Open Text plunders Aussie partner ranks

Open Text chief John Shackleton is holding talks with six Australian consultancy partners with a view to acquiring at least one to boost regional revenue.

The global head of the Canadian enterprise content management firm had met with partners on Monday and customers yesterday as part of his visit to Australia.

Shackleton said Asia Pacific contributed six percent of Open Text's global revenues. He wanted it to represent 10 percent of revenues within two years and eventually hit 20 percent.

"We'll be looking at everything from partnering to doing acquisitions to help us [reach that goal]," he said.

"We need to grow this region and we think the economy is such that this is a good time to grow."

He said that during his visit, he was holding talks with "half a dozen" consultancies with experience in document and records management and "our technology".

The targeted firms were at least 50 staff and had revenues of at least $5 million per year.

Shackleton did not believe that acquiring some of its top local partners would have a negative impact on growth plans by reducing the reach of the channel.

"If there's a conflict we wouldn't [acquire them]," he said.

He believed firms ripe for acquisition were those that wanted to hit their next phase of growth but were struggling to get the funds to do it in the current economic climate.

He said the vendor's US arm had recently snapped up an Oracle Fusion partner for those reasons.

"We were probably generating $3 million for them [in annual business]," he said. "But they realised they couldn't grow a lot further in the current economic environment."

Shackleton said the local growth areas were in government and government-owned entities such as healthcare, SAP, email archiving, document and records management.

He said Open Text was yet to pursue telcos as a channel for its products as it had done in other parts of the world where they offered an Open Text-powered archiving service to customers.

"We haven't approached telcos in Australia. It's just a timing thing," Shackleton said.