Open Text Corporation-Ten Years of Innovation-1991-2001 and Beyond

Open Text Corporation ( OTC OTEX) is a Canadian high-tech company based in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. It produces and distributes computer software applications designed to enable enterprise content management solutions for large corporate and government systems. Its flagship offering is the Open Text ECM Suite supported by Open Text Content Services. This suite provides extensive ECM functionality for managing content and integrating it with business systems from Microsoft, Oracle Corporation and SAP. Open Text employs approximately 3,500 people worldwide. It is a publicly traded corporation. Open Text is now the largest Canadian-based software centric company.The company, which was incorporated in 1991, originated from a project at the University of Waterloo to create an electronic Oxford English Dictionary — an undertaking that required developing search technologies that could be used to quickly index and retrieve information. The search technology developed for this project, which incorporated full-text indexing and string-search technology, was recognized as being useful for other electronic applications. With the growing importance of the Internet they grew as organizations found they needed to index and search their existing and growing stores of electronic information. In 1994 they began hosting its Open Text 4 search engine on the World Wide Web, competing directly with the AltaVista Web search engine. In 1995, Open Text provided the search technology used by Yahoo! as part of its Web index. In 1995, they purchased Odesta, producer of Livelink, an electronic document management system. This system was later converted to a Web-based system. In that same year Open Text shipped its first Web-based product, Latitude Web Server (later renamed Livelink Web Server), which gave Yahoo! the capability of searching every word on every Web page. It also co-developed with SAP ArchiveLink and the first standard ArchiveLink product for SAP.