After a period in the doldrums, Open Text is looking like a hot company again.

Shares in the Canadian firm shot up 25 percent late last week on the back of outstanding financial results with licence growth up sharply and overall quarterly revenue up from $105.2m a year ago to $175.2m. That’s a remarkable rise for a sector that some say is slowing and is often characterised as being full of veterans under threat from Microsoft and other menaces.

Some experts said the stock jump was in part because investors are looking for safe havens in a market that is deemed to be rebounding, unlike the financial services sector that is taking a hammering. Certainly, IT bellwethers such as Intel, Microsoft and Cisco are also up although none so much as Open Text.

The real reason Open Text is suddenly so popular is that it is performing. The company said the integration of Hummingbird and work on bolstering its partner channel had gone well. Good for Open Text, a straight-talking company that tends to keep marketing BS down to a minimum and sometimes pays a price for its modesty.

Becoming a $1bn-revenue company still looks a long way off but the shooting stock price might at last put to bed (for a short while, anyway) the argument that as the biggest of the last remaining big ECM firms not owned by an IT giant, Open Text will soon be swallowed up by an SAP or other behemoth.

Open Text's performance is probably also a reminder that hard-won domain knowledge still has value and that veterans of the sector won't be displaced without a battle.