back to article 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 …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not a bad deal.

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

  2. NotBob

    Sounds better than companies just selling customer lists...

  3. Charlie Clark Silver badge
    Facepalm

    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.

  4. Pirate Dave Silver badge
    Pirate

    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?

    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      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.

    2. Pascal Monett Silver badge
      Coat

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

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

  5. Allonymous Coward

    Loyal^H^H^H Locked in

    FTFY

  6. MJI Silver badge

    I was expecting

    QBS Zod

    Percy the Park Keepers Alien friend

  7. 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.

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