While a year ago at Enterprise World, OpenText announced the OT2 cloud’s availability, this year they emphasized the mission-critical services they have begun to bring to market.
Muhi Majzoub, OpenText’s Executive Vice President of Engineering, onstage
TORONTO – At the 2018 OpenText Enterprise World event here, the main announcement was the availability of OpenText’s new OT2 SaaS cloud platform. This year, a highlight of the event was the availability of mission-critical services for the platform, as it becomes a key part of their Information Advantage strategy.
Last year at Enterprise World, we spoke a lot about OT2,” said Muhi Majzoub, OpenText’s Executive Vice President of Engineering. “This year, we have applications for it available – native SaaS applications built on microservices architecture which leveraging the EIM [Enterprise Information Management] platforms.
It’s all about moving from concept to actual services.
“We’ve been talking about the OT2 concept for the last two to three years, formally announced it a year ago, and customers loved the concept,” said Savinay Berry, Senior Vice President of Cloud Services at OpenText. “They know that they are not in this for a year or two but ten to twenty years. We are mission-critical workloads. If our solution goes down, Heathrow Airport stops. If our solution for Citi goes down, they lose 11 million dollars a minute. This is real money on the table. So it’s important for them to know what we can deliver today and what we will deliver in the next five to ten years.”
With the six new services announced at the event, OpenText now has 25 OT2 services, up from 16 two quarters ago.
“We pick integrations that matter,” Majzoub said. Key new cloud ones include Core for SAP SuccessFactors, whose importance stems from the fact SAP is OpenText’s deepest strategic partner, and Core Capture, a SaaS capture solution based on the rebranded, next-generation version of Captiva.
“Many customers also asked us to deliver federated compliance for Content Services, where they can define policies,” Majzoub stated. That’s Core for Federated Compliance and it is coming this quarter.
“In the future, this can grow to support other systems,” he said. “We can build connectors to anything.”
“These microservices on OT2 can be easily consumed in the cloud,” said Marc Diefenbruch, Senior Director, Product Management, at OpenText. “There will not be content management in SuccessFactors. It will be in one place, in OpenText, and can be consumed everywhere for a seamless experience.”
The model for this is similar to what Salesforce did with Lightning, where they started internally with their own engineers, and once they were comfortable with that, opened up the APIs to customers and partners and charged a fee for it.
“We will meter and bill those services and have a packaged model – not too different from Salesforce but focused on EIM,” Berry said. “With Capture, we are already providing a RESTful service and saving metadata into a data record. That’s already happening. You will start to see other services, like OpenText Brava!, a viewing service, be exposed to customers as well.”
What has not yet been done is opening up access to OT2 beyond OpenText’s own engineers.
“We have not yet opened OT2 for partners and customers,” Majzoub indicated. “Today we sell our APIs in Capture and in our Trading Grid, and SAP leverages Capture. We are looking for ways to open up our services in a way that will be similar to Marketplace.”
The delay here is simply the need to fully secure the APIs appropriately first.
“This is a deliberate strategy,” Berry said. “Customers will be using these for mission-critical applications, not to create a portal or a social network. It needs to be hardened.”
“The process by which OT2 is built is very modern, with the data centres being very scalable and providing safe harbours for sovereignty, including the realization of Brexit,” Majzoub said. “There are no complications there. The issue is that we went to make sure that our APIs are hardened first, and put into production in multiple use cases before they are opened up to the mases. Today. It’s just our engineers using them. Once we open it up, floodgates are open. It could be 100,000 developers – and we want to make sure that it will first work.”
The delay isn’t likely to be a long one.
“We are looking to announce availability very soon,” Majzoub indicated.
“We will sell access to the APIs so that customers can build their own services in any vertical that we are in, and we have to decide how best to do that,” he added. “We will publish a pricing model for that. They will be able to take a headless service and build their own services for dentistry or oncology – or anywhere else we do not play.”
The pricing model is different for each service.
“For example, in our Capture service, an enterprise could use two people to scan 100,000 documents, so pricing this one per user wouldn’t be economically viable for us,” Berry indicated. “However, a per user model makes sense, in say, an identity service.”
This is a key part of what OpenText refers to as the Information Advantage, and where they believe they have an advantage over the industry.
“Software had gone wild, but we bring it back under control while keeping things agile and flexible,” Berry said. “We provide that by connecting with key partners like SAP and Salesforce and where they don’t have their own applications, we build our own. All that information is stored in the same layer, which we can use to get insights, to provide all the analytics, and compliance and auditing. Nobody else can do that. That’s the Information Advantage, and it’s the key for our customers. Many have a bright-eyed view of going to the cloud. We provide the SLAs, what they want in critical incident management. They just leave that to us, and we deliver it.”
