No Room at the Inn for Dell EMC's Enterprise Content Division

**Editor’s Note: Please click here for a recap of the biggest channel-impacting mergers in July-August 2016.**

To no one’s surprise, Dell EMC is selling its Enterprise Content Division (ECD was in EMC’s portfolio prior to the recent Dell acquisition) to OpenText in a $1.62 billion deal. ECD includes the Documentum, InfoArchive and Leap product families.

With the recent Dell-EMC merger, ECD was clearly an outlier to the vendor’s strategic vision.

OpenText, an enterprise information management company, entered the definitive agreement with Dell EMC which also noted Dell’s intention to negotiate and enter into a strategic commercial partnership to expand customer offerings and to better serve customer needs.

“We are at the beginning of the digital revolution where extreme connectivity, automation, and computing are converging,” said OpenText CEO and CTO Mark J. Barrenechea. “This acquisition further strengthens OpenText as a leader in Enterprise Information Management, enabling customers to capture their digital future and transform into information-based businesses. We are very excited about the opportunities which ECD and Documentum bring, and I look forward to welcoming our new customers, employees, and partners to OpenText.”{ad}

At EMC Global Partner Summit 2016/EMC World 2016, held in May, the vendor did make a number of ECD-related announcements, most notably EMC Leap, a suite of purpose-built, cloud-native content apps for content management. However, EMC’s ECD portfolio, which includes Documentum, purchased in 2003, struggled to take root at the company.

In a similar move, HPE this month also announced an $8.8 billion spinoff and merger deal with Micro Focus to unload non-core software assets.