Last week, Open Text made another purchase. This time it picked up StreamServe, which according to Open Text's Lubor Ptacek is a Document Output Management company, which Ptacek defines as:

"[a way] to create personalized documents for their business communications, most frequently used in the B2C space at organizations that have to communicate with thousands of customers."

At first glance, this sounds like what Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE) is doing with Enterprise LiveCycle, but Real Story Group's Alan Pelz-Sharpe says this is not the same market. "StreamServe much like Document Sciences targets high volume, high complexity environments (Financial Services for example)--whereas LiveCycle more typically targets general publishing needs within enterprises."

Pelz-Sharpe says this is consistent with some of Open Text's previous purchases. "StreamServe, as an acquisition, fits into Open Text's previous pattern of buying firms with complementary functionality, in this case dynamic publishing, to LiveLink and that can provide accretive growth to the firm."

But he points that there is a difference with this particular purchase because of its links to Europe. "The difference here is that StreamServe is technically headquartered in Burlington, Mass., [but] they are much better known as a European company, and OpenText has had mixed fortunes with European acquisitions."

Ptacek doesn't see it that way, though. He sees it as a great compliment to another recent Open Text acquisition, Vignette and its web experience management component. He also says it gives Open Text a good foot hold in the Scandinavian market.

Pelz-Sharpe holds a more skeptical view saying, "Arm in arm with Autonomy, Open Text are the key consolidators in this sector, but its surely harder to push off the criticism that they are little more than holding companies these days."

Regardless, on its face it seems like a decent purchase, especially given StreamServe's ties to SAP, which is one Open Text's biggest partners.

For more information:
- see Lubor Ptacek's blog post

Related Articles:
New Open Text release keeps ECM alive 
Open Text releases semantic search tool based on Nstein technology 
Open Text announces version 10.1 
Open Text expanding social offerings