OpenText was a preferred partner at last week’s Google Cloud Next ’21, where we showcased new cloud technologies that empower customers with the ability to utilize customer data for personalization at scale.
What is the key to success for your sales and marketing campaigns? It’s simply knowing your customer and knowing them well. Although sales and marketing leaders have an abundance of digital tools at their disposal and access to many systems containing customer data, they often miss the mark in delivering the right content to customers at the right time.
Organizations often use a siloed approach to interact with their customers from the marketing front-end of the funnel to help customers use their products and services. Many have a myriad of apps to build a different experience tied to various data sources from SAP, to CRM, to call centers. But analyzing customer data across numerous systems and multiple touchpoints is difficult. Anticipating your customers’ interests and needs and then dynamically tailoring your messaging based on relevance is even more difficult.
That’s why OpenText and Google engaged in significant co-innovation, developing a solution to personalize the content at scale with customer data to deliver a better customer experience for better outcomes. OpenText and Google provides a common data framework bringing together campaigns and omnichannel delivery techniques. Now organizations can access the same customer data view across multiple touchpoints for a deeper understanding of their customer. Personalizing content based on customer behavior improves the customer experience and ensures every interaction is meaningful.
OpenText and Google partnered to develop OpenText™ Experience CDP, a customer data platform to eliminate the siloed approach many companies use today. The new solution centralizes customer data collection from every touchpoint. A common customer data engine unifies customer profiles from separate sources and imports Google audiences. Now, organizations can easily deliver relevant and enriched customer experiences across the customer journey.
Experience Platform + Google Marketing Platform
Integrating the OpenText™ Experience Platform with the Google Marketing Platform provides a common platform to interact with customers with relevant information throughout the customer journey. The integration enables an intelligent view of the customer by capturing analytics and audience data from the industry-leading Google Marketing Platform.
The OpenText and Google co-innovation enables data analysis across a variety of sources and systems, including website, mobile and CRM in real-time to provide a complete and intelligent view of the customer to empower deeply personalized campaigns and communications.
Analyze your data and then act
The OpenText Experience CDP breaks down data silos and brings customer data into a single customer data platform. Collecting customer profile data regardless of location and importing Google audiences enables a holistic view across the customer journey to gather insights.
Analyze the data with two complementary approaches. The first is with people closest to your customer — customer engagement, sales, and marketing teams. The second is with embedded Google Cloud machine learning and artificial intelligence. These tools find patterns and behaviors to optimize the customer journey.
Act using insights gathered from customer behavior to create a highly scalable customer 360-degree view. Easily customize Google Marketing and paid ad campaigns with rules and permissions. The campaigns will track your audience behaviors, and while interacting, personalized experiences are delivered to them dynamically.
Better customer experiences for the best outcomes
With the latest innovation from OpenText and Google, marketing teams are empowered to optimize every interaction in the customer journey. A common view and data consistency are essential to delivering exceptional customer experiences to acquire and retain customers for life.
Experience CDP takes data-driven marketing to the next level leveraging a common data engine for unified real-time personalization on any channel, device, or mode of interaction, from unknown first-time site visitors to known and authenticated customers. It’s now easier for marketing teams to create personalized and cohesive customer journeys that will help contribute to higher conversion rates, happy customers, and customer loyalty.
Set yourself apart with better customer experiences and get started with the Experience CDP on Google Cloud Marketplace with solution deployment, integration and optimization support from OpenText.
Gartner has just published its annual assessments of the content services sector:
2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms
2021 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Content Services Platforms
The two reports are essential reading and provide excellent insight into the evolving landscape—including new trends, use cases and emerging technologies, as well as offering expert analysis of how the leading vendors are adapting and progressing to meet these new needs.
“Gartner defines content services platforms (CSPs) as the foundational component in an organization for the management and use of content. CSPs provide a way for employees to retrieve and work with content in a modern, seamless way across devices and organizational boundaries. As such, they are a core component of any organization’s digital workplace strategy.”
OpenText feels it is essential for organizations to be able to surface the right information at the right time to employees and customers when they need it, wherever they are, and with proper context. Comprehensive integration with daily line-of-business applications like Microsoft®, SAP®, and Salesforce is critical, simplifying accessibility to content, increasing employee productivity and collaboration, and ensuring governance. With the increase of remote and hybrid work environments, the use of Microsoft Teams has dramatically increased, requiring a modern content services integration to enhance governance and security. Integration creates dependable connections that enable the automated flow of information to the people and processes that need it in today’s digital workplace.
In the report, Gartner states, “Organizations are increasingly looking to consolidate their content services portfolio using cloud-based services that are simple to deploy, configure and operate. Vendors are responding with increasing SaaS capabilities.”
At OpenText we believe in embracing vision and innovation, providing global companies with accessible, scalable and intuitive cloud-based solutions and services. Our multitenant SaaS content services platform, OpenText™ Core Content, powers modern work by seamlessly connecting business content to operational processes with deep integrations with key applications such as SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud, with more applications planned. Organizations rapidly deploy and configure with low IT involvement required.
