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Transcript:

Steven Dickens: Hello, welcome to another episode of the Futurum Tech Webcast, coming to you live from AWS re:Invent. I’m your host, Steven Dickens, and I’m joined by Neil Fowler from OpenText. Hey Neil, welcome to the show.

Neil Fowler: Thank you very much. Nice to be here.

Steven Dickens: So, let’s get the listeners and viewers orientated first, maybe do some introductions.

Neil Fowler: So Neil Fowler, and I’m responsible for the application modernization connectivity product group, OpenText, specializing on what we’re talking about today, mainframe modernization.

Steven Dickens: So big topic, big title, let’s sort of dive straight in. What does that mean in the context of OpenText? OpenText has gone through a really sort of transformational year with the Micro Focus acquisition. I know that’s kind of your heritage, business has expanded. What does that mean in the context of OpenText and how you’re seeing the industry right now?

Neil Fowler: Well, from a general side, most of the customers that we’re dealing with, there’s a lot of overlap for some of the most significant size organizations worldwide. So, as well as from the OpenText traditional information management, we can also look after the core transactional systems and provide access into those mainframe systems and data, allow them to modernize that and take it forward into public cloud.

Steven Dickens: So, we’re in a fantastic setting. We’re on the 60th floor of the Wynn at re:Invent. AWS is a huge partner. We’ve spoken a number of times about your collaboration with AWS. Why are you guys here? What’s this week looking like and where does that fit within the context of the overall collaboration?

Neil Fowler: Well, as we’ve talked about before, when AWS brought out their mainframe modernization service, the re-platform pattern was built on what was the Micro Focus enterprise suite of technologies. So, we’ve carried on that relationship with AWS. It’s a key strategic relationship for us, helping build the platform and the technology to help these applications move forward. So, what we’re seeing is with the interest been growing year-on-year, we have lots of our partners and our customers here. So, as well as we continue to develop our integration into the platform and enable more choice, we’ve just got a lot more opportunities to have conversations with our customers and help them move into the future.

Steven Dickens: So, AWS has been doubling down on that over the last two or three years, making some acquisitions themselves, strengthening and bolstering their ecosystem of partners. Where do you see that on the, I suppose, maturity level now? I think obviously people have been deploying AWS for a while, the mainframe service has been relatively in the near term. Where are you seeing that from maturity perspective?

Neil Fowler: Well, with any of these platforms and mainframes that have been moving, it’s not just the infrastructure of the platform, it’s not just the application with all the mainframe capabilities, it’s a full infrastructure and third party technology base from security, job scheduling, printing. So, what we’ve seen over the years is as that maturity is going through, even though we’ve moved hundreds of thousands of customers off mainframe onto cloud, one thing we’re seeing is just because that platform, as you say is actually maturing, there’s more choice, there’s more partners being signed up to make sure you can account for all of the specialist technology third party pieces, which means it becomes more of a rounded appliance and makes it easier for that service delivery.

Steven Dickens: So, we’ve just done some research with you guys and your team, and as part of that we got exposure to AG Insurance. Those guys were on a transition, they’ve used the enterprise suite to move and re-platform, they’ve gone to on-premise x86. One of the things that came through in the conversation was that the next turn of the crank for that is to move to the public cloud. I know you are heavily involved as the executive sponsor of that project. Where do you see that in the context of… I don’t know whether that’s maybe going to be AWS, but where do you see that as a kind of discussion thread with what we’re doing here at re:Invent and how that fits together?

Neil Fowler: Well, as you said, with AG Insurance, they took the first step of moving to an on-prem solution. So, they’re looking to take advantage of more of the elastic type capabilities. So, that’s the reason they’re looking away from having to manage their infrastructure, their hardware, and they want that sort of dynamic scaling from both sides. Now, as they go through that, every time a customer like AG Insurance is looking for that choice, they need to be evaluating all those capabilities back to the maturity of the platform, but it doesn’t have to go strictly to the managed service per se. They can still use a move to the infrastructure. So, I think the conversation’s still out in terms of where they are, in terms of whether they want to embrace more of the managed service, or just use the AWS or other infrastructures to move that technology.

Steven Dickens: And is that where you see customers in general, they’re going to be saying, “Hey, I’m going to be re-platforming this application.” There’s an infrastructure component to that, but then there’s also potentially, do I want to go the further turn of the crank to go to a full managed service? Is that kind of the inflection point that you see there for those customers?

Neil Fowler: I think so, so much of it is around their data strategy as well. From your conversations with the team at AG, you understand how data is important and information and how they’re driving it. So, access to that data and pulling things like AI and ML as part of that, that’s an important part of it. As they’re looking to move that, do they want to just look at the management of the infrastructure or are they looking for the whole application? They’ve got a very established operations team and engineering team, so they’re probably quite happy managing the system themselves, but can they just take advantage of that infrastructure? So, I think customers go through that choice of have they outsourced the operation to management, or are they just looking to have that as a managed infrastructure and just take advantage of it from that side?

Steven Dickens: We did pretty well. We went a few minutes without mentioning AI. We’re recording this in 2023, everybody’s mentioned AI within the first two minutes. We managed to get, I think, five or six questions in, but you brought the subject up. Where do you see that fitting in the mix? I think as you look at journey to the cloud for some of these workloads, proximity to some of those AI services, particularly here with Bedrock from AWS, where do you see that kind of fitting in the mix?

Neil Fowler: Well, for any AI model to work, it’s got to have access to the data. So, the first thing is having access to that, releasing it away from the proprietary platforms and moving into more contemporary infrastructure. And then with that model balance, with all the other information, they can start factoring that into their customer engagement side, but it goes further than that as well, because as you want a more open agile platform, you can start looking at maybe artificial intelligence in terms of their operations, their DevOps, into their development system, into their agile practices. So as you go through each of these ones, there’s a little piece that plays, but the key factor is enabling that initial part of the data and that transaction to be formed part of the model.

Steven Dickens: So as we start to summarize up here, where do we think… We’re at re:Invent, what are those key takeaways that some of the OpenText customers or AWS customers that are watching this as this goes live this week, what are those key takeaways? What should be people thinking about they’ve got their mainframe workload today, they’re considering what their options are with OpenText, maybe there’s a re-platform, a modernization story, public cloud is in the mix potentially, what should people be thinking about as they start to start on that journey of where they’re going to explore?

Neil Fowler: Well, I think a point you raised a few minutes ago regarding the maturity of the platform, so the combination… The technology, especially from the OpenText side, has been a around for decades. So we’ve been successfully doing this, but with the advent and the integration into the public cloud platform and the scale robustness, reliability, as well as then opening up the future modernization options and extension of it. So, I think the key thing is actually understanding it is possible, and it really opens up the ability for them to maintain the relevance, deliver to market quicker, and be able to basically deliver the needs of their customers into the future. So, I think it’s a really key aspect to start now, don’t get left behind.

Steven Dickens: Neil, as always, you do a great job of bringing this home and making my job really easy. That’s a great summary for the conversation. Thank you so much for joining us.

Neil Fowler: Thanks, Steven.

Steven Dickens: You’ve been watching us here from AWS re:Invent. I’ve been chatting to Neil Fowler from OpenText. There’s lots of other episodes coming this week, so please click and subscribe to check those out, and we’ll see you next time. Thank you very much for watching.