By Ralph Gammon, Senior Analyst at Infosource
November 26, 2024
OpenText has a long legacy in the Information Management Industry, having evolved from its roots in enterprise search to become a leader in content management. Its 2023 acquisition of Micro Focus has increased the ISV’s annual revenue to over $5B. It also expanded OpenText’s already wide breadth of technology. At November’s OpenText World 2024 conference, CEO and CTO Mark Barrenechea discussed the company’s evolution, including its latest stage, which he labeled “Information Re-imagined”—the theme of the event.
OpenText lists more than 300,000 customers worldwide, including 120,000 enterprise-level and 210,000 SMB users. At OpenText World, the ISV talked a lot about its Titanium X initiative, which, when it comes down to it, represents OpenText’s efforts to leverage LLMs. At last year’s OpenText World, the ISV unveiled its Aviator initiative, which basically connects elements of OpenText’s software portfolio to LLMs for various applications. Content Aviator, for example, is promoted as a tool for enabling users to leverage the power of LLMs to better understand and utilize what is in their content stores. While uptake of Aviator is still in its early stages, OpenText is already making plans to join the rest of the industry by launching an Agentic Automation initiative.
OpenText’s differentiator is the volume of critical information that it already stores for its customers. OpenText plans to leverage this content to create retrieval augmented generation (RAG) models that can improve the accuracy and specificity of LLM responses to queries. For example, if an organization wants to leverage an LLM to make decisions based on its company policies, it’s useful to have a curated collection of those policies that can be fed into a prompt. This curation involves a combination of meta data extraction and parsing and chunking of document content. Through a combination of its IDP and indexing capabilities, OpenText should be able to securely manage this for its customers.
IDOL now Knowledge Discovery
One of the intriguing technologies that OpenText picked up through the Micro Focus acquisition, is the IDOL platform, originally developed by Autonomy. Primarily marketed as an enterprise search application, OpenText has renamed the software Knowledge Discovery. At OpenText World, the platform’s multi-media capabilities were demonstrated, showing how it can be used to create indexes by applying text and facial recognition to images and videos.
Knowledge Discovery can be utilized on more than 2,000 file types and has the ability to connect to a wide array of repositories through APIs. Its capabilities can potentially be used to increase the breadth of files that OpenText can curate to help with the creation of RAGs for its Aviator applications.
Thoughts on Agentic Automation
The concept of Agentic Automation aligns with Infosource’s vision for incorporating IDP in applications that address end-to-end processes. I’m not sure that the currently available LLMs are up to the task of replacing humans for complex decision-making, but the framework for achieving this type of automation is in place. OpenText seems to be taking a measured approach to leveraging LLMs. While the ISV realizes the importance of being on the cutting edge of Information Management, it also understand where its strength lies.
Focusing on implementing LLMs and AI in a manner that leverages OpenText’s content management base should enable the ISV to best serve its customer base by moving them forward into the emerging world if AI-powered automation, while grounding their results with secure, proprietary data. At the end of the day, AI is a tool that can be leveraged to improve multiple areas of business, similar to content management. Combining AI with market-leading content management seems like the right path for OpenText and its customer base.
