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Last month, in the wake of the Metastorm and Global 360 acquisitions, OpenText announced the creation of the Business Process Solution Group.
The Group gathers OpenText’s business process management offerings together as OpenText sets itself as a major contender in the BPM space. We talked to the Group’s CTO Steve Russell and asked him to outline the new Group’s strategy.
Q. What is the thinking behind the new BPM Consulting Group?
The new group is a strategic step to pursue more process-centric solutions. Instead of putting more document-oriented process capabilities into its content management portfolio, Open Text made the strategic decision to be a bigger player in the business process management market itself
The result was that the last year they made a couple of acquisitions, notably Metastorm and Global 360, that pushed them into that space
The rationale for doing multiple acquisitions was to build out a broad portfolio of capabilities to enable it exploit the opportunities that exist in that market.
If you look at how those capabilities bear on the market, OpenText brings a lot of content management and content compliance capabilities; Metastorm brings some core BPM capabilities as well as some very sophisticated strategy modelling and process analytics; Global 360 brings a lot of case management capabilities.
The group itself, taking something from OpenText, Metastorm and Global 360, aims to build out a platform and a set of solutions on top of that platform to go after what we think are the real growth opportunities in the BPM market.
Q. Was this part of a strategy, or did the strategy evolve as the acquisitions were made?
We basically outlined the strategy and the acquisitions followed. Only last month we announced a general manager that’s running this part of the group and that general manager has been working with OpenText over the past couple of years, helping them build out the strategy and outlining the different assets that they could acquire to accelerate the strategy.
It was a considered way to go after this market, and in this respect I would say that we’re not done, that there are more pieces that we want to bring in, and the way we have approached it thus far is going to continue.
Q. So these missing pieces, they will come be acquired over the next 12 months and becomes part of the new business process management group?
A. Yes
Q. All this will be separate to the enterprise content management aspect of OpenText’s business?
A. Yes. They will be separate.
The reason for setting it up as a standalone group with its own salesforce was that the solution orientation that BPM requires from a go-to-market perspective is different to the go-to-market perspective that you get with content management opportunities.
The thought was that it the two of them were separated, it would be easier to do the integration of these technologies and that we would have sales forces that would focus just on selling those technologies.
Over time, we will have to see how they come together organizationally and how it plays out. However, the plan is to do a lot of joint selling so that, for example, when you have a client that is focused on a content management perspective, you have an arrangement whereby the two sales forces [for the two products] can work together.
Q. With the Metastorm and Global 360 acquisitions, and with whatever other companies you buy in the coming months, where do you see yourself in the market?
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