SAP has extended and knotted the reseller ties it already has with Open Text and will start to sell a fuller complement of the company’s enterprise content management software.
The companies have said that SAP will offer for resale the Open Text Extended ECM for SAP under the name of SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management.
One of the benefits of the arrangement comes from the high level of integration that will be achieved between the two application suites.
“We can attach metadata to enterprise data held in SAP and the content then gets enriched. The system understands the business rules that sit behind the SAP data which can be stored with the content. The outcome is better search and retrieval, better retention and records management processes, and so on,” Patrick Barnert VP at Open Text told us.
As the volume of unstructured content such as e-mail, documents and presentations continues to explode within organisations, there is a growing need to connect this content with the underlying business processes being managed by SAP applications, the companies said in a statement.
Describing the significance of the deal, John Shackleton CEO of Open Text said “We are entering into a new phase in the evolution of content management technology.”
Content from our partners
The two software suppliers already have agreements in place for SAP to resell Open Text’s Document Access and Archiving and Invoice Management applications, and this latest move will strengthen the relationship between them.
“It is a win-win for both sides and our customers stand to gain because it will be easier for them to buy and maintain the software under a single contract managed by SAP,” said Barnert.
Edgar Jager, VP for SAP, said the deal should lead both to new business and new upsell opportunities, saying that Open Text had become one of the fastest growing third-party applications for SAP.
The companies estimate that as many as 3,000 SAP sites are currently also using some Open Text software and that as many as 10-12 million end users use Open Text applications to get at their SAP data.
Analysts are cited as seeing the agreement as ‘game-changing,’ he said.
