Five factors defining the future of business

The future of work is distributed, digital, inclusive, sustainable, and secure, according to a keynote delivered by OpenText CEO and CTO Mark Barrenechea at the company's OpenText World event earlier this month. 

In a presentation peppered with client testimonials, product announcements, and a bold "zero barriers, waste, and emissions" statement, Barrenechea identified five key forces that are driving OpenText's "great rethink," with the goal of delivering a "seven-star experience" to customers. 

Five drivers, one goal

Barrenechea illustrated each of the five forces with client examples. The first: Adopting a distributed work model. This enables OpenText to recruit talent without geographic limitations and embrace diversity and inclusion. 

OpenText supports borderless workflows by providing clients with content services for contact management, collaboration, external sharing, project management, and e-signatures, Barrenechea said. 

The second: Digital transactions, for exchanges from banking to commerce to transportation and shipping. Cosmetics giant L'Oréal, for example, uses OpenText to manage its digital consumer ecosystem, including payments, invoicing, onboarding, shipping, omnichannel engagement, and e-commerce. 

The third: Viewing every facet of the business through a customer-centric lens. To deliver a seven-star experience, companies need to provide frictionless interactions at every touchpoint. "It's a mindset of how to keep raising the bar on yourselves and your company to achieve the next level of products and services," Barrenechea said.
He noted that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is using OpenText as its platform for digitizing and archiving all of its assets, the better to accelerate service delivery.

The fourth: Trust and security. OpenText is working with Morgan Stanley, for example, to protect its entire banking ecosystem, including risk mitigation, data and cybersecurity, and secure trading. 

In a pre-recorded interview, Rachel Wilson, Morgan Stanley's head of wealth management data security and infrastructure risk, said a zero-trust model is critical when workers need to access sensitive information from anywhere in the world. The goal is for data to never be stored locally, she said, so that device theft is no longer a risk. 

"The combination of encryption and virtualization is going to save our bacon,'' she added. 

The fifth: Sustainable and inclusive growth. Barrenechea emphasized the importance of companies 'doing good' with technologies that can help reduce emissions and improve diversity. He cited OpenText's partnership with Shell, which is using the OpenText developer cloud in its transition to cleaner energy. 

With tools that automate routine tasks and analyze data to identify efficiencies and competitive advantages, he explained, fewer resources are wasted. OpenText clients are, "looking holistically at bringing integrated edge technology [together] with cloud technology,'' he said. "They're given a set of blocks they can work with and apply... to the problem at hand, whether it be off-cloud, private cloud, public cloud, or API cloud, to solve and create opportunity within their business." 

Competitive SaaS offerings

Barrenechea also took the opportunity to promote OpenText's feature-rich, public SaaS model for content services, and launched a competitive "Bye Bye Blue" program. He took direct aim at IBM's managed infrastructure services spin-off Kyndrl, saying that using it requires negotiating "multiple SLAs" for a private cloud offering, while OpenText will provide performance guarantees for its cloud. OpenText is offering free migration assessments, dedicated migration tools, and straightforward service-level agreements for guaranteed performance. 

OpenText has spent its pandemic time "doubling down" on research and development and simplifying its cloud portfolio, which fully supports AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. "Every 90 days, we bring thousands of facets and features to market," he said, adding that these upgrades require no end-user intervention. 

Zero barriers, zero emissions

"The greatest challenge we face is not Covid. The greatest challenge ahead of us is climate," Barrenechea stated, introducing the OpenText Zero Initiative, a commitment to zero barriers, zero waste, and zero emissions. By 2030, the majority of key roles at OpenText will be diverse, with equal gender representation and 40 percent or more women leaders, he said. 

Further, Barrenechea vowed that there will be zero waste from company operations by 2030, and the company will achieve zero net emissions by 2040. "The future of growth is both sustainable and inclusive,'' he said. "It's time to be bold and digital." 

Learn more about OpenText and its services by visiting www.opentext.com.