One of the country’s biggest software companies is embarking on a big overhaul of its products.
OpenText Corp., which makes enterprise information products such as content and business process management applications, said Wednesday it has begun work on creating integrated suites of services.
The project, dubbed Red Oxygen, will “bring new levels of integration across our EIM products and deliver a set of information management suites, each targeted to specific buying centres in the enterprise,” CEO Mark Barrenechea (pictured) told financial analysts on a conference call to discuss the company’s latest financial results.
Details will be released at OpenText’s annual Enterprise World conference in November in Orlando. But he did say that “each suite will include ground-breaking innovations to extend our market leadership in each of our core markets.”
“Across suites we intend to leverage shared services for process management, discovery and archiving with unification, innovation and common services. We intend to make Red Oxygen easier to buy, simpler to deploy, simpler to use, simpler for the developer.”
“We will not rest until we are number one” in each product area of the company — enterprise content management, business process management, customer experience management, information exchange and discovery — he added.
That’s a tall order for a company whose competitors include products from IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, EMC, SAP, Hewlett-Packard, Software AG — although it has OEM deals with some of them as well.
Based in Waterloo, Ont., OpenText finished its fiscal year ending June 30 in fair shape — revenue $1.36 billion, up 13 per cent over the year before (although licence revenue for the year dropped five per cent), with adjusted net income of $329 million.
Fourth quarter revenue was $347.3 million, up 14 per cent over the same period a year ago.
Overall, though, for the year Barrenechea was pleased. Major corporate wins include toy maker Hasbro and clothier Ralph Lauren, and over 150 new technology and integrator partners were signed.
It was a “pivotal year” for OpenText [TSX: OTC], he added, because the company shifted from calling itself a maker of enterprise content management (ECM) solutions to one that makes enterprise information management (EIM) solutions, and it shifted its management structure from having a number of business units to being organized around business function, geography and customer.
It also bought EasyLink, a cloud platform; ICCM makes smart processing applications on top of OpenText’s BPM platform; and Resonate Knowledge Technology (RKT), which makes reporting and visualization extensions for the OpenText Content Server and Enterprise Content Management products.
Investors even got a dividend program.
As for the new fiscal year, Barrenechea expects hopes to establish a broad EIM ecosystem “as influential as the ERP (enterprise resource management) ecosystem” by expanding products, wider distribution and more system integrators, VARs and strategic partners. He also wants to accelerate sales in fast growth markets, which he virtually described as everywhere outside North America and Western Europe.
