Is OpenText giving away the ECM farm?

It looks like OpenText is trying a new strategy to keep its customers happy: giving away its solutions for free. This month the company announced for the second time in two months that it was giving new and existing customers the opportunity to download Tempo Box, its file sync and sharing solution. Now, this could be a generous gesture by OpenText to help its customers share files safely. Or, the more likely thought process is that the behemoth company is finally feeling the pressure of simpler, more nimble ECM and file sync and sharing services creeping into the enterprise space.

With Box, DropBox, and Microsoft all making inroads into the enterprise with easily deployed, cost-effective solutions, why wouldn’t OpenText be nervous that customers would start to defect to solutions that their employees already know how to use at the consumer level. Last year OpenText posted the first decline in license revenue in more than ten years. It’s no secret that the multitude of names for its solutions is confusing to even the most well versed ECM pundits, so as other vendors streamline and simplify their solutions to make deployment and adoption easier, the company is looking for a new carrot to entice its current customers to stick around. It looks like, for OpenText, that carrot is free pieces of its solutions to keep customers from taking their business across the street (read the report).