ORLANDO — Users of SAP SE’s platforms can expect to see Waterloo, Ont.–based OpenText Corp.’s content services integrated into the platform for the foreseeable future, as the two companies announced on Tuesday that new OpenText Content Management Services will be available on many of the SAP platforms starting in Q4 of 2019.
“SAP and OpenText are strengthening our partnership to extend SAP’s unified business data platform with unstructured content for the Intelligent Enterprise on SAP Cloud Platform,” said Tom Roberts, SAP’s global vice president of third-party solutions. “These services and automatic document processing capabilities will help customers improve information flow and aid collaboration along the entire business process. Additionally, it will help them meet compliance requirements and increase productivity.”
Slated to be released on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP C/4HANA Cloud and SAP SuccessFactors, OpenText will provide document management, versioning and viewing capabilities, attachment lists, Office 365 integration, and capture and document generation services. The services are included in the subscription price for all SAP SE users.
“SAP is trying to harmonize their landscape. And SAP also wants to provide a consistent content service on top of SAP Cloud platform in a consistent way that all applications can leverage the same repository, the same capture service, the same document management service,” said Hans-Gerd Schaal, OpenText’s vice president of strategic initiatives. “And this service will be delivered by OpenText. So OpenText becomes the de facto standard for content services for SAP cloud in the future.”
Beginning with the integration of OpenText’s standard and premium services, Schaal says the next step will be to develop industry-specific versions of its applications to integrate into SAP platforms. Some of the industries he says they plan to focus on include financial services, government, pharmaceutical, and energy.
“For the last four or five years, the SAP talk was all about the technology shift. I think now we have gone through the technology shifting, we can get back to what customers are actually asking for the business processes and the industry needs,” said Schaal. “When you look to the 40 years of SAP, they started with a very generic EMP platform. And then they specialized and individualized this platform into a specific line of business and industry applications. In the last five years, with the disruption in the technology, it was mainly technology discussion. Now it becomes very much again a business process discussion. And that’s our involvement. That’s our strategy to deliver on these specific needs.”
