Open Text to use Burntsand acquisition for SharePoint consulting services

Open Text announced this week a package of products and services to help companies implement multiple SharePoint 2010 sites. As part of the plan, Open Text will be offering consulting services from Burntsand, a consulting firm they recently purchased. 

Tony White, founder at content management consulting firm Ars Logica isn't overwhelmed with the Burntsand piece because he says they were already working together. "Owning Burntsand is a slight positive for Open Text, and it creates a nice SharePoint/document management integration story," he said.

The products include the recently released SharePoint 2010 version of Open Text Content Lifecycle Management (CLM) and Open Text Case Management Framework for SharePoint 2010, which Open Text claims should help IT departments deploy and then manage multiple SharePoint installations across an organization.

Open Text is attempting, with this release, to find a way to work with SharePoint in the enterprise. It's not surprising given SharePoint's obvious popularity inside companies. Nor are they alone in this approach as other large ECM vendors, such as EMC, have also developed products and services to work with the Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) offering, especially from a compliance standpoint.

Lubor Patek, VP of Product Marketing for Open Text said in a statement that he believes this can help bring the SharePoint ecosystem in an organization under control. "By combining the Open Text ECM Suite with SharePoint 2010 deployment expertise, we are in a position to help IT regain control over content in SharePoint 2010 sites, improve efficiency and put in place comprehensive governance, risk management and compliance solutions not only for the content in SharePoint 2010 sites, but for content across the enterprise," he said.

ECM vendors have a love/hate relationship with Microsoft. On one hand they compete with it; on the other they have to find ways to work with it. This announcement demonstrates that.

For more information: 
- see the Open Text press release

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