TORONTO – OpenText Corp. is taking a bigger leap into the cloud with the upcoming release of its Enterprise Information Management (EIM) suite. This year’s Release 16 will become the new cloud-first Cloud Edition in April 2020, containerized, fully integrated into the OpenText Cloud, and with deep Google support.
“We’re not interested in kind of generic clouds that don’t add value, we want to go to cloud providers that make innovative sense,” explained chief executive officer and chief technical officer Mark Barrenechea. “And Google’s a great example of where we can get to a transcription, translation services, deeper integration, and click stream for supply chain customers and have their Google Cloud Platform as an option for customers.”
To that end, OpenText announced extensions to its seven-month-old partnership with Google, with OpenText naming Google its preferred partner for enterprise cloud, and Google selecting OpenText as its preferred partner for EIM.
In addition, OpenText will use Google Cloud to enable global disaster recovery services for EIM customers, will integrate its products with G Suite, integrate key Google machine learning and artificial intelligence services to create industry-specific solutions, and leverage Google Anthos to deploy and manage EIM workloads in multi-cloud environments. The companies will also expand their joint go-to-market activities.
This doesn’t mean that on-premises deployments will be forcibly replaced. Barrenechea promised that the company would support on-premises environments as long as customers demand it. And they will continue with traditional licensing until they migrate to cloud, at which point pricing switches to a subscription model.
“Shift happens,” Barrenechea noted during his keynote. “Shift has happened, and it’s an exciting time. We have transitioned. We’re not in the digital era anymore, we are beyond digital. We are in a post-ERP era; we are in the information era. Automation is not enough. Everything must be machine-readable.”
That includes signatures. Later this year, electronic signatures will be added to OpenText Core. “It’s a feature inside of Content Suite,” he said. “It’s not a company. E-signatures is a feature that should be in the product line.”
Later he told media that the e-signatures are part of the capability set designed to win the enterprise from Box and Dropbox.
“Box and Dropbox, they’re a feature, I’ve said it all along,” he said. “We are competitive, we’re going after them hard in the enterprise. Core collab is there, plus workflow, plus forms, now electronic signature, integrated in. We’re taking no quarter here, there’s no rest and no quarter against Box and Dropbox. It’s all out of battle to win that space and OpenText is going to win.”
Mastercard was part of another key announcement at Enterprise World. Joel Kremke, vice-president of Covisint global sales and alliances at OpenText explained that automotive supply companies worldwide use OpenText Business Network for all kinds of secure collaboration via its automotive identity exchange: engineering collaboration, financial collaboration, inventory, sales, and more. When OpenText heard about the Mastercard Track B2B global trade enablement platform, it seemed a perfect fit and a partnership was born.
The companies will leverage the OpenText Supplier Portal (formerly Covisint Supplier Portal), OpenText Identity Portal, and the OpenText IoT Platform, integrated with Mastercard Track, through a single user interface to allow Business Network’s automotive supplier customers to access spot financing, as well as maintain and exchange key business information. Track will provide monitoring on sanctions, credit, and other business information.
“It’s focused on the customer experience, which is clearly why we’re here,” said Claire Thompson, executive vice-president of enterprise partnerships at Mastercard. “Real time risk management, finding trusted partners who they want to trade with, integrating payments in a robust manner. And then obviously, we’re also looking at the payments information that we get, as well as providing visibility. So what have I got paid for, when am I going to get paid, the whole cash flow management, which is obviously also critical for SMEs.”
She added that since both Mastercard and OpenText already have extensive relationships with banks, implementation will be accelerated, and given many of the companies using the Business Network are SMEs, the program will help increase financial inclusion.
“And imagine as we continue to build more and more intelligence into the network for them, then the smallest guy has got the exact same sort of key abilities as the big guy in the network,” Kremke said. “It’s aspirational, and that’s where we’re going.”