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Tony Byrne

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Not Buying Into Open Text and the Power of Three

22-Feb-2010

Tags: Digital and Media Asset Management, Enterprise Search, Web Content Management, European Marketplace, Marketplace at Large, Selecting Technology, Software-as-a-Service, Vendor Viability & Financials, OpenText Portal

Mega-vendor Open Text announced today that it would acquire fellow Canadian vendor, NStein. NStein was known mostly for its text-mining / text analytics tools, but over the years took a circuitous route to market wrapped in various personas -- most recently as a DAM and WCM vendor, after acquiring small French and UK vendors that focused on the media and photo management spaces.

All this makes me think that Open Text is a big believer in the vaunted "power of three." That is, they don't seem to want to go to market with less than three tools, which they now have in both the WCM and DAM marketplaces. Each time Open Text doesn't do as well as they'd like with one, they take on another. For example, after effectively dropping three previous Web CMS tools and trying to promote both Vignette and RedDot, now they add a third again. (Although as our Web CMS research customers know, we are not sanguine about RedDot's mid-term viability, and maybe this is just one more nail in the coffin.)

On the DAM side, the complicated and expensive "Artesia" offering (now part of Open Text's Enterprise DAM suite) was supplemented by a simpler, hosted DAM when Open Text acquired eMotion last year. NStein's DAM, an acquisition of UK's Picdar several years ago, also occupies a DAM niche -- mostly focused on image management -- not dissimilar to eMotion's typical use cases. We can't imagine all three will sustain a place in the Open Text DAM pantheon, as there's simply too much overlap. My colleague Theresa Regli points out that in multiple DAM procurements we've assisted research customers with in the last year, we've seen numerous Open Text proposals -- all touting Artesia, with not a single mention of the eMotion addition. That speaks volumes to the probable the future fate of NStein's DAM.

In all likelihood, Open Text sees the real value here in NStein's text analytics and processing technology, which has always been their strongest and most competitive offering in any of the markets where NStein played. Over time, these may prove useful to the vendor's existing customer base. The problem here is that Open Text -- unlike its erstwhile role model, Oracle -- doesn't have a great track-record of cross-pollinating acquired technologies. In the end -- very much like Oracle -- Open Text acquires revenue streams. Then the vendor leaves it to its marketing team to come up with creative technical rationales and impressive-looking (but often illusory) integration roadmaps.

The strategy of selling multiple different tools has worked fairly well for Open Text on the document and records management side, but very poorly for their DAM and Web CMS customers. If you the customer are looking at Open Text for DAM or WCM, best to focus on their bigger offerings (Artesia and Vignette, respectively) until the smaller ones prove their longevity.