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

OpenText, the content management company based out of Canada, has acquired Guidance Software, a forensic security and eDiscovery vendor for $240 million. As per the deal, the company will become a wholly owned subsidiary of OpenText. The acquisition gives the company some overlapping functionality and gives the company forensic tools business, but it’s also getting a rich set of eDiscovery tools, and a customer list that includes 78 of the Fortune 100 companies.

Cheryl McKinnon, Forrester Research analyst, commented 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”. Also, it isn’t the last expected acquisition of the firm. Just about a year ago, it bought Documentum, a competing enterprise content management firm, from EMC for $1.62 billion.