The OpenText™ Content Cloud™ connects information from across the enterprise with the people and systems that need it. Content Cloud platforms and applications support diverse business and industry needs through purpose-built applications, pre-configured business scenarios, extensive integration capabilities, full lifecycle management, and intelligent automation. Content Cloud encompasses OpenText Extended ECM, Documentum, Intelligent Capture, InfoArchive, the OpenText Core suite of multi-tenant SaaS offerings, and more. Content Cloud is architected as cloud native, and available across a variety of cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure, OpenText).
This approach to content services has resulted in OpenText having the #1 ECM market share. And we feel it’s the reason Gartner has, once again, selected us as a Leader in the 2021 Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms—the 17th consecutive year we’ve been recognized.
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms, Michael Woodbridge, Marko Sillanpaa, Lane Severson, Tim Nelms, 18 October 2021
Gartner and Magic Quadrant are registered trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
The first generation of digital asset management (DAM) software was a lifesaver, a huge improvement over shared drives and file sharing platforms. Yes, these older methods provided shared access to assets – but they lacked the metadata, faceted search, fast previews and other DAM features that are crucial to working more efficiently in the digital marketing era. Imports to and exports from the DAM system were largely manual processes, as was the addition of metadata.
As great as these early DAM solutions were, there was room for improvement. Your DAM system was a standalone place to get assets, not an interconnected tool. Integrations were often limited to tying in the corporate directory for user authentication.
The people who use DAM 1.0 probably work with it every day. Maybe they’re even folks whose job is focused on managing assets, rather than actually using them. But to others within the company who need to make a request to a DAM team member to obtain an asset, such systems can seem mysterious and overwhelming.
DAM 2.0: A syndicated martech service
DAM 2.0 takes the reliable, expandable, organizable repository of assets that was DAM 1.0, and starts to integrate it into other solutions. Second-generation DAM solutions not only store and organize assets, but hand them off to or receive them from workflows elsewhere in the company. Common integrations include web content management (WCM), product information management (PIM), content delivery networks and graphic design tools. Portals under DAM control allow occasional users to access portions of the asset library. This increases productivity by enabling colleagues, partners or even customers to find assets themselves rather than having to make manual requests.
The second generation of DAM is noticeably less siloed than the first. But it’s still not integrated at the level that’s demanded by organizations pushing the envelope today.
DAM 3.0: Delivering for omnichannel
DAM 3.0 is the new frontier of DAM development, empowering the forefront of modern experience building. What DAM 3.0 truly means is still taking shape in real time, but key aspects include:
Two-way communication for greater insight
With third-generation DAM, information not only flows out – more of it also flows in. That means your DAM software can track usage and pull in metrics for success and failure across teams. Content can be stored that reaches beyond assets into components: sections of websites and other mixed-media pieces. These include not just the atomized, granular assets that have been popular in DAM 2.0, but also larger mix-and-match puzzle pieces.
Redefining ‘assets’
Traditionally, assets were primarily image files and content videos. But the field is now expanding to include 360 spin sets, audio recordings, security footage, drone feeds, 3D models and digital twins. It’s likely to grow to include even more formats – not just emerging content types, but also assets traditionally stored outside of DAM systems, such as text or website theming files.
Everywhere your customers are
DAM 3.0 is being pushed to empower teams across channels through even greater integrations with WCM, CCM, CRM, social media management platforms and more.
In spreading out to cover more of the enterprise, DAM 3.0 brings its powerful asset management abilities to more teams. And it often operates behind the scenes in ways that employees won’t even notice, but that can deliver serious workflow benefits. This helps enable a more unified brand message, and more seamless experiences across channels for customers.
In other words, DAM 3.0 is starting to show strong influences from part of the current movement away from disparate martech solutions and toward integrated digital experience platforms (DXPs).
OpenText Digital Asset Management – striving for the future
Designed for extreme flexibility, OpenText™ Digital Asset Management can be a single DAM solution for the entire enterprise. Assets are all kept in one (incredibly scalable) place and are available across your entire organization via headless integrations or customized, team-specific portals. Through filters and security, access to specific assets can be controlled to keep things safe. This also helps to keep staff from being drowned in content that isn’t relevant to them.
Purpose-built portals and integrations to the tools they already use make this DAM solution easily accessible to staff without requiring extensive training. It’s simply there when they need it – and not in the way when they don’t.
Thanks to this functionality, OpenText DAM can be a powerful asset to teams not only in marketing, but also in production, design, sales and even facilities (maintenance and security). It’s truly a DAM solution for everyone.
As part of the larger OpenText Experience Platform, OpenText DAM is also becoming more and more integrated with WCM, CCM and other powerful martech solutions. These are key to delivering the omnichannel experience that today’s customers and employees demand.
