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Data management needs of mid-market firms may be next frontier for OpenText
TORONTO The CEO of Canadian enterprise software giant OpenText Corp. is hinting that his firm may be looking to broaden its strategy of targeting its information management services primarily at the biggest companies on the planet.
While Mark Barrenechea said OpenText remains focused on selling to “Global 10,000” firms, the chief executive used his keynote address at the company’s Enterprise World partner conference on Tuesday, to introduce a new platform dubbed OT2.
The cloud-based platform uses simplified tools to allow users to quickly build custom applications to automate workflows and manage data with nearly no requirement to write software code.
That, and the ease of accessing it via public internet instead of through on-premise servers or in private cloud networks, could make it appealing to mid-market enterprise clients that don’t quite fit into the “Global 10,000” category.
“Right now, we are maniacally focused on the global 10,000, and that’s our opportunity field,” Barrenechea said. “Through time, we’ll absolutely consider the midmarket. It takes a slightly different product, different salesforce.”
When asked whether OT2 was that “different product,” all Barrenechea would say, with a smile, was, “Watch this space.”
OpenText’s bread and butter has been providing information management platform services to large enterprises, to help organize and link complicated networks and huge amounts of data.
For example, OpenText’s platform might be used to connect all the computer systems of a railway company that collects data from things like ticketing systems, scheduling systems, human resources systems, and these days, even internet-connected brake systems on the trains.
The need for this kind of platform to connect systems is increasing as companies adopt more and more connected “internet of things” devices, and Barrenechea said that’s a major priority for OpenText.
“Up until now, we have primarily automated for humans, and human-generated content, but there’s five billion humans, and there’s going to be a trillion machines,” Barrenechea said. “They’re smart endpoints, and we’ve got 50 million of them under management right now.”
The release of OT2 follows 2017’s Magellan, an artificial intelligence product that aimed to let customers glean useful patterns and insights out of all those varied data flows.
Magellan wasn’t quite as prominent at this year’s conference, and instead of talking about “artificial intelligence,” Barrenechea point- edly referred several times to “augmented intelligence” in the sense that OpenText systems can assist humans and derive immediate value for customers.
All the same, he said Magellan isn’t going anywhere.
Barrenechea said in the course of deploying Magellan, the company has learned a lot, including how to make the data travelling across its own network more useful, for example by adding timestamps to documents along the way.
“I think it’s been a really good first year. I mean, there are trends that come and go; drawing insight out of information ain’t going away,” he said.
Another thing that isn’t going away is OpenText’s core business strategy of growing by acquisition. The company has been criticized for a lack of organic growth, expanding its userbase by buying up other companies.
“We’ve acquired 60 companies in our history,” Barrenechea said. “We’re an experience and declared consolidator, and we’ll continue to acquire.”