In addition to the cloud-native capability for OpenText applications, which will roll out over this quarter, OpenText makes a multitude of other enhancements and some new additions in the 20.2 release.

Today, content services and cloud platform provider giant OpenText has announced the long-anticipated cloud native OpenText Release CE. It’s part of Release 20.2, which also includes a new Core SaaS application and a plethora of enhanced services and other updates. The release also reflects the major acquisitions OpenText has made in the last year, which it has leveraged in its own internal business planning, as it moved its employees home as part of their response to the coronavirus crisis.

“This is a big release for us,” said Muhi Majzoub, OpenText’s Chief Product Officer. “It is the work of 6-12 months of activities, including two major acquisitions. Release 16 has been around at OpenText for a little under four years. Last summer at Enterprise World, we said we would be saying goodbye to that and said that the next release will be CE.”

Release CE – Cloud Editions – is significant because makes cloud-native versions of OpenText’s important software available in cloud native editions, with a containerized architecture.

“Open Text Release CE enables all our solutions with Docker and Kubernetes and containers,” Majzoub stressed. “All of our major products are going to be made Docker and Kubernetes-capable, although there are some old legacy solutions we won’t enable that way because there isn’t customer demand.”

The plan is to roll out availability of specific solutions during the calendar second quarter. Majzoub noted that that’s what 20.2 means – 2020, second quarter.

“All of these solutions will become available during April, May and June,” he said. “Some of them are available now, including Documentum, Content Suite, InfoArchive, and File Intelligence.”

While OpenText has always had an aggressive acquisition strategy, Majzoub highlighted the importance of the recent Carbonite and XMedius acquisitions.

“In December we completed the acquisition of Carbonite, which brings 3-4 powerful cyber resilience tools, including Webroot endpoint protection,” he said. “With COVID-19, products like Webroot become even more relevant. We are an office-based company with 60 locations and physical offices. All of us now work from home except 50-100 people who do hardware IT, so Webroot becomes vitally important for us because things are no longer just in our network.”

Majzoub also emphasized the importance of BrightCloud, a cloud service company Webroot had acquired.

“They crawl the internet to determine if URLs are suspicious,” he said. “We sell that as a service and in the future. we will leverage it to protect our own endpoints in our cloud.”

The third set of tools coming from Carbonite that Majzoub cited as critical was databackup, from DoubleTake and Datacastle.

“We can leverage those in our data centre, and sell them to customers through partners like SAP,” he said.

Majzoub also emphasized the importance of the acquisition a year ago of Montreal-based secure and collaborative communications provider XMedius.

“They are very important in our trading group and business network,” he said. “They bring Fax-over-IP to our large On Demand fax network. They also bring voice messaging and voice mail over the internet, and support our strategy of a hybrid approach to the cloud.”

While those are the big areas whose capabilities are represented in Release 20.2, Majzoub then turned his attention to some of what he termed the hundreds of new capabilities in the release.

OpenText AI and Analytics have been strengthened significantly by new emotional analysis, and connector and crawling capabilities in Magellan Text Mining.

“A new intelligent folder capability will allow documents to be dragged and dropped into intelligent folder automatically through Magellan text mining and autoclassification,” he stated. “It extracts advanced metadata and uses defined business logic to put content in all the right folders, pertaining to things like marketing, finance. It will crawl all documents and put them in the right place in seconds. Magellan BI and Reporting also adds a  WYSIWYG [what-you-see-is-what-you-get] experience for simplified self-service dashboard authoring.

Intelligent capture is now more deeply integrated into many solutions. One of them is the new release of Extended ECM for Microsoft Office 365 within OpenText Content Services. The AI-powered Intelligent Capture now automates filing of documents and metadata in an Extended ECM workspace. Extended ECM for Microsoft Office 365 also now lets Microsoft Teams documents and chats be stored as records.

Majzoub noted that OpenText Customer Experience Management has received several significant feature enhancements. These include executing multi-channel communications directly from the browser with Exstream, and new advanced home screen personalization and collections sharing in Media Management.

“This will improve the digital experience and allow more interactions between call centre data,” he noted.

“In cyber resilience, Encase remains the gold standard in investigation and forensic analysis,” Majzoub said. “We are seeing a lot of growth in our Encase hardware solution with Tableau. Uptake is growing because of the browser-based interface and the WiFi capability to control remotely, and we are seeing strong uptake in law enforcement and security.” Remote access with Tableau TX1 Forensic Imager is further improved in this release with 802.1x network connectivity, and EnCase Endpoint Security adds real-time monitoring for crucial persistence artifacts.

The release also contains the new version of the OpenText Trading Grid, their unified B2B and A2A integration platform delivered as a managed service that addresses complex data integration needs for the new API-driven economy.

“Our [late 2018] acquisition of Liaison and of XMedius addresses supply chain uncertainty issues by creating a bigger and more holistic network,” Majzoub said. This release extends integration capabilities with a modern, microservices architecture and improved data visualization from OpenText Alloy to provide better real-time insight into supply and demand fluctuations. Trading Grid also adds self-service innovations, including self-service connectivity in Global Partner Directory.

OpenText OT2 20.2 adds a new Core SaaS application. OpenText Core for Building Information Modeling cuts operational costs and complexity, while increasing efficiency in building operations by facilitating the efficient capture and verification of incoming data.

On the developer front, select partners will be invited to participate in a closed Developer Beta Program with a refreshed developer experience, where partners can access additional OT2 services and APIs.