Announcing OpenText Business Network Cloud CE 21.4

For many years we have been investing in capabilities that can be used by almost any type of company, including enhancements to our visibility and IoT solutions, but with OpenText™ Cloud Editions (CE) 21.4 for OpenText™ Business Network we are introducing capabilities that allow companies of any size to integrate their supply chain operations.

With CE 21.4, our main focus will be the introduction of a much broader suite of self-service tools that can be leveraged by companies of any size.  Whether you are a tier 4 supplier, a large global OEM in the automotive industry, or anything in between CE 21.4 provides enhanced self-service tools to establish a single digital foundation across both the internal and external business environment. With this suite of tools built on top of OpenText^™ Trading Grid^™, any business can maximize its network effect by joining the world’s largest business network dedicated to helping companies integrate their digital business ecosystem. We recently undertook a study with IDG to obtain the latest insights into what companies thought about outsourcing their business integration to a trusted partner. We decided to survey both large and small businesses so that we could see whether there were any major differences in responses.

For small companies, 77% said they would choose an integration vendor based on whether they offered self-service tools to allow companies to undertake their own integration and day to day management of a trading partner community. The survey also found that 58% of respondents had a lack of bandwidth to implement new B2B integration capabilities due to competing projects.  Finally, 77% of respondents had seen an acceleration in B2B integration requests from customers over the past 12 months.

CE 21.4 introduces a tiered approach to business integration allowing any size of company to seamlessly integrate with trading partners around the world through the OpenText™ Business Network Cloud.  With pre-packaged, self-service capabilities, this expanded offering enables companies to manage their own trading partner communities, while also providing best-in-class integration, analytics, and compliance services in an easy-to-use format.  Leveraging a unified integration platform, any company can use the same capabilities normally reserved for much larger businesses to react to supply chain disruption or to take advantage of new business opportunities.

In addition to providing SMB focused self-service tools, CE 21.4 will provide a suite of pre-built trading partner kits that includes key business documents used by many of the world’s leading companies, thus accelerating ‘time to live’. Finally, new API adaptors will be introduced in this and subsequent releases to cover many of the popular ERP packages used by smaller companies, including Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Oracle Netsuite.

In addition to introducing a tiered approach to business integration, CE 21.4 will also be introducing:

Expanded compliance and shipment visibility

The capabilities in OpenText™ Active Applications have been expanded to provide greater support for invoice compliance and improved shipment visibility.  In addition, new APIs allow for greater integration with external vendors and other data sources.

Improved User Experience

The user experience for the OpenText IoT Platform has been redesigned to make it easier to gather insights and manage IoT devices in business and developer environments.  The redesigned interface provides enhanced self-service developer capabilities, including accelerated device onboarding allowing for the ability to create more comprehensive digital twin environments.

New Solutions for Manufacturers

Many manufacturers strive to expand their global operations and with that comes complexity in ensuring they can work digitally with trading partners irrespective of where they may be based around the world. Many of the key manufacturing hubs around the world, for example, China, Brazil and Europe have unique government mandates for dealing with electronic invoicing. The new Compliant e-Invoicing for Manufacturers solution helps to automate the invoicing process for global manufacturers, enabling them to accelerate cash flow, reduce costs, speed supplier payments, and meet government mandates across 48 countries.

Our quarterly release schedule for Business Network continues to evolve and helps to ensure that our customers continue to leverage a best-in-class integration environment, irrespective of what happens in the global economy.  If you would like to learn more about the new Business Network capabilities in CE 21.4 then please register for OpenText World 2021  where you will be able to learn more about these new capabilities and see our self-service tools in action.

For more information on our solutions, please visit businessnetwork.opentext.com.