Open Text announces Major Expansion in Waterloo

Open Text Corporation unveiled plans today to expand its Waterloo facility to two buildings, doubling the company’s footprint at its headquarters location. Construction of the second building is expected to get under way in July, 2010 and project completion is slated for the summer of 2011.

The new 120,000-square-foot, five-storey building will complement the existing 113,000-square-foot, three-storey Open Text office on Frank Tompa Drive in Waterloo, and will be joined to the existing facility by an elevated enclosed sky-bridge.

It’s anticipated that the finished complex will house up to 1500 employees; there are currently over 700 people employed at the existing Open Text headquarters facility.

Open Text’s long history as an innovator in the software industry began at the University of Waterloo in the late 1980s with a group of university researchers who were working on a project to convert the entire Oxford English Dictionary to electronic form, a major feat in the pre-Internet days. The work formed the basis for the Internet’s first search engine technology, which was soon adopted by Yahoo. Today search technology is one of the components of Open Text ECM Suite which helps large organizations manage huge volumes of documents, email, video, images, web content and other online information.

2009 has been a banner year for Open Text. The company earned a spot on Fortune Magazine’s 2009 list of the 100 Fastest-Growing Companies globally, ranking 15th overall and 6th on the list’s breakdown of fastest-growing tech companies. Waterloo neighbour Research in Motion was #1 on the same list.