OpenText Corp. rolled out the latest version of its product suites this week at its Enterprise World conference in Las Vegas, bringing to fruition the latest stage in its product development strategy, known as Blue Carbon.
The Waterloo, Ont.-based company rolled out new versions of its product suites for both on-premises and SaaS users, incorporating new analytics functionality from its purchase of Actuate earlier in the year.
The new products revolve around enterprise information management, OpenText’s banner term for IT functions including content management, business process management, customer experience management, information exchange, and discovery.
The company had been working on integrating its products more closely as part of a concerted effort known as Project Red Oxygen. That evolved into Project Blue Carbon, which ties them together more closely, said Lubor Ptacek, vice president of product marketing at OpenText.
“[Project Red Oxygen] was the first time when we had a harmonized release and introduced the suites. This is the second generation, with a focus on increased integration, deeper functionality, user experience and adoption, and analytics,” he said.
Organizations are being driven to transform themselves, he said. They are under pressure to operate digitally to gain more efficiency in competitive markets.
“To cope with digital transformation, it’s not enough to address the customer-facing part of the organization. To be digital outside, you need to be digital inside,” he added.
New suites
The company hopes to help customers improve their engagement of customers and employees, enhance their productivity, gain more insights and improve internal controls with a sweeping product update.
OpenText Suite 16, the on-premise version of the company’s product set, comes in four different suites: Content, Process, Experience, and Analytics. The cloud-based version, known as OpenText Cloud 16, includes Content, Process, Experience, Analytics, and Business Network suites.
Ptacek highlighted the analytics capabilities in the new suites as particularly interesting to CIOs.
“This combines traditional reporting and dashboarding with some of the big data analytics,” he said, arguing that in the past, CIOs and business managers focused on analysing historical or current data for visibility into the present.
“The next step is to use some of that, apply some smart algorithms to start predicting what may happen,” he said.
As an example, he gave supply chain management as an area that could benefit from predictive forecasting. Applying analytics with trading networks can now give supply chain professionals full visibility into the supply chain, revealing patterns around which suppliers are often not on time, and how it may impact product availability.
Other enhancements to the products include the ability for the cloud-based Content suite to integrate with OpenText Core, its cloud-based file sharing and collaboration service. To some products, the company has also added integration with Salesforce and with HCM application SuccessFactors. The firm also added new entity modelling layer in its Process suite, to hep customers develop applications to better manage business processes, although Ptacek wouldn’t say whether these features were in the cloud version.
The products won’t be available until March next year, Ptacek said. When they are, they will come with some new licensing models. For the first time, on-premises users will be able to buy the product on a subscription basis, and there will also be a managed services offering including some consulting components.