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Alan Pelz-Sharpe

Open Text releases Livelink 10

15-Nov-2006

Tags: Document Management (ECM), Marketplace at Large, Selecting Technology,

Yesterday Open Text announced LiveLink 10, the latest release of its ECM product suite offering. The new release re-positions Open Text in the market to some extent, or at least attempts to clarify what has been a very confusing situation. Open Text has grown by a broad series of acquisitions, and the company has at times been criticized for offering little more than a shopping list of disparate content management products. That's a little unfair, but indeed the company has been quite slow to integrate and rationalize redundant pieces from its product portfolio -- postponing, but not eliminating heartburn for its wide-ranging customer base. LiveLink 10 claims to be a big step forward in integrating the disparate parts, not least its recently acquired technology from Hummingbird and RedDot. LiveLink 10 appears to be building on the strengths acquired from iXOS (archiving and SAP integration) and Gauss (links to ERP systems), in addition to strengthening alliances with Oracle and Microsoft. What this means in theory (we'll see about practice...) is a core set of library services that can pull together diverse repositories of content stored in business applications, email systems, and file servers -- with the potential to apply true enterprise wide retention and metadata management policies and processes. Open Text is trying to coin this "Customer Information Management (CIM)," and although normally I oppose new acronyms (we have enough already), trying to mark out your own turf in the ever competitive ECM market is understandable. I look forward to taking a proper look under the covers of LiveLink 10 and talking to customers actually running the platform; until then I will take the integration statements with a pinch of salt. But overall the direction proposed by LiveLink 10 appears sensible.