OpenText Enterprise World Europe: CEO Barrenechea stakes claim for EIM as competitive edge

OpenText’s chief executive Mark Barrenechea told delegates to the company’s customer conference in Vienna that enterprise information management (EIM) software could make the organisations that use it more competitive in way reminiscent of enterprise resource planning (ERP) in its early phase.

“Just as ERP conferred a process advantage, so can EIM, which is still a young market, confer an information advantage,” he said.

Barrenechea, who is the author of a book, The golden age of innovation, referred to the fourth industrial revolution as “creating new businesses, new business models and creating a new wave of innovation”, saying that “new ways of working, agile new business models and global opportunities for collaboration and partnership make this a time where we can re-imagine business and create lasting and resilient organisations”.

He gave as an example of “re-imagining”, two OpenText customers in car making, which are moving into insurance, harnessing the driving data they have to underwrite risk.

Barrenechea emphasised the coming into the workforce, in North America and other developed economies, of a new generation of digital native workers “who want to work for a purpose”, not just a pay cheque.

“There is today full employment in the US, with 60 million Generation Z workers who have only known the internet. The global workforce is becoming younger and increasingly nomadic. Technology plays an important role in linking talent to value – ensuring that the right information is in the right hands,” he said.

“Embedding security throughout information-intensive business processes ensures that data security and governance can be maintained throughout these distributed systems. AI [artificial intelligence] and automation are bringing new insight, combining the creativity and talent of a human workforce with the scale and power of computing.”

“Just as ERP conferred a process advantage, so can EIM, which is still a young market, confer an information advantage”

He said information stored by enterprises could offer “profound competitive advantages”, citing purchase orders, invoices, request for proposals, employee records and call centre transcripts as holding “important pieces of insight”.

And he drew attention to the company’s work in the area of cloud software delivery as one that could help companies be more secure and agile.

The supplier offers an EIM as a service called OT2, with specific industry-relevant software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps and a set of microservices designed to facilitate flexible and scalable deployments. It has customers for this in life sciences, the legal industry and financial operations.

A company statement referred, in support of the cloud orientation, to a comment from 451 Research: “Enterprise IT architectures are increasingly hybrid as organisations migrate legacy workloads to the cloud or build new applications there. The reasons for this trend are many: the scalability of cloud resources affords enterprises more flexibility, can lead to reduced costs and helps streamline resource management.”

Barrenechea told a group of reporters and analysts ahead of the conference that, beyond its own datacentres, he was “very excited” about Google Cloud Platform.

“We’re not in the hosting business, we are about providing a full-stack EIM. And we have an opportunity of integrating content with Google’s translation services and Google Suite for the desktop,” he said. 

The company is known in the market for growing by acquisition. Most recently, it acquired cloud application integration service supplier Liaison Technologies to extend the reach of its “business network” offering. And it bought legal software company Catalyst to increase its offerings in that sector, where fast and accurate “e-discovery” of documents is important.

In 2016, it acquired EMC’s enterprise content division Documentum for $1.62bn.

At the event in Vienna, OpenText is signposting, among other product developments, augmented web-based document authoring and design for OpenText Exstream and newly integrated AI-based analytics for OpenText Digital Asset Management; expanded flexibility for the low-code developer tools in OpenText AppWorks; and new machine learning capabilities in OpenText Discovery that can transform how corporate legal departments and law firms service their clients.