OpenText, Its Management Shift, and Search Challenge

December 16, 2011

Short honk: Management shifts are flashing yellow lights. Examples range from the shuffles underway at America Online to the RPMs at Thomson Reuters’ revolving door. Now OpenText, a collection of poorly integrated information and content processing companies, has allegedly started the process of replacing its top dog. I read “SGI’s Barrenechea To Run Open Text.” Here’s the passage I noted:

Open Text this morning said it has named current SGI chief Mark Barrenechea as president and CEO effective January {,2012].

Mr. Barrenechea’s background according to Forbes includes:

Mr. Barrenechea served as Executive Vice President and CTO for CA, Inc. (?CA?), (formerly Computer Associates International, Inc.), a software company, from 2003 to 2006 and was a member of the executive management team. Prior to CA, Mr. Barrenechea served as Senior Vice President of Applications Development at Oracle Corporation, an enterprise software company, from 1997 to 2003, managing a multi-thousand person global team while serving as a member of the executive management team. From 1994 to 1997, Mr. Barrenechea served as Vice President of Development at Scopus, an applications company. Prior to Scopus Mr. Barrenechea was with Tesseract, an applications company, where he was responsible for reshaping the company’s line of human capital management software as Vice President of Development. Mr. Barrenechea holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from Saint Michael?s College.

Interesting. Three developments to watch in my opinion are:

OpenText’s ability to integrate a wide range of products and services into a cohesive offering. Compared to Autonomy’s marketing, also a company built via content centric applications, OpenText has not mounted compelling marketing campaigns which make the company’s products interesting.
OpenText’s engineering to update some of its properties to keep those products in step with competitors’ offerings.
OpenText’s cloud services deliver value and features to enterprise customers unable or unwilling to cope with the burdens of traditional on premises solutions.

One of the more interesting tasks for the new president will be figuring out what to do with OpenText’s line up of search systems. These include the aging BASIS and BRS Search, the Nstein system, the SGML search system, and the embedded components in such OpenText properties as RedDot. The cost of keeping each of these systems in step with competitive solutions strikes me as too large for even OpenText’s revenues.

Will OpenText be a kinder, gentler marketer? Will open text implement Computer Associates’ style of sales? Exciting 2012 for OpenText, its customers, employees, and technology staff. I hear the revolving door spinning in rural Kentucky.

Stephen E Arnold, December 16, 2011

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.