We knew Open Text had more acquisitions planned, the company said as much on its most recent earnings call. Buying Captaris will give Open Text improved fax and document capture capabilities, which are most interesting for Open Text when tied to enterprise apps from SAP and Oracle for outbound faxing of invoices and purchase orders coming from those apps.
Open Text has bid $4.80 per share of Captaris, valuing the vendor at $131m. Brenon Daly looks more at the financials of this deal over on the 451 Group’s tech M&A blog, Inorganic Growth. For 451 Group clients, our full deal analysis is here.
After two small deals earlier this summer (for Spicer and eMotion), this is a bigger acquisition for Open Text and one that may slow it down a bit on the acquisition front, as Captaris had a few recent acquisitions of its own to digest. Open Text is no stranger to assimilating acquired portfolios but it’s still no small task. As usual, Alan Pelz-Sharpe at CMS Watch does a great job outlining the potential pitfalls for customers.
Another interesting angle though is that Open Text has made a larger acquisition and it wasn’t of Vignette. There’s been speculation like this about such a deal and we don’t doubt Vignette is in play. This acquisition does make it seem less likely that Open Text will go for Vignette anytime soon.
Still, if approved, this deal should leave Open Text with at least $100m in cash and an apparent mood to buy, so there will likely be more (smaller) deals to come.
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