SAP AG and Open Text Corporation have announced a joint worldwide offering to help companies efficiently manage the growing amount of data and documents crucial to effective business operations. SAP is reselling solutions from Open Text, the largest independent provider of enterprise content management (ECM) software. Adding powerful capabilities for secure, long-term archiving, Open Text's solutions complement the existing document management capabilities of SAP applications. This solution helps customers increase business process efficiency, reduce risks and ensure compliance with government regulations.

Based on Open Text's Livelink ECM solutions, SAP will resell applications marketed under the names "SAP Archiving by Open Text" and "SAP Document Access by Open Text." Available today, the archiving and document access applications are targeted toward the financial services industry as well as public sector organizations, healthcare companies and other service organizations.

This global reseller agreement builds on two decades of partnership between SAP and Open Text. Open Text's Livelink ECM Suite for use with SAP applications is a mature and well-established offering deployed in more than 2500 SAP customer sites around the world.

"GATX is in the midst of implementing Open Text's Livelink ECM, which was selected, in part, for its proven integration with SAP applications," said Yvonne Scott, CIO, GATX Corporation. "The solutions, now available directly from SAP, should help us to cost-effectively manage the growth of our data. The solutions from these two highly regarded companies are expected to maximize data security and integrity and improve system performance and availability while allowing us to address regulatory compliance. Once fully implemented, this will enable us to better focus our attention on other investments in our business."

Open Text's Livelink ECM solutions for use with SAP applications consists of two primary components that address data and document archiving and document access in an SAP application environment:

• SAP Archiving by Open Text incorporates the imaging, SAP data and  document archiving components of Livelink ECM. It is a secure,  cost-effective solution that stores data on optical media or compliant  disk storage with logical to physical archive management. This helps to  lower the cost and risk of meeting data retention and destruction  requirements. Document archiving helps eliminate information silos and  reduces the need for time-consuming regular mail or expensive express  delivery services as well as the need for paper archives. 
• SAP Document Access by Open Text incorporates the capabilities of the  archiving solution and extends it with the ability to provide SAP  applications with a process-oriented and application-spanning view of  all business documents and data across SAP and non-SAP applications. A  Web browser-based interface also allows occasional users to easily  retrieve content.

SAP Archiving by Open Text and SAP Document Access by Open Text can be purchased and supported directly from SAP.

Open Text is an SAP Software Partner with certified integrations and the companies have shared two decades of partnership and co-development. As a result of this cooperative relationship, Open Text, which acquired IXOS in 2003, is the market leader in document management, document archiving and data archiving for SAP solutions. Broad-based and industry solutions let enterprises create, access, manage and securely archive all content for SAP solutions -- both data and documents -- to address stringent requirements for risk reduction, operational efficiency and IT consolidation.