Open Wallet
This week’s announced
acquisition of Global 360 by OpenText had me scratching my head. Didn’t OpenText only just recently
acquire Metastorm? My mom would no
doubt disapprove of OpenText’s voracious appetite for BPM firms: she always taught me to take at least enough
time to put my fork down between bites.
There’s plenty of speculation around as to why OpenText would
acquire two very different BPM vendors in such a short interval. Perhaps time will clarify everything, though
that’s certainly not a given: there are
plenty of acquisitions that make no sense when they happen, and no sense
afterwards either. Still, while I give
OpenText the benefit of the doubt, there are a couple of messages in this
acquisition I find hard to avoid:
- Notwithstanding OpenText’s claims of “complementary” feature
sets, the transaction is not a vote of confidence in the Metastorm
technology. OpenText is making much of
adding Global 360’s case management features to its offerings. But if the Metastorm technology were strong
enough, is it not probable that OpenText might have used a fraction of the
quarter billion dollars they spent on Global 360 to simply add case management
functionality?
- Some customers are going to be left behind. Something’s gotta give: having chosen not to
simply extend Metastorm’s product with case management, OpenText is going to
have to find some way to package all this “complementary” technology . Packaging is about picking winners: a single architecture, API set, user
interface design, etc. Each platform–and
don’t forget OpenText’s own ECM solutions–has existing customers. These folks are going to be awfully nervous
until they discover whether the software in which they’ve invested has a future
or not.
- The market isn’t counting on SharePoint Workflow
Foundation. Nobody’s going to spend this
kind of dough acquiring BPM vendors if the marketplace is expecting Microsoft
to solve their BPM problems. The message
seems to be this: We’ve seen SharePoint
2010, it has many lovely features, and most organizations will and probably
should adopt it. But it’s not going to
address complex business process issues:
we still need full-fledged BPM solutions for that.
In the scheme of things, though, OpenText has done us all
some good here, adding energy to an already frothing product category. Thanks in part to transactions like these,
the BPM market continues to be an exciting and occasionally even surprising
place to work.
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