‘Our quest is to be #1 in all the pillars of the EIM space’

Today, 67-85% of information in enterprises is unstructured and includes PDF documents, CAD diagrams, models, emails, contracts, case records, templates and a whole host of data that is created during every day operations. One avenue in enterprise applications is that of Enterprise Information Management (EIM) that helps process and manage information coming in various avenues such as cloud, social media and mobility.

Graham Pullen, senior vice president-APJ, OpenText was recently in New Delhi as part of a larger entourage from Canada holding trade talks with the Indian government and exploring opportunities in the G2G space as well. OpenText is a Canada based leading provider of Enterprise Information Management (EIM) solutions and already holds a 17% market share in the ECM market (source: Gartner). Dataquest spoke to Pullen to gain insights on OpenText and its EIM strategies. Excerpts

What has OpenText been doing in the EIM space?

OpenText has been around now for 28 odd years. We obviously started life solving all document and content problems for organizations, where companies didn't have document management systems in those days, of course. Now, I think the document management of choice would be SharePoint from a Microsoft perspective.

But we started even far back, designing the company or building the company to not solve just document management problems. We built a repository; we built a platform that could manage both the structured and unstructured information such that organizations, whether they be top-tier commercial banks, oil & gas companies, telecommunications companies or governments could manage information flowing through their organizations and in a secure manner.

So now we're in a world where social networking and mobility have become topics of discussion and we still manage those environments in the same secure manner that we always did when it was really a laptop or a computer that connected to a server with the repository.

What are the main opportunities you see in this market?

For us, fundamentally, EIM's addressable market is made up of 5-6 opportunities. The first is where we started, Enterprise Content Management (ECM), that includes everything from input management, ICR, OCR, scanning, imaging, ingesting information into your corporate repositories, making it intelligent with metadata; putting attributes and attaching it to things.

Organizations were struggling because their content, their value on content was spread around flat files systems that they had no control over. And therefore, that not only exposed the companies to risk on where that information went to or when an employee left it, they would completely lose everything.

The 2nd pillar to EIM is Business Process Management (or BPM). Business process management or business process improvement is getting a lot more specific, like case management process management. And this is where OpenText has been taking that the Global 360 (G360) acquisition that we made and the MetaStorm acquisitions were two very well regarded in BPM solutions.

Then you have Customer Experience Management (CEM) where our customers are trying to get closer to their customers. Like, a telecommunications company or a bank seeing a single view of its customers.

So being able to provide that single view of the organization and being able to recognize areas of interest from your customers is really important. The other key opportunities are in areas of Information and Exchange, Discovery (of data) etc.

We are putting a lot of effort into building semantic search capabilities for instance, that enables people to find information in that vast and deep web of information in more of a semantic way, put it in context to the problem that they are trying to solve or why they are doing the searches. So it's not Google or Yahoo orientated. This is definitely using social capabilities as well.

We are in good shape in those 5 pillars. And the sixth one that we are creating is a bit that glues all of that together, we call it InfoFusion. A large organization already has multiple repositories of structured or unstructured: Oracle, SAP, SharePoint or PeopleSoft environments, which is now bought by Oracle - there are so many buckets of information around a corporate at the moment.

OpenText has built InfoFusion that enables you to enter those buckets of information and manage them and control them in the same way as if it were in the OpenText environment.

And that gives a lot of organizations either the ability to transition over time or the ability to leave things as they are. If they are not broken, don't try to fix them, as they say. But leverage the information in them.

Which are the challenges that CIOs face and EIM can help in?

The 3 main disrupters currently are cloud, social networking, and mobility. Cloud, CIOs need to handle with sensitivity as cloud is completely redefining the server, the multi-processing and millions of transactions in the cloud, for this OpenText is now helping build easy links from infrastructure to cloud (EDI). There are 2 mn customers in the cloud using OpenText.

In case of social networking, crowd sourcing resulting in collaboration of productivity, knowledge management, and a social environment is happening and for this CIOs are asking for OpenText collaboration for this to happen in a secured, managed manner. In terms of mobility, server, productivity and cloud environment have changed in terms of business and in this scenario, how do we manage devices is another challenge.

Apart from these, the weakest area and opportunity for improvement is information governance and compliance. EIM can help CIOs address these.

Plans going forward...

So, we are about Enterprise Information Management. We intend to be number 1, but to be number 1 we have to be number 1 in every one of those 5 pillars. Our quest is to do that within the next 3 years. Right now we are number 1 in only a couple of those pillars.