Open Text, Oracle extend content management partnership

Issued by Global Research Partners for Enterprise Content & Wireless

Johannesburg, 22 Nov 2006

Lava Systems Africa, an affinity partner of Canadian-based Open Text, and one of the companies within the Enterprise Content & Wireless (ECW) Group, today announced that Open Text is creating an Oracle Solutions Group and developing a suite of solutions based on Oracle Database and Oracle Fusion Middleware.

This further extends the partnership between Oracle and Open Text announced earlier this year with the introduction of Oracle Content Database and represents a further deepening of the long-standing relationship between the two companies.

Open Text plans to offer customers complete enterprise content management solutions that include licences for Open Text Livelink ECM software along with Oracle Content Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle BPEL Process Manager. The integrated solutions will also work with Oracle applications including Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle's PeopleSoft and JD Edwards.

To meet the growing demands of Oracle customers, Open Text has formed the Oracle Solutions Group to be headed by Vice-President and General Manager Ron Vangell. Open Text already offers extensions to Oracle's products for Imaging, IDARS, records management, archiving and search. Open Text has also developed a solutions roadmap to integrate its industry-specific content management capabilities with Oracle business applications.

"We are already seeing broad market interest and acceptance for our Oracle-based offerings," commented Vangell. "By partnering with Oracle, we are significantly lowering the barrier to entry and bringing IT organisations the combined benefit of Oracle's world-class database infrastructure and Open Text's extensive content management expertise."

Over the coming year, Open Text plans to deliver solutions that allow customers to access and manage content from Oracle, Siebel, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards applications. Open Text also expects to deliver a new solution, Customer Transaction Console. This can help streamline customer inquiry processing in sales, call centres and service departments, allowing users to access information stored in Oracle applications and content stores in a consolidated view directly from Microsoft Office 2003 applications including Microsoft Office Outlook 2003.

"This partnership aggressively advances our strategy for managing unstructured information in the Oracle Database," added Andrew Mendelsohn, Oracle Senior Vice-President, Database Server Technologies. "Our complementary products provide customers with a powerful set of solutions to their content management problems."

For further information, please contact Ray Dalgarno, Lava Systems Africa: telephone (011) 675 7193, fax (011) 675 4075, e-mail rayd@lavasystems.co.za.

Enterprise Content and Wireless (ECW)

ECW is the merged entity of Lava Systems Africa and Lava Systems Mobile (LSM).

The Lava Systems Africa (LSA) team originated in the late 1990s with the objective of becoming a premier supplier of enterprise systems based around knowledge management, document management, records management, image management, collaboration and workflow solutions. The emerging demands that were identified included government process re-engineering, supply chain co-ordination, customer relationship management, e-government and B2B processing.

In support of these business aims, the technology platforms chosen had to enjoy a proven global track record and adhere to open Internet architecture standards and developments. LSA is a South African-based company dedicated to the sales, marketing, support and consultancy founded upon the Livelink product suite from Open Text, a product that the staff have been involved with since 1998. LSA user base embraces customers from both the private and public sector and includes organisations such as Bateman Projects Limited, Alexander Forbes, the Gauteng Provincial Government and the National Social Security Fund of Uganda.

Lava Systems Mobile, a company focusing on the development of mobile applications and tools, was originally created in 2005 and later that year absorbed KeyTools, a well-established mobile applications software developer with international links.

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