Watch this webinar to learn how global software giant SAP has implemented OpenText’s DAM technology to deliver consistent collateral to over 100,000 colleagues.
Welcome to the October 2021 edition of OpenText’s E-Invoicing Regulation update.
In this edition, we are pleased to provide a timely reminder about imminent changes in Italy, as well as news about the upcoming B2B mandates in France, Poland, Spain, India, and Saudi Arabia. The USA rarely features in our compliance bulletins due to the lack of VAT but e-Invoicing is increasingly a hot topic so we are delighted to share some developments here as well.
Compliance news updates
Europe
France: e-Invoicing mandate pushed back 18 months, while the first release of technical specifications is made available
On September 16, the French Council of Ministers published a revision to the scheduled mandate for their national e-Invoicing and e-Reporting program.
Further clarification has been made regarding which companies are in scope of the regulations. For e-Invoicing, any business that is established, domiciled, or “ordinarily resident” in France must comply. The e-Reporting obligations also apply to non-resident/non-established companies who are with VAT registered in France.
As had already been established, companies in scope retain either the option of connecting directly to the public e-Invoicing portal (PPF / FR: portail public de facturation), or as an alternative may use a private e-Invoicing platform or operator who connects to PPF on their behalf.
The new calendar pushes back the dates by 18 months for large enterprises, and 12 months for small and medium companies, giving both the DGFiP (Directorate General of Public Finances) and also taxpayers, more time to prepare.
The revised schedule is as follows:
1st July 2024 – At this point all companies in scope must be able to accept e-Invoices from their suppliers. On the same date the largest enterprises (~300) must issue e-Invoices instead of paper.
1st January 2025 – the obligation to issue e-Invoices will then apply to ~8,000 mid-sized companies (Entreprises de taille intermédiaire”).
1st January 2026 – all of the remaining medium and small companies (~4 million) must also issue e-Invoices.
On September 30th the first technical specifications have been made available allowing taxpayers and e-Invoicing vendors to begin the technical design process.
These specifications are not “full and final” and later clarification will be provided around specific invoicing use cases as well as around e-reporting. Many elements still need to be established by decrees and updates to the official bulletin (BOFIP).
The technical specifications cover the following areas:
Roles and obligations of parties operating in the new scheme
The use cases and types of invoices in scope and syntax of formats – namely XML CII, XML UBL and Factur-X
Transmission methods and interoperability considerations
Addressing of messages and the central directory
Invoice lifecycle, statuses and controls – with an obligation for trading parties to document and report the full end to end lifecycle of each invoice including time of creation/issuance, when it was made available, received, and any rejection etc.
Payment statuses must be reported by suppliers also through either the public portal (PPF) or their e-Invoicing platform / operator.
Italy: Changes for cross-border invoices as of January 2022
Italian companies with cross-border operations who transact invoices internationally, and who today use the periodic “Esterometro” report to share their cross-border sales and purchase invoices with the government, please take note.
The Esterometro report will be abolished as of January 1st 2022. From this date, all cross-border invoices will need to be reported instead using the FatturaPA XML format and via transmission to the SdI portal. This is the same flow as for domestic e-Invoices today.
Since foreign entities are not able to register on the SdI platform and receive FatturaPA XML invoices via that channel, companies trading cross-border electronically will have likely been using other e-Invoicing and compliance mechanisms such as EDI or signed PDF to send and receive these invoices. These flows can and should continue, but from January you will need to ensure you have an additional flow created in parallel to support this change.
For outbound invoices, you will require a new flow to issue a copy of each cross-border invoice in FatturaPA XML format, and transmit this to the SdI platform. Again, remember this is in parallel to the existing flow transmitting the invoice directly to your foreign buyer, not a replacement thereof.
For inbound invoices, companies will need to set up a new flow issuing a “self-invoice” in FatturaPA XML format and this must be transmitted to the SdI platform. Self-invoices must certify the application of the reverse charge mechanism.
For existing customers using Active Invoices with Compliance in Italy, if you have not already planned to set up these flows, please reach out to your delivery manager who can assist.
Poland: National e-Invoicing system postponed
In our last newsletter of June 2021, we discussed the draft bill which defined the proposed National e-Invoicing System (PL: Krajowy System e-Faktur – referred to as KSeF for short).
The bill set out an expected timeline for availability on a purely voluntary basis in the first instance. The original timeline had suggested the system would be available this month – October 2021 – but this milestone has now been postponed until 1st of January 2022.
There will be a gradual transition to the use of the new system, but it remains to be seen how this will function in practice, since the new system will remain optional until 2023 at least.
While there are many potential benefits to taxpayers from the use of the new system – such as a single form/format for all invoices, visibility for the supplier of receipt by the buyer, secure storage within KSeF itself, leading to a reduced audit burden and faster VAT refunds – many of these benefits will not be realized until all of an organization’s invoices are fully electronic.
Full technical specifications remain to be published but we continue to monitor the changing situation closely and will provide further updates in subsequent newsletters.
