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Partnership Explained

Open Text is a SAP Software Partner. Open Text and SAP have shared two decades of partnership and co-development. As a result of this cooperative relationship, Open Text is the market leader in document management, document archiving and data archiving for SAP solutions. Our targeted solutions let you create, access, manage and securely archive all content for SAP systems—both data and documents—so you can address stringent requirements for risk reduction, operational efficiency and IT consolidation.

Size/significance of partnership

More than 2,000,000 users—over 2,200 installations—worldwide have achieved exceptional value of ownership by improving their critical business processes with Livelink ECM - Suite for SAP Solutions.

Support for ease of use by end-users and compliance

Livelink ECM - Suite for SAP Solutions makes life easier for information workers by integrating with the Microsoft Windows desktop and leading email applications. Documents from any ODMA-compatible desktop application can be integrated into SAP business transactions, with support for early archiving, late archiving, and simultaneous archiving scenarios. Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes email users can select an email and link it to standard SAP business objects such as invoices, customers, or orders, enabling SAP users to access the email directly from the associated business object in the SAP GUI.

The Livelink ECM - Suite for SAP Solutions inherently supports compliance initiatives by leveraging the Livelink ECM – Archive Server to manage the long-term retention of any type of SAP content.

History/Background

IXOS Software AG—now a part of Open Text Corporation—has worked closely with SAP since 1988 in the document imaging and document archiving area. As an innovator in SAP archiving, IXOS partnered with SAP to develop the SAP archiving strategy. As a result, in 1993 SAP released the ArchiveLink interface, which is now the basic technology for integration of external content repositories with SAP. Since the early days of archiving, our document management and document archiving solutions have evolved from an ordinary document repository for SAP to a powerful, enterprise-wide ECM framework with the ability to manage terabytes of SAP documents and to integrate these documents in SAP and non-SAP business processes.

Shared vision

Open Text is the first of the major ECM solutions providers to join SAP AG’s new Enterprise Services (ES) Community, a major industry initiative recently launched by SAP. The ES Community is composed of technology companies and customers dedicated to defining enterprise services -- services make it easier for companies to combine software capabilities, and to create and deploy applications that solve complex business problems.

The ES Community facilitates the adoption of the enterprise services architecture (ESA), SAP’s blueprint for a business process-driven approach to service-oriented architecture (SOA).  Enterprise services provide the common business language enabling software applications and infrastructure products running on disparate systems to communicate within ESA.  

The ES Community gives technology vendors and customers an open forum to collaborate on the creation and use of enterprise services and helps guarantee the utilization quality of enterprise services through a certification program.  Community members can join a variety of definition and advisory groups to identify specific business challenges facing companies today and define enterprise services and best practices needed to address those business requirements.

• “The Enterprise Services Community offers a unique forum bringing together partners with customers to share ideas and influence the development of enterprise services—all aimed at helping companies achieve business profitability," said Zia Yusuf, Executive Vice President for SAP’s Platform Ecosystem.  "As a charter member and a contributor to the ES Community, Open Text will play a key role in helping to define enterprise services that bridge the worlds of structured and unstructured data.”

Open Text actively supports SAP’s strategy for the SAP NetWeaver® platform and SAP xApps™. For example, Open Text Contract Management is a composite application that has received the “SAP xApps Certified” designation, the highest level of certification possible.