Kneel before Zod! OpenText claims mighty Documentum from Dell

Dell has finally sold Documentum, one of the oldest and best-known names in storing and retrieving corporate information. Documentum is going to the relatively small OpenText for $1.62bn, as part of Dell’s Enterprise Content Management (ECM) division. That price compares to $1.7bn EMC paid for Documentum in 2003. Dell …

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a bad deal.

That also moves roughly 2,000 employees off the Dell Technologies books.

[NotBob]

Sounds better than companies just selling customer lists...

[Charlie Clark]

Heavy lifting for OpenText came courtesy of Barclays Capital who bankrolled the deal to the tune of £1bn credit.

ie. another debt-financed deal that can be written down just as soon as it's financially advantageous.

[Pirate Dave]

Genuine question

"OpenText hopes to sell its existing products into those customers, putting it in new markets."

I'm not a customer of Documentum or Opentext, just a nerd reading a story here on El Reg. So my question is: is OpenText really paying $1.6 billion just so they have new fields of potential customers to harass? Are they likely to let Documentum's product(s) wither on the vine? Or is this a semi-fire-sale like when Novell sold it's good stuff to Attachmate a few years ago?

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Genuine question

All of the above but mainly it's a bit of creative accounting.

Dell needs to off-load assets quickly but needs to pretend that the EMC takeover wasn't at a vastly inflated price. Write-downs can be expected once the dust has settled and any paper has been dumped on unsuspecting mugs, aka pension funds desperate for any kind of return in a world of zero interest rates.

So, when you hear the toilet flushing when the inevitable write-down happens, you'll know it's part of your pension you're hearing.

[Pascal Monett]

Re: just so they have new fields of potential customers to harass

From a marketing point of view, that's a pretty good reason.

[Allonymous Coward]

Loyal^H^H^H Locked in

FTFY

[MJI]

I was expecting

QBS Zod

Percy the Park Keepers Alien friend

[shub-internet]

What it really does is bring a huge amount of support money from customer's enterprise infrastructure systems to OpenText. They'll not sell much, as these things are one-off sales to big cusotmers; once they're embedded, all you get is slow, organic growth of licenses and a stream of support income until the customer business changes enough to warrant a rethink. That way of working killed Vignette (along with management's failure to notice that the world had changed), and it killed Documentum. OpenText will do nicely from the support fees.