AMC moves from OpenText to Rocket

Back in the day (only a year or so ago), I was welcoming the acquisition of Micro Focus by OpenText. A good match I thought. I still do, but M&A (Mergers and Acquisition) is a risky business and you don’t know how it will finally turn out until the dust has settled. Now I hear that Rocket Software has finished the acquisition of the Application Modernization and Connectivity (AMC) business of OpenText for some $2.275B – so that business has moved again.  Presumably, this helps finance the original purchase and Mark J. Barrenechea, OpenText CEO & CTO, says:

We intend to use the net proceeds from the divestiture to reduce our debt by $2 billion and lower our net leverage ratio to under 3x.  Further, the divestiture allows the company to focus on the future of Information Management, which is innovation and growth in the Cloud, Security, and AI markets and the opportunity to expand our capital allocation program for shareholders.”

This is probably an uncertain time for AMC employees, but I think that even if OpenText was a good home for AMC, Rocket Software may be an even better one. I like Rocket Software and this acquisition lets it claim to offer “products and solutions across the modernization continuum, spanning the mainframe to the cloud”. Which is good – whatever else “modernisation” means, it shouldn’t mean the perpetuation of silos, connected by point-to-point links.

Rocket Software offers a rich range of products already, particularly servicing the sort of mainframe environments that run workloads for the very largest enterprises. Milan Shetti, President and CEO of Rocket Software says:

We remain committed to the current portfolio of products and can now offer even more solutions to meet your needs. In addition to several complementary Host Connectivity, Mainframe Application Development Lifecycle Management and CORBA solutions, Rocket Software will also offer market leading technologies COBOL and Enterprise Suite, which allow companies the ability to run COBOL and PL/I applications on distributed or cloud servers. These added capabilities expand the mainframe modernization approaches that Rocket Software can deliver, enabling choice and allowing our customers to run workloads wherever it makes sense for their business.”

So, the one constant is change. We wish AMC all the best in its new home.