Over the next 12 months, OpenText customers can expect many new innovations designed to make work easier, faster and smarter than ever.
Powering many of these advances will be technologies like automation, analytics, the cloud, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). These technologies will help our customers to collaborate more easily, remove repetitive tasks, devote more energy to business and process innovation, and keep their organizations secure.
Artificial intelligence
OpenText’s approach to AI is to help people and smart machines work together – seamlessly. As AI advances, it will become an increasingly common and important part of our lives: IDC predicts more than half of all user interface interactions will use some kind of AI by 2024[i].
We’re embedding our AI analytics engine into all of our enterprise information management platforms, from Content Suite and Documentum to the OpenText Business Network. This allows us to analyze a wide range of content types and even predict how past events might affect a business in the future. For example, how global events – tariff wars, a downturn in the housing market, an economic crisis – will affect supply chains.
AI can also help companies spot unusual behavior to prevent fraud and data breaches. Imagine an employee who downloads an average of two or three documents every week for seven years. But, one night, they suddenly download thousands of documents from a remote location. When this happens, OpenText Content Suite will recognize the anomaly and trigger an alert, allowing a security officer to decide if this is a required action or a malicious attack.
OpenText customers will also benefit from intelligent capture– scanning documents, extracting relevant metadata and storing that information in the right systems, with zero human effort. Intelligent capture could automatically direct an order to the appropriate computer system, determine which items need to be taken off the shelf, and print an invoice and shipping label, saving considerable time for busy staff.
Content collaboration
Another area where we’ll see plenty of new developments in the coming year is content collaboration. With the way we work today – from many different locations, using many different devices – it’s vital that we have collaboration tools that are both effective and secure.
As IDC predicts, 70% of enterprises are likely to turn to industry-specific as-a-service offerings by 2024 to reduce cost and complexity[ii]. We’ll be extending our enterprise content management solutions to connect to a variety of third-party platforms, including SAP SuccessFactors, Salesforce and, eventually, Workday.
We’ll also be expanding offerings with new collaborative capabilities, including digital signatures. This will allow you to email documents to other people for review, collaboration and signature – integrating and managing all digital signature logs that record the time each person signed and on which machine or device, providing all the information needed for a digital signature to be legally binding.
Whether customers are dealing with contract management, property law or clinical trials in the life sciences, making signatures faster and easier can make a huge difference.
Security
As the digital sphere becomes an ever-bigger part of our lives, the number of devices we use at work, at home and elsewhere keeps growing. So do the volumes of data these devices generate – and the associated security risks. In fact, 70% of breaches now originate at endpoints, according to security firm Absolute. We need smarter automation and AI to help.
For OpenText, 2020 will bring new security developments in analytics and threat intelligence, including capabilities like anomalous behavior detection, which I discussed above. You can learn more about the latest security innovations here.
Threat intelligence will also get a big boost in the coming year, thanks to our acquisition of Carbonite, bringing new capabilities in security and data backup.
We’ll be integrating Carbonite’s anti-virus endpoint protection solution into software like EnCase, so our customers will gain new levels of security. Carbonite will also provide expanded protection against ransomware: if a machine in your business gets held for ransom, IT can simply wipe the device clean, reinstall the necessary operating software and then reload all the previous data from Carbonite’s backup systems. And we’ll be adding Carbonite’s machine learning and crawling technology, which can identify more than two billion potentially malicious IP addresses and URLs. This means that, if you try to click a suspicious link or connect to a questionable URL, the technology will recognize that before you can actually visit the site and warn you not to continue.
All of the solutions we’re rolling out – in AI, in security, in collaboration – are aimed at helping our customers save time, effort and money in the coming year and beyond.
[i] IDC FutureScape: Worldwide IT Industry 2020 Predictions IDC # US45599219 October 2019
[ii] IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Cloud 2020 Predictions IDC #US44640719 October 2019
