OpenText Enterprise World: A Shift into the Information Era!

Offering insights into the latest trends as well as stories on successful digital transformations, OpenText Enterprise World is designed to help attendees unlock their information advantage. This article provides a brief overview of the 2019 event in Toronto.

This year’s event included over 200 breakout sessions as well as 15+ LearnPath opportunities to educate attendees on digital transformation and productivity.
This year’s event featured a number of keynotes from Mark Barrenechea (OpenText CEO & CTO), Muhi Majzoub (OpenText Executive Vice President of Engineering), Sir Tim Berners Lee, and special guest Peter Gabriel.
Google Cloud has selected OpenText as its preferred partner for Enterprise Information Management Services, and OpenText has named Google Cloud its preferred partner for enterprise cloud.
OpenText’s roadmap for the future echoes an emphasis on moving beyond just automation and delivering content for consumption by machine learning applications.

By Marc Mascara

Introduction

On July 9, OpenText kicked off Enterprise World 2019 in Toronto with a week’s worth of information exchange, learning opportunities, breakout sessions, and keynote speeches. Thousands of attendees joined the event to learn how to make the most of underutilized information and capitalize on the next wave of transformation in productivity and growth. Offering insights into the latest trends as well as stories on successful digital transformations, Enterprise World is designed to help attendees unlock their information advantage.

OpenText Enterprise World entrance.

This year’s event was located at the Metro Toronto Convention Center. OpenText Enterprise World is touted as the most expansive EIM (Enterprise Information Management) technology event in Canada and the world’s largest information conference. The most recent event included over 200 breakout sessions as well as 15+ LearnPath opportunities to educate attendees on digital transformation and productivity. Pre-conference training courses were also offered on July 7 and 8, including over 25 accelerated sessions that spanned ten different industries.

Keynote Speeches

This year’s event featured a number of keynotes from Mark Barrenechea (OpenText CEO & CTO), Muhi Majzoub (OpenText Executive Vice President of Engineering), Sir Tim Berners Lee, and special guest Peter Gabriel. Mark Barrenechea kicked things off with an insightful and compelling keynote that set the tone for the entire event. Mr. Barrenechea thanked all his customers and partners for their undivided trust in allowing OpenText’s platform to manage some of the world’s most trusted data, which was especially interesting and timely given that data security is such an important topic.

As the amount of information captured in the cloud continues to increase exponentially, the need for data security will only increase as time goes on. To that end, Barrenechea announced on stage that Google Cloud has selected OpenText as its preferred partner for Enterprise Information Management Services. Meanwhile, OpenText has named Google Cloud its preferred partner for enterprise cloud. In other cloud news, OpenText Release 16 will move to OpenText Cloud Editions (CE) in April 2020. Moving forward, all OpenText offerings will be cloud-first, but can be containerized and operate off-cloud. This means that with OpenText CE, customers will never have to upgrade again. OpenText is also confirming its commitment to content services by providing new and expanded products and capabilities to its platform.

Barrenechea made a rather bold declaration during his keynote, declaring to the audience that the digital age is no more. “We’re in a new era that is post-ERP [Enterprise Resource Planning] and post-digital,” he asserted. “Automation is not enough—content must also be machine readable. It’s about unlocking insight to build a smarter, better business.”

Mark Barrenechea delivers keynote speech at OpenText Enterprise World.

The Shift from the Digital Age to the Information Era

In today’s environment, insight, artificial intelligence, and human capital are key to driving better business decisions. OpenText believes that the shift away from the digital age has already occurred. As Barrenechea jokingly said, “shift happens”—and this shift is well in place from the Digital Age to the Information Era. Extreme convergence is driving this shift with automation, connectivity, and computing power accounting for over 1 trillion devices and 5 billion connected consumers. Businesses must leverage the information advantage associated with EIM, which dwarfs the process advantage that ERP delivered. In today’s changing landscape, businesses will be challenged to look at how their capital may change over this Information Era horizon. Capital that was once viewed as commodity capital will shift to information capital as machine, customer, and product data become key to revenue generating products and services. At the end of the day, everything still comes down to the end-to-end customer experience—whether it’s the way a bank communicates through its mobile app or the precise targeting of a direct mail campaign, data is poised to be king. At the same time, however, the information era is not without its challenges. Although the pace at which we move has made us somewhat immune to many technological changes, cybersecurity threats and regulatory shifts will create some obstacles in the path forward.

As the Information Era brings us closer to extracting value from all this prescriptive and predictive learning from the data that is captured, we will see a direct impact on a different way of working—perhaps most importantly how best to deploy Artificial Intelligence. With that in mind, the algorithms that are required to make this happen will become the glue between your data lake and revenue stream, creating the need for Data Scientists. During his keynote, Barrenechea noted how Data Officers along with Data Scientists will shape the workforce of the future.

A recurring theme that surfaced throughout the conference concerned ensuring that everything is machine-readable, leading to the idea of information capital. To help enterprises move beyond digital and enter the information era, OpenText has officially become an EIM platform. The company is leveraging its capabilities to offer an information advantage for the future. OpenText’s roadmap also echoes an emphasis on moving beyond just automation and delivering content for consumption by machine learning applications.

The Bottom Line

As always, OpenText Enterprise World 2019 was jam-packed with technology announcements and partnerships. For more information about this event, please contact your Keypoint Intelligence – InfoTrends account representative or see our Enterprise World 2019 Analysis. Our 2019 annual global research and forecasts are also underway. For more information on how to access this unique market intelligence, e-mail Deanna Flanick at [email protected].

Marc Mascara is the Director of Keypoint Intelligence – InfoTrends’ Customer Communications Advisory Service. In this role, he supports customers with strategic go-to-market advice related to customer communications. His responsibilities include conducting market research and analysis, consulting engagements, forecasting market growth, client care, and providing coverage of industry events. Marc has been involved in the graphic arts and publishing industries since 1980. Prior to joining InfoTrends, he worked at Eastman Kodak Company, where he served as Director of Marketing US/Asia for the Enterprise Inkjet Systems Division, managing regional marketing and operations for Kodak’s high-speed inkjet portfolio.