I do a lot of technical work with the Livelink products for the company I work for, QUALCOMM, so I know a lot from a user stand point. And I think there is a lot of money to be made on their stock this year so I follow it pretty closely.
I would say their search engine is excellent. It was rated #1 by ComputerWorld recently. (http://www.opentext.com/corp/pr_cwwin.html) Where they have the advantage is they can index all kinds of documents, not just HTML. They can index Microsoft Word, Adobe PDF, HTML, etc, which is important for an Enterprise company. And they provide phrase seaching which a lot of the engines don't. I think most people are caught up in Internet searching, but their strength is in Intranet searching, allowing big companies to find information quickly and easily, no matter what format it is in. They are going to make a lot more money selling this technology to large companies than they are selling add space on their WWW page.
Their document management software blows Notes away. Notes is a development environment, Livelink is full scale application. Notes has its own database, which is not very robust. Livelink sits on top of Oracle, Informix, or Sybase which makes it very powerful. Notes is good for managing projects among departments, Livelink provides that plus company wide solutions that can easily be tied in with customers, suppliers, etc. Companies are looking for these kinds of solutions.
I think the company is going to do very well in '97. They have hired a couple of good business people (CFO and COO) to bring costs under control and merge the two companies into a cohesive team. See the press release at opentext.com. This kind of management experience was missing early in '96. Plus, they rushed the IPO to take advantage of market conditions. I don't think they were ready with their products. Intranet software is growing at unbelievable numbers. Dollars spent on Intranet software are anticipated to grow from 400 million this year to $4 billion in 2000 in one study I saw. I think it's going to be a very profitable company.
There are a lot of people who lost money this year on OpenText so I imagine they are selling for tax purposes right now. I think they might get a boost from the Intranet/Internet conference in mid-December plus the January effect, where fund managers buy small cap stocks, starts in December now. |
