Open Text to Acquire Document Management Provider Captaris

By Irina Guseva | Published Sep 4, 2008

Open Text Corporation, a well-known ECM player, announced its intention to acquire Captaris, Inc., a provider of document management and delivery solutions.

The price of this deal is approximately US$ 131 million.

Captaris specializes in document automation, capture, recognition, routing, workflow and delivery. The company is known for its RightFax Connector for SharePoint — one of the many Sharepoint connectors available out there. Other products include Captaris Workflow and Captaris Alchemy.

Captaris was founded in 1982. The company is based in Bellevue, Washington, and sends paychecks to approximately 565 employees.

The acquisition will expand Open Text’s offerings by creating tighter integration with Open Text's invoice management solutions that work on SAP and Oracle. Captaris also offers business information and delivery solutions built on the Microsoft .NET framework, which process and automate the flow of content.

The companies expect to close the transaction by the end of the calendar year, subject to some conditions. Meanwhile, Open Text continues to gain momentum, following the reports of its record profitability results for Q4 and fiscal year ended on June 30, 2008.

One of the most recent acquisitions by Open Text was that of the hosted business applications provider eMotion LLC from Corbis Corporation. This move was aimed at augmenting Open Text’s Artesia Digital Media Group’s offerings.

Artesia Technologies is a DAM vendor that was also acquired by Open Text back in 2004. Artesia’s acquisition expanded Open Text's rich media integration and management capabilities as part of its comprehensive ECM suite.