Spain: Draft law extending the current B2G mandate to specific B2B transactions open for public consultation
As part of their recovery and resilience plan – a response to the global pandemic funded with aid from the European Union – the Spanish Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation has recently announced a draft Law designed to promote the creation and growth of companies in Spain.
You can find the draft law here in Spanish language.
This proposal pushes digitization as a means of improving commercial operations and encouraging entrepreneurship in Spain. As an incentive, the government launched a “Digitalization plan” program which will provide financial aid to companies in their business digitization programs. This focuses heavily on the SME sector and seeks to modernize their business processes such that they become more resilient to potential crises. Areas of focus include cloud services and e-commerce.
More information on this plan can be found here, also in Spanish.
One key target of the law is to extend the existing B2G / public procurement obligation (now active since 2015) to include the issuance and exchange of B2B electronic invoices as well.
At a high level, the new electronic invoicing system will require companies and freelancers/contractors to exchange invoices electronically and provide their buyers with the ability to electronically access, read, copy, download, and print the electronic invoice, and consult them for at least 4 years (the current invoice retention period in Spain). Sanctions will be imposed on companies that fail to meet the new obligations.
As we have seen in other regions, implementation will be phased to allow for businesses to transition smoothly, with larger companies (turnover above €8 million per annum) provided a year’s grace period, and all smaller companies below the threshold having three years to transition.
Full legal and technical detail is still to follow, and we will keep you updated in forthcoming newsletters.
The Americas
USA: eInvoice Exchange Market Pilot – Federal Reserve and Business Payments Coalition
As one of the few remaining non-VAT regimes globally, e-Invoicing has been widely used in the United States for many years without any complications around compliance. However, the piecemeal approach and lack of standardization have still hampered adoption and limited the potential benefits that might be achieved.
The Federal Reserve FedPayments Improvement organization has teamed with the Business Payments Coalition – a voluntary group of organizations working to promote adoption of electronic B2B invoices, remittance, and payments, to build a working group exploring the feasibility of developing and implementing a standard ubiquitous B2B electronic invoice processing platform similar to the clearance platforms widely used in other countries.
More information about this initiative can be found here and organizations interested can still get involved using this form to register their interest.
Asia-Pacific and Rest of World
India: B2G and self-billing no longer in scope for e-Invoicing
In June 2021 the Indian government announced that their mandate for e-Invoicing will explicitly exclude/exempt B2G transactions. This has no effect on businesses trading with private companies rather than government agencies. Self-billed invoices under the reverse charge mechanism are also out of scope.
Those categories of taxpayer whose core business is exempt from VAT are still required to comply with the new obligations for all other supplies where a regular tax invoice must be issued.
Saudi Arabia: “Fatoorah” e-Invoicing project launch
In August 2021, the Zakat, Tax and Customs Authority (ZATCA) formally inaugurated their electronic invoicing project (Fatoorah), highlighting the importance to the national economy of the proposed e-invoicing system, including the potential impact on the “shadow economy” which costs the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) over SR400 billion ($100 billion) each year. By digitizing the exchange of invoices, it is expected that fraudulent transactions and commercial concealment activities will be significantly reduced.
Phase 1 is set to go live in December 2021, and delays are not currently anticipated. Phase 1 does not mandate a specific electronic format BUT requires businesses to generate e-Invoices and associated documents in a structured electronic form, so PDF and word processing documents like MS Word or other formats are not acceptable as e-Invoices. PDF/A-3 format invoices which include embedded XML may be accepted. As well as being in a structured data format invoices must contain all of the mandatory data, including a consistent sequential numbering scheme (multiple invoice sequences are not permitted). B2C e-Invoices are required to include a QR code. Invoices and audit trails must be unmodifiable with controlled access.
Phase 2 was moved back from June 2022 to 1st January 2023. In Phase 2, as well as delivering e-Invoices to their buyers, suppliers must also transmit a copy of e-Invoices to the ZATCA in a mandated UBL XML format. B2B e-Invoices must be transmitted in near-real-time as in other clearance regimes. B2C e-Invoices must be reported within 24 hours of issuance. In phase 2, invoices must include a Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) in addition to the sequential invoice number. E-Invoices must include a cryptographic stamp and hash, as well as a QR code.
ZATCA has now published an indicative list of e-invoicing solution providers who have met the qualification requirements – but they have been keen to highlight that taxpayers may choose any e-invoicing solution provider as long as it is compliant with the e-invoicing requirements.
Disclaimer: This newsletter is intended to reflect the direction the industry is moving and does not a reflection a commitment for the OpenText Active Invoices with Compliance (AIC) product development roadmap to meet any particular stated regulations.
