The Six Five Team discusses OpenText World 2023.
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Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: Dan, you and I were in Las Vegas, our second home at OpenText World 2023, the Six Five was there interviewing and chatting with the most senior management at the company.
Daniel Newman: Six Five was there, Pat, and yeah, let’s talk a little bit about OpenText world. Let’s talk a little bit about OpenText. How about that?
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. No, that’s a great place to start.
Daniel Newman: OpenText is one of those really big companies that most people have never heard of, and when I say most, I don’t mean enterprises. Enterprises know OpenText, but when I’m thinking like consumers, because they don’t make PCs or devices or phones, they are a pure enterprise information management play that is now almost six billion dollars or is six billion dollars in revenue and has done so through a pretty substantial series of inorganic and acquisitions as well as really focusing on helping companies deal with the information management age. This event, we did have the Six Five there. We talked to their CEO, their CMO and their chief product officer, all of which you’ll be able to watch videos and we’ll have to drop those in the links here as soon as they’re up and ready. But let’s be straight what this event’s all about. And I didn’t hear what you said there, Pat.
Patrick Moorhead: Oh, I muted it. I was screaming to the rest of the family I’m recording a podcast.
Daniel Newman: Professional stuff, people, we got to stay with this here, but that’s what we do and we’re on the road. Anyway, so we got to talk to the leadership. Make no mistake, this company’s been enabling information and data and management in the enterprise across the full stack of business intelligence, machine learning, automation for a long time. But this event was all about AI and you simply cannot spell Aviator without AI. And that this company was zeroed in on telling a story, architecture, baby, telling a story about how companies can, I don’t know, download a million documents for 350,000 and then lay generative capabilities all on top of it. And Pat, the continuum of what it’s doing in Aviator really does go from your most sort of citizen developer friendly Aviator for business products all the way to your incredibly complex Aviator for technologist products that enable companies to build very custom with a poly LLM approach all the way to sort of pre-canned uploaded documents with CX and DX and enterprise search capabilities.
But the company really does have a story there, and this is probably what was most interesting to me. I came in, we’ve covered OpenText for about a year, so I still am in the phase where I’m learning more about the company and the business, and I was trying to say, what is the thing that this company really stands out for? And to me it’s all about data across the continuum being able to be managed and then being able to layer meaningful generative applications that take into consideration the important tenets of responsible AI, privacy, security, and accuracy. So Pat, I think the company did a really good job. I think Aviator and its new brand spokesperson Ice caught the attention. I really enjoyed the fact that the company came out with a meaningful monetizing strategy for this. Helping companies, actually pleading companies to partner in terms of getting them to the point where their data, and that’s data from SharePoint, data from SAP, data from Oracle, data from Salesforce, can all be looked at under the guise of being used for generative apps.
You can get a lot more in the conversations that we have, Pat, but my take here is that OpenText is a very interesting company. It’s really thinking about AI in a very holistic fashion. It’s not about good and bad AI, it’s just AI. We heard Mark Barrenechea, CEO say that more than one time, you don’t drive a safe car, you just drive a car. And I largely agree with that, but I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Pat on the track. But anyways, good show, good event, good primer here. Check out those videos. Pat, what was your take there?
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, so that was a great intro and additive, and I’ve been researching the company for about a year, and I’ll admit it’s been a slow role. You get a company that does so many different things in the enterprise, and they’re this combination of a lot of acquisitions, Micro Focus is a great example and four or five different companies along the way, but it’s a company on the move. And I think the safe and accurate way to characterize the company is it’s all about information management. They have their apps, but it is all about ingesting every type of data type, enterprise data type on the planet and managing that data. And the CEO, Mark Barrenechea-
Daniel Newman: Barrenechea, yeah.
Patrick Moorhead: Just threw out big and impressive numbers. They manage 96 trillion rows of Vertica, a trillion pages of content managed. And it’s one thing to manage it and it’s another thing to secure it, but to activate it is really the key here. Otherwise, it’s just technology for a technology sake. And with Aviator, I think we really saw this in action when they showed a demo of Aviator Search. And on the left handrail there were about 30 data types from billing to CRM, Salesforce, Documentum, teams, Twitter, internal Slack, internal OneDrive, and then the ability to lay across generative AI. And Dan, I’m the pain in the butt in a lot of the Q and A in these rooms, and you may or may not recall in a major CRM meeting, it’s like, how are you going to connect all this data together? And Salesforce had a visionary video on how to do that.
And here, we actually saw it in real life in Aviator search. So that really brings in the power of it. And they did a demo of Log4Shell, that was a big security issue that happened a way back. And they showed how Log4Shell came in every single private and company query that came out. We saw how a contract was put together using these tools as well from disparate data sources. So super interesting stuff. But again, folks, check out the coverage when we publish it next week on all of these interviews. There’s three. We had the CEO, chief product officer, chief marketing officer, who also runs Partner as we found.
Daniel Newman: Good call. The multi job machine, Sandy Ono, she’s great too.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, she really is.
Daniel Newman: Did you screenshot that, dude? When you were going through all the, I mean, was that a… Or is that all from memory? Because I pride myself on having a great memory and you got the sources.
Patrick Moorhead: Oh, it’s totally, I’m checking out my photos. So Dan, I’m kind of like Einstein, why remember things you can just write down and in this day and age things you can take pictures of?
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
