News Analysis
Mark Barrenechea's 13-year run as OpenText's CEO and CTO came to an abrupt end on Aug. 10, 2025. The timing wasn't coincidental. OpenText announced disappointing fiscal 2025 results on August 7, showing total revenues dropped to $5.17 billion from $5.8 billion the previous year — their first negative annual growth in years. Three days later, the board fired him.
"OpenText is where good software goes to die." That's what enterprise content management professionals have been saying about the company's strategy under Barrenechea's leadership. Now it seems OpenText's largest investor agrees.
"OpenText needs a CEO more focused on organic growth" and transparency in performance, Charles Nadim, portfolio manager, Canadian Equities at Jarislowsky Fraser Ltd, told Reworked. The investment management firm is OpenText's largest investor and carries enough clout to influence the board and company's actions.
Nadim believes OpenText had become "too complex" during Barrenechea's tenure. "Organic growth wasn't one of Barrenechea's strengths," he said. But Nadim is optimistic about the company's core capabilities, noting that OpenText leads in Information Management for AI, specifically with the in-house built Aviator products.
The Shopping Spree That Defined an Era
Barrenechea transformed OpenText through acquisitions. Lots of them. Starting with Easy Link in 2012, the shopping spree never really stopped.
The hits kept coming: Cordys and GXS in 2013-2014. Then Informative Graphics Corporation, Actuate Corporation and Daegis in 2015. The following year brought Recommind and Dell EMC's Enterprise Content Division, including the crown jewel, Documentum.
The pace accelerated. Guidance Software and Covisint in 2017. Liaison Technologies in 2018. Catalyst Repository Systems and Carbonite Inc in 2019. Xmedius in 2020. Bricata and Zix Corporation in 2021.
Then came the big one: Micro Focus in 2023 for $6 billion, their largest acquisition ever. Most recently, Pillr in 2024.
The Strategy That Worked … Until It Didn't
Barrenechea was clear about his approach. Speaking with Spencer Stuart's Jason Hancock in 2023, he explained the philosophy: "If we're looking at a company and it's sort of standalone for standalone, to just buy the company based on a financial model, that's not our place. What we use (we) integrate. We bring the power of our product portfolio, we bring the power of our install base, we bring the power of our culture and then we integrate, and that's how we build our value way up."
The formula worked for a while. The company grew from a document management vendor into something much bigger and more complex. But that expansion came at a cost.
"His primary contribution was being the champion of top-line growth through acquisitions until he ran out of affordable consolidation targets," a solutions management executive who worked in the document/content management space for several decades told us. (We promised to keep their identity anonymous in exchange for their insights.)
Another industry professional was more blunt: "My personal opinion is that they only make enough investment to justify their maintenance costs to their legacy customers."
The Pattern John Newton Predicted
Documentum co-founder John Newton saw this coming. When OpenText purchased EMC's enterprise content division in 2016, he warned eWEEK: "There's a pattern with which OpenText operates. It's very much the Computer Associates model: They bring it in, they do minimum maintenance on the product, and then they kind of milk the installed base."
Newton was right about the strategy: "What they're really doing is buying market share, which I assume is the most important thing for them."
And maybe that strategy worked for more than a decade from an investor's perspective. Yet as OpenText's acquisitions diverged from its primary stronghold — enterprise content management — it became difficult to discern what business OpenText was actually in.
"They're not really an ECM company anymore," analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe told us in 2024. He didn't suggest this was necessarily bad or good, just reality.
When the Music Stopped
The company is midway through a three-year cost-cutting program that has eliminated 2,800 positions since 2024, including 1,600 job cuts announced in May 2025. Despite these cuts, the numbers weren't adding up.
OpenText's shares tell the story. On Oct. 29, 2021, they sold at $50.35. By March 28, 2025, they hit a low of $25.29. When the company announced negative annual growth for fiscal 2025, investors had enough.
The board acted fast. The leadership change has extensively shuffled the company's C-suite and kicked off an executive search for a permanent CEO. James McGourlay, a 25-year OpenText veteran who was EVP and president of international sales, was named Interim CEO immediately after Barrenechea's departure. Chief Product Officer Savinay Berry now presides over CTO duties. OpenText chairman and former CEO P. Thomas Jenkins has been appointed chief strategy officer, and will lead the new executive search committee.
"After a thorough review of the business and its performance, and as we look ahead to the Company's future, the Board believes there is an opportunity to enhance shareholder value by growing revenue in our core Information Management for AI business and redeploying capital from the non-core assets," said Jenkins.
What Barrenechea Got Right
Not everyone thinks Barrenechea's tenure was a failure. One industry professional we spoke with believes his impact was transformative: "He changed OpenText from a document management company to one that acquired many companies outside that space and made OpenText truly a software company rather than just an ECM vendor. Whoever replaces him will need to be able to do the same and spot good acquisitions to keep OpenText relevant in the wider market and beyond ECM."