LEGAL Disclaimer: The information contained in this newsletter is for general guidance on matters of interest only. The authors are not herein rendering legal, accounting, tax or other professional advice and the content should not be used as a substitute for consultation with professional accounting, tax, legal or other competent advisers. While we make every attempt to ensure the accuracy of the information contained within is from reliable sources, OpenText is not responsible for any errors or omissions, or for any results obtained from the use of this information. All information is provided “as is” with no guarantee of completeness, accuracy, timeliness, or of the results obtained from the use of this information, and without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including, but not limited to warranties of performance and fitness for purpose. In no event will OpenText or its agents or employees be liable to you or anyone else for any decision made or action taken in reliance on the information in this Site or for any consequential, special or similar damages.
When Vertica was acquired by Hewlett Packard, we were told that we needed to change our messaging about commodity hardware. HP didn’t feel comfortable with the phrase, because it implied that underlying infrastructure was not a key differentiator.
But as a true software company who designed every line of code to be optimized for infrastructure efficiency, Vertica was determined to ensure that, no matter what choice our customers made for servers and storage, Vertica would deliver the best possible performance. We had no incentive to push for more compute capacity because we didn’t make any money on the underlying infrastructure. And today, now that we’re a software company again, that’s more important than ever.
Just Add Compute – aka, If All You Have is a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail
As consumption-based pricing becomes the norm, knowing and controlling what you’re consuming matters a lot. Many managed service providers make it “easy” by bundling hardware and software into a single offering, especially in the public clouds. But for whom is that actually easy? Well, to be honest, bundling hardware and software is much easier for the SaaS company’s developers, because when faced with customer performance expectations for complex queries, different workloads, and varying concurrency demands, the easiest way to solve performance problems is to apply more compute.
It’s also easy (and attractive) for the SaaS provider’s finance team because every hour of high-end compute means more profit. This is especially critical when the underlying infrastructure in the black box bundle is a high percentage of Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) because it is not owned by the managed service provider.
But You Lose Pricing Transparency and Control
Elasticity – especially the concept of auto scaling – is a very real value for customers using SaaS offerings, but not if it’s used instead of core optimization within the software itself. If auto scaling doesn’t allow you to specify the instance types and numbers that you’re willing (and able) to pay for, then you might indeed get the best possible performance due to the highest possible compute. But you’ll also get the highest possible invoice at the end of the month.
To be clear, ensuring the highest possible performance for predictive and proactive analytics is critical to meeting business needs, but most companies also need to accurately forecast their monthly and quarterly spend. The key to successfully balancing these conflicting demands is pricing transparency and control.
Take Back Your Performance, Flexibility, and Control with Vertica Accelerator
Vertica Accelerator is continuing proof of our commitment to delivering a unified analytics platform with the performance, flexibility, and control that our customers expect. Vertica Accelerator is a software-only SaaS offering that delivers all the query performance, concurrency, and workload isolation that our customers need while allowing them to have full and direct control of their AWS infrastructure costs: They can leverage their reserved instance types and committed contract spend. Vertica Accelerator offers both auto scaling and auto scheduling, but both provide the transparency and control of which instance types will be added to the cluster and how many.
Vertica developers love the challenge of crafting and testing every line of code to ensure that Vertica delivers the most optimized, efficient, and performant analytics platform on the market. They believe in the ongoing mission of a software-only strategy that has built powerful trust with our customers.
Would our finance department like to make money on underlying hardware? Maybe, but we’re not giving them that choice.
October is Cyber Awareness Month. To mark this I’m writing about a subject that is close to my heart, a subject I believe is our best chance of keeping our adversaries and bad-actors at bay.
Specifically, the proactive detection of cybersecurity incidents within the Federal Government infrastructure. And using technologies to drive Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) towards active cyber hunting, incident response, and remediation.
Ours is a world that is constantly under attack.
In 2020, the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) worked to accelerate the removal of more than 7,000 fraudulent domains and blocked more than 6,829 malicious domains from attacking Federal networks.
Chief Information Security Officers (CISO) in Government agencies understand the importance of incident response in the context of an overall enterprise risk management strategy. Common strategies to perform a so-called “shift right” transition in emphasis on the prevent-detect-respond scale underscore how critically essential it has become for CISO-led teams to have effective tools, processes, and procedures to support their incident response program.
This new emphasis builds on a mature base. Incident response has been an element of security programs since their inception, and most CISO’s understand how to handle an ongoing case or exploit incident. What might not have been as clear at the outset, but has now become critical, is the role that EDR capabilities play in assuring that incidents are detected, analyzed forensically, and responded to rapidly.
Keep a 360-degree view
Security teams need an EDR tool with 360-degree endpoint visibility to validate, analyze, scope and respond to incidents quickly and completely. Best-of-breed Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions empower organizations to tackle the most advanced forms of attack at the endpoint, whether from external actors or internal threats.
The increase in the frequency of attacks has accelerated the need for EDR solutions to provide artifact-level detail and full visibility. OpenText EnCase Endpoint Security produces more artifact-level detail on average when compared to many other similar technologies. Having 360° visibility into the attack reduces the risk of attackers going undetected.
