Thread regarding Open Text Corp. layoffs

@3d6 agreed. All it takes is starting to invest in R&D and things will be exponentially better. Mark never learned you need to spend money to make money in the long term. He ran the company like a Ponzi scheme. He learned how to make money for executives, implemented that and keep doing it until he was let go. He failed the company but made 50+ million dollars doing so.

"even knowing nothing about Rocket, it's got to be better. Hard to be worse."

To all that are nervous, anxious, scared, etc about being part of a divestiture let this statement sink in. It CANNOT be worse than being here. End of story.

@g5
Just saw this and I agree with you 💯!
When we were acquired I knew the OT 'exceptional expenses' catagory was a catch all.
I am glad the gig is finally up, though the winners are still the current and former leaders and their pay packages..the Law firms and Accounting firms that put lipstick on the OT 🐖 🐷.
Sadly the losers are always the rank and file employees. As soon as the Shareholder Lawsuits start flying (and they will) it will be interesting to see how quickly it settles to bury the aforementioned 'sins' on the balance sheet.

It's astounding that Rocket was able to buy Vertica for less than 2x last year's earnings and about a third of what HP paid for it 15 years ago. OT is clearly thinking tactically -- go for quick sales of anything they can get someone interested in, in order to pay down debt. Vertica is still a solid product, albeit heavily damaged by OT, so if Rocket invests (or at least does no further damage), they should see a nice profit. The Vertica team must be thrilled to be getting out from under the thumb of the incompetent clowns at OT -- even knowing nothing about Rocket, it's got to be better. Hard to be worse.

@qf you are right PE cares more about MOIC than ROI. They care about assets to be traded, not software to be nurtured. And only care if the cash extracted + resale value is higher than the purchase price.

@OP You obviously have no idea about how Private Equity works. Stay away from topics you don't understand. PEs only care about 1 thing: MOIC. Destroying a business is never going to increase MOIC, it is a last ditch effort to prep the bride before selling it at a loss. One thing that's for sure though, is that a PE will NOT run a business that's been failing with the same recipes that precipitated its failure. So yes, leave nostalgia at the door, it's never coming back the way it was.

@gn anything someone is willing to acquire.

What's getting sold off next?

@fd For years, we reported profit by excluding massive costs (restructuring charges, acquisition integration costs, and amortization) labeling them as one-time or exceptional. The gig is up.

@dr
All due respect "Its strength lies in acquisitions and financial operations"...This never was a strength @Open Text.
They were just adept at hiding a multitude of sins on their balance sheet. What better way to hide the sins than with claiming "exceptional expenses" on every single earnings call..due to (fill in the name of the acquisition)..

Though I do agree it operated as more of a PE firm than a Tech company. MB (and almost the entire C-suite) were located on Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park in SiliconValley....(a stone's throw from Andreson_Horowitz) and all the other VC's. This is where MB's unbelievable arrogance started and why the company (regardless of who the leaders are now) will come to a sad ending for employees, customers and Shareholders..
The only winners (as usual) are the executives (and some lawyers)..

We were forced to use Vertica for multiple products when it was by far more expensive to run, harder to maintain, slower - it is an expensive analytics tool, not an application database (when what we needed was an application database) - the excuse was, we own Vertica, we have to use it. We shot ourselves in the foot many times over.

Does Jaguar TCS still use this product?

@ck It’s a bad product. Poor design, ugly UI. Comparing to modern analytic database systems, it’s way way way behind.
You couldn’t even tell what tech Vertica owned are good. For cloud function, BigQuery or redshift is way better than it. For on-premise, InfluxDb, even a postgresql or mysql could easily wins.

When I first joined OpenText, someone told me it was more of a trading company than a real software company. Over time, I came to agree. Its strength lies in acquisitions and financial operations rather than long-term product innovation. If there is a company that can gradually turn good products into mediocre ones, OpenText is a typical example.

@ck Similar to the way CyberRes was set up to be semi independent and therefore easier to spin off, Vertica was even more aloof.

An easy, low hanging fruit, divestiture.

@cd Yeah, worked with Vertica for a few years (MF) and it did not su-k. Highly performant. On-prem was (and probably still is) rock solid. Cloud version was iffy at first but works well enough now. Several internal products have been tightly integrated with it. None of them are being sold. They'll probably be dumped.

Will be interesting to see how all of this plays out.

I worked for Vertica back when HP owned it, and it was a great team and a great product that was going places. The three following acquisitions (in which we had no say, of course) really bolluxed things up, and Mark B was worse than everyone before him combined. (I'm saying this as someone who lived through Meg and Hsu!) Vertica begged to be cut loose for years, but OT really did a lot of damage so I don't know if they can make a go of it now. I hope so, or at least, I hope the good people who are inexplicably still there finally get treated decently.

This is the 3 strikes and out model we see over and over again

First acquired by HP, then acquired by MicoFocus and then acquired by OpenText.

That’s a recipe for disaster and I think we finally learned our lesson after letting Mark go.

I’ve joined OT for over 6 years. That’s the 2nd time I heard about this name “Vertica”. The 1st time is my onboarding orientation. The 2nd time is here. :-) What a joke product!

Lucky ba----ds

@a9 It was part of the MF acquisition.

Never heard of them

Rocket Software specializes in what they call legacy modernization. Unlike some private equity firms that slash costs immediately, Rocket historically focuses on high-touch support to retain the customer base. This may work out well here.

Former OT employee here. For those who might not know, the OSM data lake runs on Vertica.
OSM/ITOM customers will probably start asking questions about long‑term support and performance. If anyone’s heard how OpenText plans to handle this dependency, I’d be curious to know.

@OP can’t be worse than how it has been handled within OpenText!