OpenText unveiled its next generation OpenText Enterprise Information Management (EIM) offerings at OpenText World this week. Formally named OpenText Suite 16 and OpenText Cloud 16, these two collections are designed to help customers with their digital transformation.
As Canada’s largest software company, OpenText has been a long-time player in the more widely recognized enterprise content management (ECM) space. Through acquisitions and organic growth, OpenText now has all of the components to address enterprise-wide unstructured data and information management needs. While conceptually similar, the on-premises version will include four solutions, whereas the public cloud-based offering will have five.
OpenText is promoting that these overarching bundles will enable its customers to experience better engagement, productivity, innovation, insight and control. Diving a level deeper, each of these five benefit areas highlights a new or improved feature set in one or more of its core software components.
For example, engagement is focused on enhancements to the Web content management (WCM) and digital asset management (DAM) modules coupled with new or updated third-party integrations to SAP SuccessFactors, Salesforce.com and digital brand portals. In the productivity area, OpenText has better integrated its core ECM platform with reporting and business process management, along with revamping the user interface to utilize responsive design and HTML 5.Innovation again focuses on business process management combined with enterprise level integrations to SAP and other ERP solutions. Insight addresses reporting and visualization needs of organizations around content, process and transactions, something which OpenText uses to differentiate from other ECM platforms.
Control is the area which is most exciting to customers looking to leverage a hybrid cloud and on-premises strategy. OpenText Core will now be a common information governance platform, through an integration with OpenText Content Server. OpenText Records Management will have advanced data security and strengthened regulatory compliance for Office 365 customers, including email lifecycle management. To prevent information leakage, OpenText’s mobile viewer will institute a “walled garden” approach, keeping all content on the server and preventing save-as or forwarding. Finally, OpenText will support digitally signed documents via a partnership with DocuSign.
So why is OpenText taking this revised stance and going to the cloud? According to Lubor Ptacek, OpenText Vice President of Product Marketing, it is a strategic play to help customers with digitaldisruption. While this is quantified through OpenText’s values of team-based collaboration, process management, insight and understanding, predictive analytics and control, the reality is OpenText – and many other legacy ECM providers – are losing their grasp on the regulated enterprise.
Enterprise file sync and share (EFSS) tools are here to stay, and the leaders in the space have the core features coupled with security, availability, reporting and control to compete with on-premises platforms. As Microsoft has found with Office 365 and EMC with its former ownership of Syncplicity, enterprise content management and office productivity vendors are slower to innovate and must protect their license maintenance stream by not overhauling their core feature set too drastically.
OpenText Suite 16 and Cloud 16 will be generally available in March, 2016.
[Source:- tomsitpro]