Endpoint telemetry helps provide a more complete picture of an attack. Without it, security teams may lack awareness of when and how they are being compromised. Leading EDR solutions use telemetry detection to accelerate incident response by giving security teams the power to detect and act swiftly.
EnCase Endpoint Security is designed with automation and operational efficiencies that help incident responders find and triage security incidents faster allowing organizations to get back to a trusted state faster, reducing the risk of potential loss or damage.
Real-time detection of endpoint security threats
Security teams need to redefine their workflow from passive ‘alerting’ mode to proactive ‘threat hunting’, actively scanning for anomalies indicative of a security breach. It creates a baseline of endpoint activity used to detect anomalous behavior or recreate how a data breach occurred using historical intelligence.
However, security teams don’t always have the capacity to manually detect, respond and defend against the latest cyber threats in the time required. There can also be delays when EDR providers rely on collecting telemetry into a central location for interrogation as opposed to having an active agent on the Endpoint. Performing detections directly on the endpoint reduces the time it takes to identify a threat.
In the MITRE Engenuity’s ATT&CK R3 Evaluations, OpenText EnCase Endpoint Security recorded more than 99% of the detections in real-time. When a breach occurs and time is of the essence, EDR software must detect threats in real-time and present notifications in an easy-to-read interface for the fastest response.
Faster response to malicious activity
EDR tools accelerate response time, significantly reducing the risk of data loss and damage to systems. EnCase Endpoint Security, for instance, reduces triage time by up to 90%, helping incident response (IR) teams validate and assess the impact of malicious activity – even polymorphic or memory-resident malware. Organizations can realize even greater efficiencies by integrating EnCase Endpoint Security with third-party alerting technologies via RESTful APIs.
However, much is made of speed and how quickly security tools can run queries on certain endpoints. While speed is important, the depth of endpoint visibility enabled by your EDR solution is far more critical. An EDR solution should be able to see beyond the standard APIs and system logs of the OS and, ideally, reach inside email, the cloud, and on-premises repositories.
Most importantly, EDR should not trample over the forensic residue left on the endpoint by every user and application interaction, including those hidden in file systems and memory that OS vendors never intended you to view, instead they must preserve the forensic artifacts for root cause analysis.
For more information on OpenText EnCase Endpoint Security, click here.
Today’s networked world makes every system an easy target for cyberattacks. Automated tools make it easier for attackers to execute successful attacks and a new threat emerges almost every second. In this environment, it’s hard for cybersecurity to keep up. According to Cybersecurity Ventures, cybercrime is expected to cause $6 trillion (US) worth of damages globally in 2021. The damage could reach $10.5 trillion annually by 2025.
In today’s cyber threat environment, this means persistently tracing and correlating millions of external and internal data points across your organization’s users and infrastructure. You clearly can’t do this with people alone; you need machine learning which can recognize patterns and predict threats in massive data sets, all at machine speed. In this blog I’ll discuss why machine learning (ML) is so crucial, as well as share an example illustrating the development of an ML algorithm for identifying phishing websites.
Why machine learning
Using machine learning models, cybersecurity teams can rapidly detect threats and isolate them for in-depth investigation. Machine learning can look at groups of network requests or traffic with similar characteristics and can identify anomalies. ML algorithms continuously analyze data to find patterns that help detect malware in traffic. It predicts malicious activity and protects data by detecting suspicious user behavior.
The right ML model can detect never-before-seen malware that is attempting to run on endpoints. It can spot new malignant files and events based on the attributes and behaviors of known malware. ML techniques include dimensionality reduction (converting many dimensions into fewer ones), clustering (identifying groups of items with similar characteristics), and statistical sampling. They can also help us use statistical information to develop baselines that can provide useful information about normal or abnormal behavior. Doing this, we can use data to identify variations from the normal.
Phishing URL detection using machine learning
Phishing is a common type of cyber-attack where a cybercriminal sends a fraudulent message designed to deceive an individual into revealing sensitive information to the attacker or to install malicious software on the target’s infrastructure, such as ransomware.
Machine learning algorithms are one of the most powerful and successful techniques in detecting phishing websites. Phishing attacks have some common characteristics which can be identified by machine learning methods.
Using a data set made up of important characteristics or attributes of URLs, I was able to predict phishing websites by implementing a machine learning model. For more information on the dataset, visit UCI Machine Learning Repository. Below is the snippet of python code. I imported this dataset in the OpenText Magellan Notebook. OpenText Magellan delivers a ready-to-use AI-powered analytics platform, which includes machine learning, data discovery, text analytics and sophisticated visualization and dashboarding. Learn more about Magellan.
Data Exploration
The dataset has 30 features. Here I explored some of the features. The URL has a detailed description of each feature and the values derived, by applying the condition such as length, PageRank, google index, age etc. applied on the attributes of the target URL.
Below is the correlation heatmap, each square showing the correlation between the variables on each axis.
RandomForestClassifier algorithm has been fitted on the training dataset and applied on the test dataset. This model has around 97 percent accuracy.
