Sydney, 2 October 2008 – A survey of 104 records managers conducted by Open Text™ Corporation (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTC), a global leader in enterprise content management (ECM), at last month’s Records Managers Association of Australasia conference, reveals that 75 per cent of organisations will increase their spend on records management in the year ahead. At the same time, 40 per cent of respondents believe that records management will eat up a larger percentage of total IT budget investment in 2009.

The survey found that the key drivers for investment included ongoing regulatory compliance, corporate accountability and employee productivity.

At the same time, while one-third of respondents believed that enabling real-time information to employees was important, only 25 per cent have already provided access to records on a mobile device. Indeed, almost two-thirds of organisations have no plans in place for providing access to corporate records on a mobile device.

The survey found that difficulty in ease of use, integration with existing IT systems and compatibility issues posed the biggest challenges in deploying records management tools enterprise-wide. At the same time, data quality problems plagued the success of records management deployments in one in five organisations and time-intensive and costly training affected over 25 per cent of organisations during their records management implementation.

An almost unanimous view (88%) of respondents found that service and support were the most valuable qualities sought when choosing a records management IT provider. At the same time, 79 percent of organisations chose a solution which could easily integrate with existing applications and 65 per cent sought confidence in the vendor’s long-term commitment to their records management product line during the tender process. Only one in four viewed the financial strength of the records management vendor as a potential factor in its selection.

“This survey indicates a strong resilience by organisations to continue their investment in records management in the year ahead while the culture of compliance that has weighed on the minds of senior management for the last few years continues in this era of electronic discovery and litigation readiness,” said Graham Pullen, Vice President, Asia Pacific, Open Text.

“The retention policies, extended metadata management and security of content delivered by records management software play a central role in giving companies the controls they need, as the source and form of corporate content evolves in the increasingly collaborative global enterprise,” Pullen adds.

“Open Text is committed to delivering superior leading records management and compliance offerings, so that customers will have the tools they need to meet not only the challenging legal and regulatory requirements they face, but also to ensure consistency of retention and capture practices even as innovative new content creation tools are adopted by Web 2.0 savvy business users,” said Graham Pullen, Vice President Asia Pacific, Open Text.

The sample size of this year’s survey was 104 respondents. All respondents were among the delegates who attended the Records Managers Association of Australasia conference in Sydney on 8-10 September 2008. These included records managers from government and public and private sector organisations with the majority responsible for document management collaboration, records management archiving and information research and retrieval.

Open Text is a worldwide leader in records management, offering the industry’s most comprehensive set of solutions to extend records management across the full range of content types stored in multiple systems, including SAP, SharePoint, email, instant messaging, file systems, and Open Text content repositories.

About Open Text

Open Text, an enterprise software company and leader in enterprise content management, helps organisations manage and gain the true value of their business content. Open Text brings two decades of expertise supporting 46,000 customers and millions of users in 114 countries. Working with our customers and partners, we bring together leading Content Experts™ to help organisations capture and preserve corporate memory, increase brand equity, automate processes, mitigate risk, manage compliance and improve competitiveness. For more information, visit http://www.opentext.com