OpenText to acquire Liaison Technologies
OpenText CEO Mark Barrenechea has said more than once that his company is keen on “enabling our customers to be digital leaders and unlocking the value of their information through automation, analytics, and artificial intelligence.” So it shouldn’t come as a shocker that during the company’s earnings call last week, he revealed that OpenText (NASDAQ:OTEX) has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Alpharetta, GA-based Liasion Technologies Inc. for approximately $310 million.
Liasion is a cloud applications and data integration platform provider that has been highly rated by analysts like Gartner and Forrester. It pioneered the Data Platform-as-a-Service model as far back as 2012, with company executives explaining that it was time for data management to shift from being an IT capability buried within application support to a collaborative effort that enables data to be used far beyond the applications that created it.
Mind you, this was before “digital transformation” was the general mandate, cloud and Internet of Things (IoT) were “must haves,” and modern analytics, machine learning and AI becoming practical. As a result, Liaison has already weathered the bleeding edge pains that innovators experience. The buy lands OpenText a proven technology and an experienced team.
Today Liasion offers two main products Liaison Alloy Platform and Liaison Alloy Platform for Healthcare, both of which are turnkey managed services. They should fit in well with and complement OpenText’s GXS, EasyLink, Covisint and ANX platforms and help insure the level of data governance, security and stewardship that enterprises in some of the most heavily regulated industries require.
Though OpenText is not offering any specifics around its plans for Liaison until the acquisition closes, Barrenechea offered the image of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Information Brokerage (below.) What’s notable is that OpenText now owns not only two of the three leaders in this particular Magic Quadrant, but also four of the sixteen vendors who qualified for inclusion.
According to its presentation to investors, Liaision is expected to further enhance OpenText’s digital ecosystem integration solutions, extending its external business-to-business (B2B) integration with internal application-to-application (A2A) integration and data management.
Barrenechea told investors that “Very few companies are getting all the value from their data as they should be, as it is locked up in various applications and systems that aren’t designed to talk to each other. Companies who are truly digitally capable will be able to connect these disparate data sources, pull critical business-level data from these connections, and make informed business decisions in a way that delivers competitive advantage.
Though OpenText says it won’t share more until the acquisition is complete, there are a few interesting points in the investor presentation. One is that Liason Technologies has served healthcare and pharmaceutical customers. There is one implimented at Merck which is based on its Contivo mapping solution, part of the ALLOY platform.
Worth noting too is that Liason leverages MapR’s Converged Data Platform (CDP.)
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