OpenText looks to channel to fulfil ambitious growth

OpenText has called on its channel partners to help it reach the ambitious goal of tripling its customer base within the next few years.

Speaking at OpenText’s Enterprise World 2019 in Toronto, CEO Mark J Barrenechea said the software vendor currently counts a third of the world’s 10,000 biggest companies as customers, but it is eyeing complete coverage within the next three to five years.

“Maximum five, minimum three years, we will cover the entire enterprise,” Barrenechea told partners. “Our strategy is to win the enterprise, and we’re going to cover every single enterprise account that exists in the market.”

To do this, the CEO said OpenText will double its direct sales organisation, which will be supported by OpenText’s 1200 partners worldwide.

“Unless you’re going to put a ton more field reps in place, you need to leverage the channel to help you get that coverage,” Jennifer Kerr, OpenText’s VP global partners and alliances told Microscope. “Our big theme this year is getting the channel aligned with the various sales reps who are given the named accounts, on what that plan would look like together, because that’s where we’re going to get the scale to support one another.”

Kerr said the Enterprise Information Management (EIM) company will focus on enabling its existing partners to grow their customer base, as well encouraging them to sell across its expanded product portfolio. However, she said there will likely be some recruitment of strategic partners to fill any gaps in coverage.

“We’re going to heat map all the partners we have by vertical and geography, and then see if there are any gaps,” she tells Microscope. “We have a lot already today, but I’m confident when we then lay it over the global 10,000, that there might be some gaps, and that we’re going to then look to do some recruitment to the partner programme.”

With revenues of $2.8 bn, OpenText is Canada’s largest software company. Forty percent of its business is generated by channel partners, with EMEA accounting for a third of its revenues.

At Enterprise World this week OpenText is focusing on cloud, digital, and AI. It announced a swathe of product updates and integrations for its OpenText Cloud and Business Network solutions and new applications delivered on OpenText OT2, the vendor’s EIM-as-a-service cloud offering.

“The cloud is the greatest opportunity we have,” said Barrenechea. “It’s about going into the install base and ripping out IBM…As they get distracted, making Red Hat successful, every single IBM customer needs to go somewhere. Every Kofax customer and Hyland customer, every Alfresco customer…they need to migrate to a modern platform. And we have the opportunity to do this right here right now and go into that install base.”

Elsewhere, it flagged the release of OpenText Cloud Editions (CE) for April 2020 – a cloud-first version of the company’s flagship EIM platform, Release 16.

The vendor also announced an expanded partnership with Google Cloud to provide new deployment options for Content Services in the cloud. Google Cloud has selected OpenText as its preferred partner for EIM services, while OpenText has named Google Cloud its preferred partner for enterprise cloud.