Open Text's Profit Soars on Higher Sales

SAN FRANCISCO - Open Text's (OTEX) - Get Report bottom line benefited from a healthy increase in the sales of its business software in the third quarter.

The Waterloo, Ont. software company reported Tuesday a top line of $178.8 million, up 15% from $156 million in the same quarter of last year. Analysts were looking for revenue of $175 million, according to Thomson Financial.

Net income jumped 87% to $7.3 million, or 14 cents a share, from $3.9 million, or 8 cents a share, in the year-ago period.

Excluding items, EPS was 48 cents, a penny greater than analysts' expectations.

The stock was down 25 cents, or 0.7%, to $33.73 in after-hours trading.

Deferred revenue at the developer of enterprise content management (ECM) software rose 24%, to $181.9 million.

Competing public-company providers of ECM software include

Oracle

(ORCL) - Get Report

,

EMC

(EMC)

,

IBM

(IBM) - Get Report

and

Microsoft

(MSFT) - Get Report

.

Open Text has strategic alliances with Oracle, Microsoft and

SAP

(SAP) - Get Report

.