Hey Documentum users, look what OpenText has for you now
Flash back to October 2016. EMC Enterprise Content Division (ECD) president Rohit Ghai stands on the keynote stage at Momentum 16, EMC Documentum’s European user conference, saying goodbye. Dell-EMC has sold the division he leads to OpenText and they are waiting for the sale to close.
Pundits, most of whom have little or no information to back their arguments, are declaring that Documentum is headed toward extinction, that customers should get ready to light the funeral pyres and that OpenText will grab Documentum’s install base, milk it for all that it’s worth and add no value to the product at all. This while both Ghai and Muhi Majzoub, OpenText’s executive vice president, engineering go out of their way to reassure customers and partners that their investments in Documentum are safe and that the future should be brighter that the past.
“ECD will now be part of not only a software company, but one that understands content and information management,” said Ghai. This will be good for customers, he explained, noting that OpenText offers products for collaboration, customer experience management and analytics which fill gaps in ECD’s portfolio. Ghai would have liked to have acquired or built these capabilities, but EMC CEO Joe Tucci refused to open his purse strings.” excerpt from CMSWire
Now, two years later, we see that the pundits were wrong and that Documentum users are getting even more than they were promised. This is due not only to the fact that OpenText in investing in the platform, but also because OpenText is a software company that embraces leading edge technologies like artificial intelligence (Magellan), Docker and containers, analytics (with vizzes), and open source . It also leverages close product relationships with vendors like SAP, Salesforce and Microsoft. Note that vendor-to-vendor relationships matter more than ever in the digital era where content management is slowly dying-out and content services are becoming the rule of thumb.
At Enterprise World last July, OpenText unveiled a broad range of updates, including OT2 (OpenText 2), a platform that delivers content services in the cloud. The stack is built on the latest and greatest open source technologies, including Cloud Foundry (PaaS), Kafka and ELK, and developers can leverage Spring to create microservices. This not only gives enterprises a large pool of talent to lean on when they need apps built, but OpenText is also providing no and low code tools to build with.
This week at an event in San Francisco, OpenText announced a partnership with Google Cloud and unveiled OpenText Release 16 Enhancement Pack 5 (EP5), OpenText Business Network Cloud 16.10, and a series of new SaaS-based applications for the legal, life sciences and HR markets on OT2.
The overall goal? To help OpenText users to connect to the content they need anytime, from anywhere, in the right context in a way that is convenient, agile and secure.
Take for example a pharmaceutical executive who needs to view approve or a apply a minor edit to a document quickly. Because of the regulations and security involved, this may mean logging in from a computer, searching through a folder, finding the right sentence or chart and so on… With a new app like OpenText Quality Center (built on OpenText Documentum for Life Science and Opentext Life Science Express) which was delivered yesterday, the pharmaceutical executive whose input is needed can view the content from her phone at her daughter’s soccer game without missing the first time her kid scores a goal. Not only that, but her coworkers involved in the workflow don’t have to sit around waiting until the game is over. An app like this can impact everything from patient safety, to time-to-market, to employee and customer satisfaction to the company’s bottom line. This is a scenario that could play out with one of the O2T apps delivered today.
Other apps include the OpenText Legal Center — a cloud-based, process-centric approach to addressing specialized legal use cases like client onboarding, external sharing and collaboration and document management, as well as Extended ECM for SuccessFactors Public Cloud Edition — the latest collaboration between SAP and OpenText, delivering secure content management solutions for SAP’s talent management platform.
These apps are an example of OpenText’s “embrace and extend” strategy, according to Stephen Ludlow, vice president of product marketing.
OpenText’s Google partnership falls on the other end of the spectrum. It is the first step OpenText has made aimed at helping its customers move their OpenText investments to a public cloud. The partnership is expected to deliver a containerized application architecture for flexible cloud or hybrid deployment models. Similar initiatives with AWS and Microsoft Azure will follow.
But OpenText isn’t rushing anyone to lift now, or ever, for that matter. Ludlow says that OpenText will continue to build for on-premise, managed service, private cloud, and public cloud. The aim is to support customer moves to the cloud when they are ready and to the destination of their choice. “Our goal is to provide a path for them,” he says.
There is something new in the release for Documentum developers too — the Smart UI for Documentum D2, a common, flexible, responsive UI across OpenText content services.
As with any acquisition and any new release, the big question is “Are you better off today than you were yesterday?” By this measure Deep Analysis analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe offers a thumbs up, “OpenText has been investing heavily for a while now and by ECM standards they are comfortably ahead of the pack in that department. Ensuring Documentum is leveraging OpenText’s other assets is a good thing,” he says, adding that a look at OpenText’s revenues confirms his sentiment.
