OpenText CEO Mark Barrenechea said the SaaS-based OT2 and their flagship Release 16 will have a long life next to each other.
OpenText’s Mark Barrenechea and Savinay Berry during the keynote demo at Enterprise World 2018 Tuesday.
TORONTO – “We are reborn cloud with OT2, the new pure SaaS platform, all integrated into our business network.” That was how OpenText CEO, CTO and Vice-Chairman Mark Barrenechea summed up his keynote unveiling of OpenText’s new next-generation hybrid-cloud platform in his keynote at the Enterprise World 2018 event here on Tuesday.
OT2 has been discussed openly for over two years at OpenText, where it has been known as Project Banff.
“Project Banff is now OT2,” Barrenechea said. “It is native SaaS, with a ‘one data’ model. We’ve taken our 20 years of experience and integrated into this one data model three separate pieces – platform, services, and applications. We have taken our acquisitions and service-ized them – and created OT2 services, and built new applications on top of them.
“There is a set of workloads that we think is particularly suited for SaaS, like Core and Hightail, and what we have done historically in Archive Center,” he added. “We will incubate and grow that.”
Muhi Majzoub, Executive Vice President, Engineering and IT at OpenText, is scheduled to preview the first generation of transformative applications built on the OpenText OT2 platform in the Wednesday keynote at EnterpriseWorld18. Majzoub indicated that the microservices component part of OT2 is also has great value.
“The OT2 has common components available in Open Source, like Hadoop and Kafka, but the IP is all in the microservices that we have developed,” he said. These include approximately 500 services for content collaboration, security, process automation, and analytics.
Savinay Berry, OpenText’s VP of Cloud Services Development, demoed OT2 during the Tuesday keynote.
“What does this microservices platform, the modern OT2, look like?” he asked the customer audience rhetorically. “All the technologies that you have been using from us, and now all the complexity is hidden behind the scenes, and it is easy to use as a RESTful interface. Very soon, there will be services like Blockchain as well. We have disaggregated all these services into individual components which are easy to consume on the top. As we acquire new technologies, and as you build new applications, they will all be able to communicate with each other.”
Berry demoed the rapid provisioning of the new system, while emphasizing the volume of the services that are part of the platform.
“All these 500 services are now in one place,” he stated.
Berry also stressed that what customers and partners see today will evolve as the product is built out further.
“The UI will be changing,” he said. “This is going to get better.”
The OpenText OT2 applications will be tightly integrated with OpenText Release 16 to ensure consistency in the OpenText solution, whether it be on-prem or in the hybrid cloud.
“Release 16 and OT2 will have a long life next to each other,” Barrenechea said. “Many of you have asked us to be the hyperscaler for managed services. In the last year, we have become the platform for innovation. Here, our Intelligent and Connected core in real time is provisioning EIM [Enterprise Information Management] in 60-90 seconds in the cloud. You can now provision in the EIM environment what used to take weeks, in about an hour. It’s hosted, in the cloud, for all our RESTful services.”
OT2 will also be a partner opportunity, at least to some of the more select members of the channel ecosystem, such as the large global systems integrators. While partners can resell and build on top of Release 16, OpenText has previously not made its private cloud available to channel partners. With OT2 this changes, and OpenText adds new pricing and support enablement tools as well.
“There is no doubt an attraction to partners for OT2,” Barrenechea said, describing that is a key motivator behind the offering, although not the only one. “We automate for the Global 10,000. We don’t target the midmarket. We don’t have a midmarket sales force today. This will expand our reach.”
