OpenText™ CEO and CTO Mark Barrenechea opened this year’s (digital) OpenText Enterprise World Europe event with a promise to all customers. “We are here for you, we are in this together, for the long term. We are here to help.”
Mark’s message was echoed throughout his keynote as he outlined what it means to build and maintain a resilient organization in the face of an ever-challenging and rapidly changing world.
Resilient organizations must adapt quickly and confidently to accelerating change, they must ensure the stability of operations, and seize on emerging opportunities. To do this they need technologies and processes that scale quickly and reliably, they must empower and secure a remote workforce, and provide supply chain flexibility and dynamic omnichannel communications.
What are the characteristics of a resilient organization today?
Speed, scale and reliability
Having a secure and centralized information platform is critical to ensuring business processes are efficient, effective and resilient. Mark outlined how the cloud is fundamental to these new ways of working and enabling organizations to be resilient in the face of disruption and change. It is about having access to cloud-native platforms for rapid innovation and application-to-application connectivity to rapidly build new processes, new applications and new automated workflows. As Mark said, “We see an information management agenda really focused on building resilient organizations.”
Empowered and secure
End-point data protection and threat protection are particularly important for the resilient organization today, something which OpenText has addressed through the recent Carbonite and Webroot acquisition. These technologies provide cyber resilience out at the edge, which is going to be increasingly important in a world of cloud-native applications and billions of connected devices. “This was a strategic acquisition for us,” said Mark. “We have added a world-class offering to OpenText to be able to secure and protect your endpoints.” The Carbonite and Webroot acquisition also opens up information management beyond the enterprise to include small and medium-sized businesses, professionals and consumers. “We think our solution for information management is relevant across all-sized customers,” said Mark.
Flexible and dynamic
Digitalization of the supply chain will be a key building block for the resilient organization in the next couple of years in the face of disruption and challenges to traditional ways of working. As Mark pointed out, the current global situation is “battle testing” global supply chains like never before. And it’s about the speed and flexibility with which supply chains can react and adapt to the changes being demanded. We are seeing how resilient current supply chains are, and learning at global speed what we can all do in the future to make supply chains event more robust, more flexible and more dynamic.
Lou Blatt, OpenText SVP Product Marketing and Acting CMO, warned of the potential consequences for organizations that fail to adapt and build resilience. “In the last 15 years, 52% of the Fortune 500 have disappeared,” he said. “By 2027, it is predicted that three-quarters of today’s S&P will be replaced.”
Information is where opportunity lies, said Lou. “Those who harness information will build organizational resilience, resulting in productivity and growth.”
Closing his keynote, Mark outlined OpenText’s key priorities. “We are going to stay focused on being the market leader delivering information management to all size customers. This is in our DNA. We are going to continue to innovate,” he said. “The cloud and the edge, these are both priorities for us. Carbonite gets us into the edge and cyber resilience and SMB, home and prosumer. No edge, no cloud. No cloud, no edge. And as innovation in computing moves back to the edge it’s a very fortuitous time to be in that end-point market.”
And Mark wrapped up with a simple message. “We think the message and priority right now is the resilient organization,” he said. “We are going to continue to be your trusted experts in information management. And we’re here to be your partner in this time of crisis.”
You can watch the keynotes on-demand here.
