Open Text Corp. has announced that after months of preparation, it is launching a managed cloud service tailored specifically for the enterprise information management market.
The cloud was built up steadily over the past few months on top of infrastructure the company recently acquired from EasyLink Services International Corp., which owned data centres around the world and also brought with it a portfolio of new services, according to Lubor Ptacek, vice-president of strategic marketing at Open Text [NASDAQ: OTEX] [TSX:OTC].
With all the groundwork complete, the company has now moved “over 20 different solutions into the cloud,” he said, “anything from the traditional content management to business process management, customer experience management all the way to some of the things like fax software and notification software, and messaging software, which came from the EasyLink acquisition.”
Ptacek said the new offerings are aimed at customers that need more than just virtual infrastructure and applications, typically offered by large public cloud vendors like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Corp. Open Text’s cloud services will also be unique in that they’re focused almost entirely on the company’s core competencies, he added.
“It’s the whole ECM [enterprise content management] operation that we are actually putting in the cloud. If you think about the stack — we could just as well run it on top of an Amazon cloud. We are choosing not to because our customers need the control,” in terms of management and security in particular, he said.
The company will also provide straightforward Software-as-a-Service applications to customers who don’t have such concerns, and will continue to offer products and services to those with on-premise infrastructure, added Ptacek.
But for many of OpenText’s customers subject to regulatory and compliance requirements, the prospect of moving their information architecture to a dedicated cloud will be compelling, he said, as it gives them both flexibility in their business operations and peace of mind.
“For us, that’s the differentiator. It’s the managed software and it’s also the managed software that’s quite focused on EIM, or if you like… on unstructured data and unstructured business processes.”