer at £5.1bn.”
Does Open Text have other search and retrieval properties? Yep.
Will Open Text become the big dog in enterprise search? Maybe. The persistent issue is the presence of Elasticsearch, which many developers of search based applications find to be better, faster, and chapter than many commercial offerings. (“Is BRS search user friendly and cheaper?”, ask I. The answer from my viewshed is ho ho ho.)
I want to pay attention going forward to this acquisition. I am curious about the answers to these questions:
- How will the math work out? It was a cash deal and there is the cost of sales and support to evaluate.
- Will the Micro Focus customers become really happy campers? It is possible there are some issues with the Micro Focus software.
- How will Open Text support what appear to be competing options; for example, many of Open Text’s software systems strike me as duplicative. Perhaps centralizing technical development and providing an upgraded customer service solution using the company’s own software will reduce costs.
Notice I did not once mention Autonomy, Recommind, Fulcrum, or Tuxedo. (Reuters mentioned that Micro Focus was haunted by Autonomy’s ghost. Not me. No, no, no.)
Stephen E Arnold, August 26, 2022
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