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Buying Carbonite Inc. gives OpenText seven million individual professionals, and 300,000 SMBs to up-sell.

“We’re declaring SMB and prosumer a strategic market for enterprise information management,” OpenText CEO Mark Barrenechea said in an interview.

Barrenechea said he expects it’ll take about 18 months to integrate Carbonite into OpenText, but he emphasized that there’s no rush.

“Let me just note a few things about Carbonite: It’s profitable. It’s operating at a higher margin,” Barrenechea said.

The company has a long history of growing through acquisition; OpenText spent nearly US$3 billion between 2013 and the beginning of 2017, including the US$1.62 billion acquisition of Dell EMC, the company’s enterprise content management division.

Analysts were largely positive about the Carbonite acquisition and OpenText stock was up about 2.4 per cent to close at $56.27 Monday in Toronto.

In a note to investors, National Bank analyst Richard Tse noted that the opportunity to pursue smaller customers could be interesting to watch.

“With an added SMB partner channel, it opens up the potential for OpenText to build a meaningful SMB revenue stream. This is particularly relevant as OpenText has opened up its product stack into those potential SMB customers in recent years as it has made those products available in the OpenText Cloud.

Tse also said it is a way for OpenText to bolster its cybersecurity chops.

“From a strategic standpoint, we believe the transaction is compelling as Carbonite complements OpenText’s current security software portfolio,” Tse wrote. “Even more interesting is the ability to upsell into OpenText’s extensive enterprise customer base where the estimated penetration rate with such security products is around 10 per cent.”