CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

8 March 2011

Acquisitions

OpenText Accelerates Mobile App Strategy with weComm Acquisition Agreement

OpenText™ announced has reached an agreement to acquire London-based weComm. weComm's technology will facilitate OpenText delivering a strategic platform to companies which will help them provide rich, immersive mobile apps cost-effectively across the multitude of mobile operating systems and devices to reach their customers, consumers or partners.

"As mobile devices are changing the consumer landscape, more enterprise customers are moving to mobile apps to reach everyone from customers to employees," said Eugene Roman, Chief Technology Officer at OpenText. "This advanced technology allows our customers to rapidly deliver highly functional apps on all types of devices economically, giving them an enormous edge over their competitors both in efficiency and time to market." According to Roman, weComm will enable OpenText to accelerate the mobility strategy it launched in 2010 with the introduction of OpenText Everywhere.

Founded in 1999 and serving major customers today, weComm is a pioneer of the mobile application industry. The company's software platform offers fast, low-cost deployment of high-quality, media rich applications for all leading mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets -- iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Java -- more than 900 devices in all.

Because weComm's WAVE platform is technology agnostic, it helps solve the biggest problem corporate customers, government organizations and app creators have today: The dilemma of whether to select a single platform for app delivery or to incur the high cost of porting, deploying, updating and maintaining apps across the entire landscape of devices. Without such technology, inclusivity comes at a very high price in the mobile app world.

"weComm's device-independent platform adds real value over the other options our enterprise customers have today," said Roman. "weComm offers exciting leading-edge technology and a great new opportunity for OpenText. It's a logical fit for our major brand-name customers, in banking, retail, media and entertainment and other markets no matter what type of content application they use."

Adding a platform for mobile apps gives OpenText a full array of capabilities to meet the evolving needs of enterprise CMOs. The next iteration of Web experience management systems requires mobile content creation, development and delivery. The combination of its existing customer engagement offerings and the weComm WAVE platform puts OpenText in pole position, ahead of other Enterprise Content Management vendors in the battle for the Mobile Enterprise Application Platform market.

weComm also strengthens OpenText Everywhere's position in mobile ECM by providing enterprises with the ability to create, deliver, and maintain mobile applications to their employees for all mobile operating systems. OpenText Everywhere provides pre-packaged mobile applications for the OpenText ECM Suite focused on collaboration, document management and workflows. With weComm, OpenText can also offer mobile applications and solutions in a compliance-based environment, requiring security and policy controls as well as develop and deliver content based mobile applications that may be consumed by anyone.

weComm, OpenText Agreement

Details of the transaction were not disclosed.  The transaction is expected to close this quarter, subject to customary closing conditions. The acquisition does not bring significant pre-existing revenues or profit. Details will be disclosed in the OpenText next regular quarterly release.

For more information on OpenText Everywhere, go to:  OpenText Everywhere.

For more information about weComm, go to http://www.weComm.com20

Follow OpenText on Twitter @opentext.

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