Business News
Open Text Tops List of Canadian Software Companies in 2009 Branham300 Ranking
Tuesday 07. April 2009 - Open Text (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTC) was ranked the largest Canadian software company in the Branham300, the well-known annual ranking of top information and communication technology (ICT) companies operating in Canada.
The Branham300 is published by the Branham Group, a leading Canadian industry analyst and strategic consulting firm serving the global information technology marketplace.
Entering its 16th year, the Branham300 ranks both Canadian and multinational ICT companies, and is widely considered to be a leading source of intelligence on Canada’s ICT industry. To be considered for the rankings of Canadian firms, companies must be founded and headquartered in Canada, and corporate direction must be determined in Canada.
“The Branham300 shows again that Canada has a strong and vibrant tech sector,” said Open Text Chief Executive Officer John Shackleton. “We are excited to be recognized as Canada’s leading software company in this year’s listing. We have worked over more than two decades to build an industry leader in both ECM technology and expertise, trusted by the some of the world’s largest organizations to manage their most important information.”
“Since first appearing on the Branham300 over 15 years ago, Open Text has consistently experienced significant revenue growth allowing it to better its ranking year-after-year.” says Wayne Gudbranson, President and Chief Executive Officer of Branham Group Inc. “Their notable achievements over the course of 2008 have further solidified themselves as an industry leader and propelled them to the top ranked software company in the Canadian ICT industry.”
Based in Waterloo, Open Text has grown fast over the last few years to become the largest independent software company in the world that develops enterprise content management or ECM software. ECM helps large companies and government agencies manage huge stores of documents, email, videos and other content, improve information sharing and worker collaboration, and manage business processes and compliance rules that depend on information. About 50 million people in 114 countries use Open Texts software. The company employs about 3,500 people around the world, including about 1,000 across Canada.
Open Text got its start in Waterloo, Ontario in the late 80s and early 90s when a group of University of Waterloo researchers were working on a project to convert the entire Oxford English Dictionaryall 60 million wordsto electronic form, a major feat in the pre-Internet days. The work formed the basis for the Internet’s first search engine technology and it was soon adopted by Yahoo, one of Open Text’s first customers. Open Text was officially founded in 1991 and went public in 1996.