OpenText acquires forensic security firm Guidance Software in a $240 million deal

OpenText, the Waterloo-based content management company, has acquired Guidance Software, a forensic security and eDiscovery vendor, in a $240 million deal. Post the acquisition, Guidance will become a wholly owned subsidiary of OpenText. It is second big ticket acquisition of OpenText with the first being Documentum, a competing enterprise content management firm, from EMC for $1.62 billion.

Cheryl McKinnon, analyst with Forrester Research, explained the deal’s logic and said that “It certainly adds, with some overlap, to their eDiscovery and file analytics portfolio (i.e. those tools to clean up network drives, detect sensitive text inside documents, etc.). But OpenText has never had anything focused more on the forensic side of the discovery business. That is, more security, deeper inspection of how information has been accessed, copied, etc. So, that forensics side is net new for them”. The deal includes Guidance’s forensic unit along with a rich set of eDiscovery tools, and a customer list that includes 78 of the Fortune 100 companies. Going by the past trend, it is not hard to guess that current acquisition isn’t last for the company, and it may go all out for such technologies in future.