The classification report shown below is used to measure the quality of predictions from the algorithm. It displays the model’s precision, recall and F1 score. The metrics are calculated by using true and false positives and true and false negatives. There are four ways to check if the predictions are right or wrong:
TN / True Negative: when a case was negative and predicted negative
TP / True Positive: when a case was positive and predicted positive
FN / False Negative: when a case was positive but predicted negative
FP / False Positive: when a case was negative but predicted positive
Precision – Accuracy of positive predictions.
Precision = TP/(TP + FP)
Recall: Fraction of positives that were correctly identified.
Recall = TP/(TP+FN)
The F1 score is a weighted harmonic mean of precision and recall such that the best score is 1.0 and the worst is 0.0.
F1 Score = 2*(Recall * Precision) / (Recall + Precision)
The accuracy can be further improved by applying other algorithms or tuning the parameters; however, this blog is mainly focused on demonstrating one of the use cases leveraging ML in cybersecurity.
Data plays a vital role in the field of machine learning and the availability of quality data that support the environment will reduce false positives. However, as this example shows, machine learning as a complement to cybersecurity can be more proactive and efficient.
How much time does the average person spend on their phone? Not surprisingly, a lot. People are spending an average screen time of 5.4 hours on their mobile phones each day, for both pleasure and work.
For busy professionals like lawyers, who tend to work long hours, it’s no different. Mobile phones and devices – especially in an increasingly remote workplace – have simply become tools to extend the billable hour day and give lawyers the ability to work anytime from anywhere. On average, lawyers spend 1.1 hours every day on their phones conducting billable work – but not all that time is being captured. For equity partners in particular, billable hours and profit per partner have a direct impact on how much they are paid (and a measure of the firm’s financial health). So, it is very important that all time is properly captured and billed.
A new survey suggests that many law firms are losing millions in revenue in billable work, and non-productive time, which could in fact be captured if they were to just abandon some routine tasks in favor of automation. According to the survey, more than 40% of the fee-earners spent 35% or more of their time on non-billable duties (such as logging billable time), while 70% spent at least one-fifth of their time on work that they could simply never charge to a client.
The major culprits? Timekeeping itself and email management – figuring out which work relates to billable work, which doesn’t and the continued reliance on manual processes.
Case in point: when it comes to time spent communicating with clients on mobile phones (1.1 hours per day), lawyers then spend even more time trying to reconstruct the fragments of what they did for what client, when and for how long (trying to recreate time spent in six-minute increments). It’s estimated that only 20% of this activity is captured and billed. Think of the loss to firm revenue – a law firm with 100 lawyers and a blended billable rate of $300 per hour loses $8.6 million in uncaptured revenue per month.
Systemic reliance on inefficient processes not only reduces productivity (and can make associates work even longer hours than they already do and encourage unnecessary added toil). Manual processes literally take money out of the firm’s pockets. As a result, doing billable work, not being able to capture it fully on mobile devices, then adding in a bunch of more unbillable work isn’t a good thing.
Automatically capture billable time when working on your mobile device
Increasing productivity within both billable and non-billable hours can bring greater efficiency to workflows, reduce lawyer burnout and improve profit per partner. Technology to automate billable processes on mobile phones and devices is now available to help lawyers convert time spent on administrative tasks to billable hours.
Thanks to OpenText™ Mobile Time Capture for eDOCS by ZERO, OpenText™ eDOCS customers can now experience a new level of productivity when working on mobile devices. While you handle your client’s work, ZERO tracks the time spent and uploads that time to your firm’s time and billing system.
And while you are already in the email, you can quickly and easily file that email alongside the rest of your related content into eDOCS with ZERO’s AI-powered predictive email filing for mobile phones and devices. No need to go back into your email on your desktop and file the email. It’s done the first time you look at the email, thus saving precious time so you can focus on other important matters.
Further, Mobile Time Capture for eDOCS by ZERO intuitively sorts emails by importance to ensure the most important emails are read first. offers “wrong recipient” detection in real time and provides against data loss prevention (DLP). Lawyers also have the ability to sort their inboxes by sender, filing status and importance.
Your data stays with you. Lawyers, who have treasure troves of high-value client IP, trade secrets, regulatory filings and other sensitive data in emails and attachments on their mobile phones, don’t need to worry about data security. ZERO’s embedded AI works on the device itself—no data is processed outside the devices, keeping client data secure from breach and latency.
Shore up more revenue and stress less
With Mobile Time Capture for eDOCS by ZERO, eDOCS customers can automatically bill time reading emails, reviewing attachments and documents, and responding to emails on their mobile devices. At the same time, you can save time by opening linked documents from eDOCS on mobile, predictive filing to eDOCS on mobile, and move to folder filing on mobile.
At the end of the day, you’ll have captured all of your time, increased profit and been more productive.
