Before OpenText was a software giant with more than twenty thousand employees, it was a puzzle about a dictionary.
The Oxford English Dictionary is not a tidy book. It is a sprawling, layered record of words and their histories, and in the 1980s someone at the University of Waterloo had to work out how to make all of it searchable. Two professors, Frank Tompa and Gaston Gonnet, were part of that effort. Nobody was thinking about enterprise software. They were thinking about how to find a word inside a mountain of text.
The early company was a search business, and search was not yet a business that paid.
That is the quiet fact at the start of OpenText. In 1991 an entrepreneur, Anouar Namouh, founded OpenText Corporation alongside the two professors, spinning the dictionary technology out of the university. A related company, OpenText Systems, had been set up two years earlier. The founders do not appear to have left much public record of their childhoods or schooling, so the story stays with the idea: if you can index a dictionary, you can index anything a company owns.
The early company was a search business, and search was not yet a business that paid. What changed things was people. Tom Jenkins joined as chief operating officer in 1994 and later became president and chief executive. In 1996 the product known as Livelink became OpenText's, and the company went public that year. Livelink pointed the technology at a more profitable problem: how big organisations store, find and share their documents.
What almost nobody outside the industry noticed was the second act. OpenText started buying. Hummingbird in 2006 for US$489M. Vignette in 2009. Then larger: Dell EMC's Documentum division for US$1.6B in 2016, Carbonite and its Webroot and Mozy units for about US$1.45B in 2019, and Micro Focus, a deal of roughly US$6B, completed in January 2023. The pattern was consistent. Buy mature software with loyal customers, fold it in, cut cost.
The approach has a price. In 2022 the company suspended its Russian business after donating to Ukrainian humanitarian efforts, and said it would resume only when the war ended and sanctions lifted. In 2025 Russia declared it an undesirable organisation. That same year the chief executive of thirteen years, Mark Barrenechea, was replaced; James McGourlay stepped in on an interim basis in August, and Ayman Antoun was named CEO in April 2026.
Today OpenText reported revenue of US$5.17B for fiscal 2025, with net income of US$436M, both down on the year, and Dealroom pegs its value near US$11B as of November 2026.
The lesson for a first-time founder is a small one. The company's biggest assets, a dictionary project and a knack for absorbing other firms' software, were not glamorous. OpenText was built by being useful to boring customers for thirty years, and by taking an academic curiosity seriously enough to turn it into a company.