Earlier in the week, Opentext CTO Steve Russell published an interesting interview on their BPM strategy in the wake of their Metastorm and Global360 acquisitions.

It contained several interesting points including their ambition to continuing growing via acquisition and the formation of a process consulting group but I found his view of the competition most interesting:

The people we are going to see the most of will be Pega Systems and IBM, and to some degree Appian — and I say Appian because they have a very focused BPM offering.

One of the things that is important to us in this respect is the relationship we have with Microsoft —Global 360 had a very strong Microsoft orientation — so that will probably drive us into competition with some of the smaller Microsoft players.

via CMSWire

A couple observations:

1. OpenText probably need to acquire some rules technology to really compete with Pega and IBM. Shame that Progress snapped up Corticon a few days ago.

2. Given Microsoft’s ECM aspirations for Sharepoint, it will be interesting to see how well the Microsoft ambition works out. It might be a case of keep your friends close and your enemies closer.