OpenText CEO: Get Ready for the Great Rethink

CEO Mark Barrenechea’s keynote speech to the 7500 attendees at the OpenText World digital conference on Oct. 26 was a story of fives: five pillars of an information management strategy, five guiding principles and five new expert domain clouds.

The COVID-19 pandemic will be a driver of what Barrenechea called the Great Rethink. He noted that the crisis has created a “new equilibrium” characterized by systemic, long-term structural change, and that cloud computing will be central to the way business is done in the future.

That has changed customer expectations. “Five years ago, you’d wait two years to deploy ERP” he said. “That isn’t going to happen now. You need solutions in a week or a day.” OpenText plans to follow that principle with software releases coming every 12 weeks over the next year.

Barrenechea devoted much of his keynote to laying out strategic pillars, guiding principles and new expert domain clouds – five of each.

The pillars to OpenText’s information management strategy are content services, digital experience, business network, cyber resilience and advanced technologies. They will intersect with five guiding go-to-market principles.

The first of those is a comprehensive cloud portfolio covering public, private, SaaS and managed services. “We are 100% committed to delivering all our products as a service,” Barrenechea said.

The second and third principles are related: Edge deployment and security have gained urgency as millions of people have been displaced to home offices. OpenText’s strategy will be underscored by Carbonite continuous backup, Webroot and Brightcloud threat intelligence, EnCase forensic security, Hightail file-sharing, CoreShare collaboration and Core eSignature document security. “Without a secure, trusted platform, none of this matters,” Barrenechea said.

In line with its cloud commitment, OpenText’s fourth guiding principle is to make every possible service available through APIs. “If we build a new app inside of OpenText it becomes an API,” he said. “It’s publicly available, scalable and runs in the cloud.”

The fifth principle is focused on Data & Artificial Intelligence, with an overarching goal of enabling the information era. Customer data paired with AI and other tools can help drive better decisions. The key is to make it easy for customers to analyze data, but to also ensure they understand privacy is paramount. “It’s your data, not ours” said Barrenechea, “We’re never going to sell your data.”

Translating pillars and principles to products, Barrenechea announced five new expert-domain-oriented clouds.

OpenText Content Cloud is the single point of integration for an organization, spanning records management, workflow, sharing, signature, content analytics, collaboration, content management and more.

OpenText Business Network Cloud securely integrates people, systems and things across extended business ecosystems. It supports self-service, automatic information and supplier validation and hundreds of software integrations out of the box.

OpenText Experience Cloud enables social commerce with unified branding, rights management, product catalogs and trusted content from video to voice to images across every channel OpenText

OpenText Security & Protection Cloud offers comprehensive security, covering endpoint protection, backup and recovery, malware protection, forensics, and behavior analysis. It’s a single service that works for enterprise, SMBs, professional users and consumers.

OpenText Developer Cloud is for people who build the most important assets for digital businesses: software. “If you turned off all software, nothing would run,” Barrenechea said. The cloud launches with 32 services in eight capability groupings. Accessing functions like capture and digitize and Magellan AI is now as simple as plugging into an API.

Barrenechea closed by outlining an ambitious release schedule for the company’s flagship Cloud Edition. Release 21.1, due early next year, will see more than 20,000 features added, while release 21.2 will bring unified endpoint management. Further releases will introduce complete programmability and a further shift to the cloud. “A year from now I believe our customers will be running in the cloud and never have to upgrade again,” he said.