News

Open Text buys German firm in $11 million deal

• By Michael W. Bucken
• August 27, 2003

Open Text Corp. moved to extend its content management technology with the acquisition today of Hamburg, Germany-based Gauss Interprise for about $11 million in stock. Open Text officials said the sale should be closed by year's end.

Open Text officials said the combination with Gauss will add more extensive Web content management and high-throughput business process management capabilities to their firm's Livelink content management and collaboration product suite. Open Text CEO Tom Jenkins added that the combination should give his firm an advantage as more corporate IT operations look to cut the number of their technology suppliers.

Jenkins said he plans to join the Gauss and Open Text development teams quickly in an effort to combine what he called "complementary technologies." He added that Open Text will continue to support individual Gauss products even after the technologies are incorporated into the Livelink products.

Open Text representatives said the combined company will offer corporate customers a range of capabilities for corporate Web sites, intranets and extranets. Jenkins noted that the Gauss VIP ContentManager includes site management features that can meet the demands of dynamically changing, high-value, high-profile corporate Web sites, and can complement and extend the Open Text Livelink for Content Management offering.

Meanwhile, the Gauss IDOM product line can extend Open Text's IDOM offerings and the latter's ERP connectors by adding links to the J.D. Edwards and PeopleSoft ERP and financial systems.