After months of giving hints about its next-generation platform, OpenText Corp. has revealed what it dubs its Red Oxygen enterprise information management products that it hopes will breathe new life into the company.
At its annual Enterprise World customer conference today in Orlando the Waterloo, Ont.-based software company will announce five new integrated business process and content management applications to be rolled separately over the next five months.
Each is suite has parts organizations can implement in the cloud as well as on-premise.
(Editor’s note: An earlier version of the story wrongly said each suite is priced the same. It should have said regardless of the number of features each suite has one price.)
But Lubor Ptacek, vice-president of strategic marketing, said in an interview that eventually OpenText will merge them into one suite. The idea is to do for information management what enterprise resource management software companies did in creating integrated ERP suites that can handle customer, employee, product and transactional data.
Wednesday’s announcement is “the first major milestone towards our strategy to provide a unified suite of enterprise information products,” Ptacek said.
“Ultimately the goal is to have one suite to handle any problem with unstructured information.”
He didn’t say when the full integration will be possible.
“Every business needs an information management strategy to capitalize on their unstructured data, and Red Oxygen will give CIOs the power to discover, manage and leverage that information to drive growth and innovation across their organization,” said OpenText CEO Mark Barrenchea.
The five applications are:
— Information Exchange Suite, a hosted cloud service (although companies can mount it on-premise) available this month that allows staff and partners to securely exchange documents.
It’s a completely new set of capabilities unrelated to existing OpenText applications that integrates with an organization’s existing email apps and includes large file transfer acceleration, an audit trail to confirm receipt of message and data leak prevention.
The other suites are basically versions 10.5 of existing applications with added capabilities;
–Content Suite (formerly OpenText ECM), is the content server and records management application that allows organizations to apply information governance policies on any data. It will be available in December.
New will be the ability to archive content from Google Apps, just as ECM now allows archiving of content from Microsoft’s Office 365.
Customers will have a choice of having an on-premise archive or putting data into an OpenText-hosted cloud archive;
–Process Suite, (formerly OpenText Business Process Manager BPM), is for automating business processes. It will be available in January 2014.
New is a case management application module, which customers can used as supplied or customized work with an organization’s existing case management application;
–Experience Suite (which comes from Customer Experience Management CEM), is a series of products for managing, building and measuring the effectiveness of marketing applications. It will be available in available in March.
New is what OpenText calls Omni-Channel, the ability to create marketing messages through the Web, desktop, mobile or print vehicles;
–and Discovery Suite (from OpenText InfoFusion), that links to existing content repositories for searching and also available in March.
It includes connectors to data outside OpenText suites such as file servers.
The new suites are a logical upgrade for existing OpenText suites and replace the previous versions.
–Linking the five is AppWorks, a new platform for developing HTML 5 applications that can work with any of the suites through a RESTful API; and Tempo (available in December), a family of enterprise social media apps for staff collaboration made up of existing products like OpenText Social and Box.
In a note to investors, National Bank Financial analyst Kris Thompson noted that AppWorks will make it easier for customers to build their own extensions to OpenText suites using — for the first time — commodity languages. Until now OpenText app developers had to use a specialized programming language.
Pricing details weren’t immediately available.
Customers with existing OpenText [TSX: OTEX] products and on maintenance contracts get the new suites free.