About eDOCS and OpenText Mobile Time Capture for eDOCS by ZERO
OpenText™ eDOCS is a light-footprint, cost-effective, highly flexible content management solution for legal organizations that have sensitive and high-value work product. It balances traditional requirements for security, privacy, and regulatory compliance with the need for information that is instantly accessible, anytime from anywhere, and easy to work with, share, and collaborate on.
For more information about eDOCS, visit the webpage or to learn more about OpenText Mobile Time Capture for eDOCS by ZERO, contact SolExPartners@opentext.com.
OpenText today announced that it has completed the closing of the previously announced acquisition of Zix Corporation (NASDAQ: ZIXI) (“Zix”), a leader in SaaS-based email encryption, threat protection, and compliance cloud solutions for Small and Medium-sized Businesses (SMBs).
Government agency migrates 15 million legal documents to OpenText and enables access for 400 users: OpenText today announced Legal Aid Western Australia (WA) selected OpenText™ Extended ECM platform to improve client service delivery through better information management and enhanced collaboration.
OpenText has been recognized as one of Canada’s Most Admired Corporate Cultures for 2021 by Waterstone Human Capital, Canada’s leading cultural talent management firm. This national program recognizes best-in-class organizations across Canada who foster high-performance corporate cultures creating a critical advantage in a hyper-competitive market to attract and retain talent.
Acquisition of Bricata technology enables OpenText to extend threat detection and response to the network: OpenText today announced the addition of next-generation Network Detection & Response (NDR) technology to the OpenText™ Security and Protection Cloud through the acquisition of Bricata.
Cloud Editions 21.4 provides companies the tools to connect, manage and secure information in today’s distributed, digital-first world: OpenText is launching its most expansive product release yet at OpenText World, which gets started this morning. Cloud Editions 21.4 (CE 21.4) introduces new integrations, applications and products to help customers adapt to modern work, navigate global supply chains, connect with customers, protect information and optimize developer experiences.
New release provides power of the world’s largest supplier network to customers of all sizes, connecting them to global trading partners through new self-service capabilities: OpenText is adding new capabilities to the market-leading OpenText™ Business Network Cloud as part of the Cloud Editions (CE) 21.4 launch at OpenText World.
Strengthens SMB Platform with Cloud-based Email Security & Compliance Solutions, Brings 5,600 Managed Service Partners, Extends Microsoft Relationship: OpenText today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Zix Corporation, Inc. (NASDAQ: ZIXI) (“Zix”), a leader in SaaS-based email encryption, threat protection and compliance cloud solutions for Small and Medium-sized Businesses (SMBs).October 2021
Mark J. Barrenechea, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson and Arianna Huffington headline the world’s largest Information Management conference: OpenText today announced the agenda and keynote speakers for the world’s largest information management conference. Registration is now open for OpenText World, which will be hosted virtually from Tuesday, November 16 – Thursday, November 18.
OpenText has been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms for the seventeenth successive year. In a work from anywhere world, the OpenText Content Cloud continues to deliver the comprehensive solution that enterprises need in a content services platform.
New detection and alert functions within Carbonite Server increase data protection against ransomware: OpenText announced new capabilities for Carbonite Server®, including hourly backups, early warning, and classifications upgrades that will enhance organizations’ ability to detect, protect, and respond to increased ransomware and other data threats.
New release features deeper business application integrations, strengthened collaboration and AI-driven information extraction: OpenText is releasing its most comprehensive update to the OpenText Content Cloud as part of the Cloud Editions (CE) 21.4 launch at OpenText World. Headlining the release is the expansion of OpenText Core Content, a complete SaaS content services platform that will now have deeper integrations with Salesforce and Microsoft 365.
OpenText recognized as a proven solution that manufacturers and retailers depend on: OpenText today announced it has been named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Multi-Enterprise Supply Chain Commerce Network (MESCCN) 2021 Vendor Assessment for the second time. The IDC MarketScape for MESCCN report evaluates multi-enterprise supply chain vendors success based on capability and business strategy.
Reduce risk and impact of ransomware and advanced security threats while enabling compliance: OpenText today announced two new MDR offerings designed to meet the unique requirements of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and managed service providers (MSPs). The addition of Webroot MDR powered by Blackpoint Cyber and OpenText MDR Service to the OpenText Security & Protection Cloud provides SMBs and MSPs of all sizes and industries a choice of MDR that fits their business needs, IT environments, and compliance requirements.
New product and cloud services empower greater personalization at scale: OpenText is a preferred partner at Google Cloud Next ’21, which opens today. OpenText will be showcasing new cloud technologies that provide mutual customers the ability to utilize customer data for personalization in highly scalable environments.
Financial technology company automates data exchange with OpenText Email2EDI for faster and more efficient processing, reduced risk, and improved customer experience: OpenText today announced that WeFi Technology Group LLC (WeFi), a financial technology company providing supply chain finance solutions to the IT industry, has selected OpenText Email2EDI to help process thousands of transactions on WeFi’s new advanced technology platform, ‘IZZI’.