The numbers support some of this. OpenText achieved 16 consecutive quarters of growth through the second quarter of fiscal 2025. Barrenechea also successfully convinced customers to stick around. OpenText maintained a 96% renewal rate.
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Innovation wasn't completely absent either. Forrester named OpenText a leader in its Wave for Content Platforms, Q2 2025. IDC recognized the company as a leader in intelligent document processing. Gartner plans to feature a session on OpenText DevOps Aviator at its Application Innovation & Business Solutions Summit 2026.
OpenText's AI Aviator platform promises to help companies with everything from recruiting to insurance decisions to aviation safety recommendations.
But Steven Dickens, CEO and principal analyst at HyperFRAME Research, isn't entirely convinced by the innovation narrative. "These initiatives have largely been seen as a rebranding of existing products and a strategic play to align with the AI trend, rather than groundbreaking, from-the-ground-up innovation," he wrote.
The debate over whether OpenText's AI capabilities represent genuine innovation or clever marketing will likely influence how the new leadership approaches product development going forward.
The New OpenText Leadership Team
The shake-up brought significant changes to OpenText's executive structure. Berry, who stepped into CTO duties, brings deep experience in cloud services and content management. He was SVP cloud services at OpenText, responsible for all cloud services and strategy, including infrastructure, service delivery, managed services and developer services. Before that, he served as OpenText vice president, Engineering and Products leading cloud applications, design, performance and security.
Prior to OpenText, Berry was vice president, product management at Dell EMC, where he was responsible for the content management product portfolio. He led all SaaS, mobile, web and on-premises products, including Documentum, Captiva and other enterprise productivity applications and was part of the executive team responsible for acquisition of Documentum by OpenText. His background suggests the company is serious about returning to its content management roots.
OpenText also announced that it will continue to work with its financial advisors to explore "portfolio-shaping opportunities that enhance focus on the Company's core Information Management for AI business and deliver long-term shareholder returns." The company is now focused on information management for AI and enterprise cybersecurity, Nadim told us.
The OpenText Investor Revolt
Jarislowsky Fraser Ltd., OpenText's largest investor, backed the board's decision to oust Barrenechea. Speaking about Barrenechea's firing, Nadim said "he wasn't right for the next 10 years of evolution," adding that OpenText's focus on Information Management and ECM was diluted during Barrenechea's leadership.
The investment firm's support for the change signals a fundamental shift in company strategy.
What's Next for Enterprise Users
OpenText will explore selling off some of the "non-core assets" of its business as part of the strategic shift. The company has already made a rare divestiture, selling Micro Focus's mainframe computer unit to Rocket Software Inc. for $2.3 billion in fiscal 2024.
Analyst Pelz-Sharpe expects more changes: "Over the next year, they will likely take a close look at much of the Micro Focus portfolio, the EAI (Business Network) and Security portfolios to see if they still align and potentially consider divesting some, if not much, of that," he said.
For enterprise content management professionals, this could mean a return to OpenText's roots. Pelz-Sharpe sees opportunity in this refocus: "What we are seeing in the broader market, Hyland and Box being good examples, is the recognition that without strong information management, enterprise AI doesn't work."
He points out that OpenText has "one of those platforms, with thousands of customers storing and automating unstructured data at scale, so they have an opportunity to return to what they do best."
What This Means for OpenText Customers
The leadership change at OpenText isn't just about one CEO. It's about the future direction of enterprise content management. For organizations running on OpenText platforms, especially legacy Documentum implementations, this shift could mean better product focus, as the company moves away from managing a sprawling portfolio of acquisitions to actually improving core ECM products for the age of AI. A return to information management roots could provide clearer roadmaps and more predictable upgrade paths for enterprise customers. There's also the potential for spin-offs where non-core assets might find new homes and get proper attention and investment.
Most importantly, with proper focus on content management, AI integration might actually solve real problems instead of just checking marketing boxes.
The acquisition-driven model that defined Barrenechea's era is over. What comes next could determine whether OpenText remains relevant in an enterprise software landscape increasingly dominated by cloud-native solutions and AI-powered platforms.
For enterprise users who've watched their favorite software get absorbed into OpenText's vast portfolio only to stagnate, this leadership change might finally offer hope for real innovation rather than just rebranding exercises.
The question now is whether OpenText's next permanent CEO can execute organic growth better than Barrenechea executed on acquisitions. Enterprise customers are watching — and they have other options if the new strategy doesn't deliver.
Editor's Note: It's interesting days in the enterprise content management world:
- Why Hyland's CEO Says 'ECM Experience Is One Thing We Don't Need' — A new leadership team, a future vision focused on content intelligence, a customer base hungry for innovation: Hyland is primed for its great pivot.
- Box Is Building Its AI Agent Vision, One LLM Integration at a Time — Box has been incorporating new LLMs as fast as vendors release them. A look at how this fits into the company's vision of the AI-first enterprise.
- Enterprise Content Management Gets Disrupted, Again — Keeping up with all the name changes ECM has gone through over the years is hard. But the latest – intelligent content services – might just have holding power.
