OpenText: The New Equilibrium. Think How? What?
November 27, 2020
I read a weird content marketing, predicting the future article called “OpenText CEO: Organizations Must Rethink Approach to Business, Technology.” OpenText is interesting for a number of reasons. It is a Canadian outfit. The company owns more search and retrieval systems than one can remember. Fulcrum, BRS, Dr. Tim Bray’s SGML search, and others. There are content management systems which once shipped with an Autonomy stub. I dimly recall that OpenText was into Hummingbird and maybe Information Dimensions too.
Wow.
Now a company which ostensibly sells content management is suggesting that there is a “new equilibrium” on deck for 2021 is fascinating. I am not sure about the old equilibrium which seemed slightly crazy to me, but, hey, I am just reading what a Canadian outfit sees coming. I would prefer that the said Canadian outfit invest in enhancing the technologies it has, but I am flawed. That’s probably part of the old equilibrium.
The write up reports that the new equilibrium is part of the great rethink:
We are going through the fastest technology disruption in the history of the world. The shift to Industry 4.0 had already resulted in a huge increase in connectivity, automation, AI, and computing power. The response to COVID-19 has accelerated this process and forever changed the business environment.
Okay. How is that working out?
The pandemic has also forced a huge shift in time-to-value. Five years ago, companies would wait two years to deploy an ERP system. Now, the expectation is that you will have a solution in weeks, or even days.
Ah, ha. New system deployments have to be done faster. Is this an insight? I thought James Gleick’s Faster explained this process 20 years ago. That seems as if the OpenText insight has moved slowly through the great Canadian intellectual winter. Where is the management guru who lived on a sailboat in Canada when one needs him?
The new equilibrium for OpenText sounds a whole lot like Amazon Web services or the Microsoft Azure “blue” thing. I noted:
These cloud solutions enable businesses to re-invent processes and seize emerging opportunities faster, easier, and more cost-effectively. Developer Cloud is particularly exciting. It will provide a platform for developers to create custom solutions to manage information, and will help build a community of innovators working together to create better enterprise applications.
From my point of view, this content marketing fluff has not changed my perception of OpenText which is:
OpenText software applications manage content or unstructured data for large companies, government agencies, and professional service firms.
Services, new equilibrium, rethink. Got it. Enterprise search. Jargon.
Stephen E Arnold, November 27, 2020
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