OpenText Unveils Analytics, Cloud Updates To SuitesOpenText Unveils Analytics, Cloud Updates To Suites

Hybrid Cloud: 7 Ways It's The Best Of Both Worlds

Enterprise Information Management provider OpenText (OTEX) is promising a host of new offerings that will enable the company's technology to be deployed on-premises, in the cloud, and in hybrid environments.

OpenText previewed the offerings, scheduled for general release in March, at its annual user conference, Enterprise World, in Las Vegas Wednesday morning, calling it a next generation EIM strategy enabled by OpenText Suite 16 and OpenText Cloud.

The rollout comes at a time when technology vendors catering to on-premises enterprise customers have found themselves under increasing pressure to cloud-enable their offerings and move from providing business intelligence-style reports to predictive analytics tools. For instance, software giant Oracle rolled out its own hybrid strategy at its Open World event last month.

During the company's Q1 earnings call last month, OpenText CEO Mark Barrenchea provided financial analysts with a top-level overview of ways the market has changed significantly.

"The IT industry is going through sweeping changes, perhaps the most change I’ve seen in my 30 years in the industry," he said during the call. While OpenText is ranked as a leader in two Gartner Magic Quadrants -- Enterprise Content Management and Web Content Management -- the company is working to build out digital strategies for its customers and for itself.

information spoke with Lubor Ptacek, vice president of product marketing about the product launches this week, and the challenges ahead for OpenText.

"To us, for example, from a traditional enterprise software company sold as a perpetual license, this is a huge change," he said in an interview. "We are adopting to the cloud, retooling products, switching our licensing model from on-premises into a subscription model. It's a significant change for a company like ours, and it requires a lot of changes to our back office policies. … Most of our customers are going through the same change. We are ahead of our customers."

The transformation is not pain-free. OpenText announced a 5% workforce reduction in May in conjunction with a restructuring program designed to simplify the business's structure and support its cloud strategy.

Wednesday's announcements at OpenText's annual user conference are a milestone in the company's effort to gear up for this new market and new competitive era.

OpenText revealed that its project, code-named Blue Carbon, and commercially called OpenText Suite 16 and OpenText Cloud, will be available in March. The company will be soliciting beta customers soon.

OpenText Cloud 16 makes the company's four on-premises suites -- Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Business Process Management (BPM), Customer Experience Management (CEM), and Analytics available in the cloud, too. These will be available to be deployed on both the OpenText Cloud and on third-party cloud platforms.

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OpenText Cloud 16 also adds new integrations with Salesforce and Successfactors, along with a host of other new integrations and features.

OpenText has also improved its analytics capabilities via its acquisition of Actuate in January 2015, and the announcements today deliver on the promise of integrating those capabilities into the company's suite of offerings -- something that Ptacek said will make a big difference for the company's existing customers.

"Virtually all of the solutions our customers use have a need for analytics," he said.

All the updates previewed today are designed to help OpenText's customers be competitive in an era of disrupted markets, Ptacek said.

"Almost every industry is going through this aha moment where you see these new entrants that can be extremely disruptive," he said. "It's what Netflix did to the movie rental industry, and what Amazon has done to bookselling. So our customers are thinking hard about what we need to do to keep our competitive edge."

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