Canada firm to buy Dell-EMC unit for $1.62bn
Opentext Corp, a Canadian business software maker, is buying Dell-EMC’s enterprise content division for $1.62bn (£1.21bn).
The move is one of the last remaining non-core asset disposals Dell needs to make following its deal to acquire data storage company EMC for $63bn last year, the largest tech deal in history.
Opentext is looking to expand its services to larger businesses and the Dell software arm – that allows companies to store as little content as possible – is seen to be at odds with Dell-EMC’s cloud storage and data centre business model.
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The unit pulled in around $600m in revenue in 2015.
The deal is the latest in a string of purchases by Opentext. It agreed to buy HP’s customer management software business earlier this year and before that it bought a set of content management software tools from HP for around $170m.
Barclays, which acted as a financial adviser, has provided a $1bn debt commitment for the deal, which is expected to close in between 90 and 120 days.
Earlier this year Dell sold its information technology services business — formerly known as Perot Services — for $3.1bn to Japan’s NTT Data and also offloaded its software division to Francisco Partners, a technology-focused private equity firm and activist hedge fund Elliott Management.
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Dell was taken private by its founder Michael Dell for $25bn in 2013 using his own fortune and the support of private equity firm Silver Lake Partners to buy out the company to try and turn around the struggling PC maker.