OpenText buys Hightail, eyes growth in content collaboration market

Hightail will remain a standalone company but many of its services will integrate into other OpenText products.

OpenText said Wednesday that it plans to acquire Hightail, makers of a cloud-based file sharing and collaboration service. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Based in Waterloo, Ontario, OpenText focuses on enterprise information management and has a portfolio that extends into content management for industries, customer experience, and data discovery. In January 2017, OpenText completed its purchase of Dell EMC's enterprise content unit, which included Documentum, in a deal worth around $1.6 billion.

As for Hightail, the 14-year-old company was formerly known as YouSendIt and its primary product was a tool for sending large file attachments that outsized email capacity. YouSendIt faltered with the rise of file-sharing services such as Box and Dropbox, and the company eventually rebranded to Hightail and expanded into collaboration services.

With the acquisition, Hightail will remain a standalone company but many of its services will integrate into other OpenText products, including OpenText Content Suite, Documentum, Core, and Media Management.

Hightail says it has approximately 5.5 million customers globally, spanning enterprise accounts, paid subscribers and individual consumers. An OpenText spokesperson said the deal expands OpenText's foothold in the content collaboration market through Hightail's existing user-base of marketing, advertising, and creative professionals.

"The acquisition of Hightail underscores our commitment to delivering differentiated content solutions in the cloud that enable marketers and creative professionals to share, produce, and securely collaborate on digital content," said OpenText CEO and CTO Mark Barrenechea. "We are pleased to welcome Hightail customers and employees to OpenText today."

Last July OpenText acquired Guidance Software, makers forensic security software, for about $222 million. At the time, OpenText said it would use the acquisition to bolster its overall infosec portfolio, with the primary gain centering around Guidance's digital investigation and forensic products.

SOURCE BY ZDNet