3 Key takeaways from OpenText Enterprise World Digital

#1 Reinvented solutions for resilience

The conference was kicked off by Mark Barrenechea the CEO and CTO of OpenText and within his keynote, he emphasized on the importance of the “Resilient Organization”. Living in the current day, we are all experiencing the COVID-19 consequences. In the past we have seen that the only way to survive a crisis is to be adaptable. To support organizations to be more agile and flexible in their operations, OpenText has released a series of new and reinvented solutions to cover a range of challenges currently experienced by customers.

• Information sharing and collaboration;

With such a large portion of the worker population being confined to tele working we’ve witnessed a boom in the use of collaborative tools such as Microsoft Teams. However, often disconnected from enterprise information, how do you ensure that your people have the right information available? How do you secure governance instead of letting information sprawl plot its course? Simple, you integrate your information flows within your Office 365 environment and close the gap between productivity and management of information.

• End-point data protection and threat protection;

Following the market movement and looking into the future, OpenText is following the Cloud Movement in an increased speed. Delivering Cloud Services however also introduces a challenge for vendors. Specifically, cybercrime since the information being stored within the OpenText landscapes also house business critical and private information. Since the acquisition of Carbonite & WebRoot, OpenText has embedded these offerings and solutions fully in their OpenText Core solution. This way a full endpoint protection can be delivered making sure no information will be prone to cyberattacks.

• Business Network;

Over the years many companies have been working with Integration Platforms focused primarily on the integration of applications and endpoints within the Enterprise. This can differ from Enterprise Service Bus implementations to more point centered solutions that implement an interaction between two or more application with each other.

Since the Cloud took off, these integrations are no longer focused only on the Enterprise itself, but it has expanded to integration different solutions and endpoints outside of the secure walls of the Enterprise organization. Think about automated processes like Order-to-Cash and Procure-to-Pay for example. These are integrations that are setup between the different Partners in business together.

Looking at these integration platforms, there has not been a single platform having the capabilities to integration all possible Solutions and Endpoints up until now. With the Business Network platform OpenText is deliver one Single Unified Integration Platform that can integrate all these different solutions and endpoints both inside and outside the Enterprise Organization. This is further extended with a new and improved Trading Grid which offers applications like for example Data Analytics, Visibility, Transformation and Quality management. In addition, it offers services like a Central Datastore, Global Messaging and a high level of continuously adapting and improving security. 

#2 Cloud Editions

With the movement towards Cloud based computing there are more than one way to adapt products to be compatible with the new Cloud Technologies. Trying to make an existing product cloud ready can have it challenges, since the solution primarily has never been designed to make use of all these new Cloud Advanced Technologies. OpenText’s response to this challenge are the “Cloud Editions”. New versions of the software suites that are referred to as cloud native. This refers to the fact that they support cloud native technology and principles such as containerization.

With the introduction of the Cloud Editions a new release schedule and version naming convention has been introduced.

• OpenText committed now to release a new version every quarter of the year;
• The naming convention of these releases will change from the current 16.x towards the year and quarter of the release. The current latest release for example is 20.2.

This introduction rules out no platforms for hosting the OpenText products. Customers can still decide and continue to use their own datacenters, hosting the products on-premise. In addition, they can also decide to host their environments on Public Clouds such as Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform or AWS, Private Clouds or go for hybrid solutions.

The advantages of leveraging on the capabilities of the Cloud Editions are numerous:

• Faster deployments through Kubernetes automation
• Easier updates and upgrades through separation of application and configuration
• Optimization of TCO

Above all, it provides you as a customer with full flexibility and the means to align with your IT strategy.

#3 New Cloud Native Information Management Solutions

In the past few years we have witnessed an uprising of cloud-based services that can be use to enrich your applications. OpenText is no different and has been releasing such services, most often under the “Core …” brand name. Core for SuccessFactors, Core Capture for SAP, Core Experience Insights and off course Core Share are just a few examples of the wide portfolio of SaaS based applications that have been released and are readily available.

On the other end OpenText introduced a few years back their OT2 platform which has taken a run in development over the past years. The OT2 platform is a micro-services hub for Information Management functionalities that is actually also used for the Core brand solutions. In the coming months, OpenText will be readying itself to release that platform and it’s services to the world! With that development OpenText also announced transitioning from EIM (Enterprise Information Management) to IM (Information Management).  

Through the offering of their micro-services solutions which are running on the OT2 platform OpenText aims to bring their solutions also to the small and mid-market organizations. These solutions offer the whole range from Capture Solutions to Information Management and Output Management.

All in all a Digital Conference doesn’t have the flair of an actual conference where you can network and mingle with other companies, but in the sense of adapting to the current crisis, this offered a good view into the latest developments that OpenText is working on and how we all can benefit from these developments.

Would you like to know more about these topics or discuss some other elements of Information Management?