Highlights from The Futurum Group’s Mitch Ashley at OpenText World 2024 Las Vegas

Mitch Ashley: Hi everybody. Mitch Ashley here, Six Five On the Road, Live at OpenText World 2024 in Las Vegas. Really great conference here. A lot of excitement, a lot of buzz about AI, but also more than AI. Some really good discussions about what’s happening, both already happened in the OpenText technology and products, but also where they’re headed.

Mark Barrenechea, CEO, CTO of OpenText did the keynote, of course. Some things that I wrote down that he said I thought were really insightful. One is you are the builders and designers of the next decade, kind of leading into where we’re going to with not just business process and things like that, but also AI. He talked a lot about being slowed by the islands of disconnected information, disconnected data that are in different systems, clouds, things like that. But we can be accelerated in our work by integrated multi-cloud and AI. There’s your hint to the themes for the conference. And also another theme was it’s time to let the machines do the work. Let’s really leverage what AI and automation can do for us so that you humans can do what we do well.

So if I can wrap those themes up. They’re really bowled down to three things. One is multi-cloud, business cloud for content formation. We’ll talk some more about what that specifically means. AI leading to agentic AI, autonomous or agentic AI that’s operating on its own, and also security is job one, taking security serious all the way through the organization and protecting customer data, building security into the products, things like that. So pretty interesting stuff. Going to that. The announcement around 24.4 of the cloud edition of OpenText Platform. Underlying that, a lot of discussion about Titanium X, is the brand for the underlying platform that empowers a lot of these things that help OpenText applications do the work that they do. Talked about 15 aviators, which is the brand for their agents, if you want to think of it that way. Capable invoking a hundred different or a hundred plus, really different AI agents that have been trained to automate specific common tasks that end users would perform. They also announced support for Microsoft Copilot, so adding that generative AI capabilities into their products. So announced support. I assume that means it’s coming, but we’ll find out more details about that.

Also, talked a lot about zero copy of data as one of the key requirements from customers. We don’t want copies of data floating around all these clouds, different locations because every time we copy data, we have synchronization work and issues to do. So let’s simplify that by not copying data. Another is, let’s use machine-led decisions. Let’s leverage autonomous agents where they can help us make those decisions, and also protecting our data of course, from that standpoint. Lots of good things coming from customers. Now, I would say that OpenText is all in on multi-cloud and multi-cloud means something very specific to OpenText. First of all, it’s talking about those islands of information. How do we integrate that and make that more seamless to the end user? So we’re not all going to this location, this application, that data that’s located maybe in one or multiple places if it’s copied. So that multi-cloud approach is talking about information we have in SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, and Microsoft is the four major categories of clouds, but they really want to integrate and make that more seamless to customers.

Of course, when we get to AI, a lot of announcements about that. I mentioned a hundred plus agents that they discussed and they showed some demos. They had an application called olly.ai, which is their own internal application for responding to RFPs. We saw in the demo where an RFP came into the Salesforce system, taking the questions out of the RFP, plugging those into the Aviator AI, answering those, getting responses to them either from prior RFPs or maybe from other information that is available, and then taking that and verifying it and putting into the response and responding to an RFP maybe in a matter of hours or a few days rather than days and weeks. I can appreciate that. It’s a lot of work doing that. Also around AI, really keeping flexibility for customers. Bring your own language model. You’re not restricted to what OpenText has decided for the models that they’re using for LLMs and small language models, things like that. Of course, leading to agentic AI coming down the road.

Also, discussion around their commitment around an AI Bill of Rights. Being really clear with customers, here’s what our responsibility is to you. What commitment we’re making to you is that A, your data is not our product. We’re not a social media company. Your data is your data, and we respect the intellectual property that you have. Third is dedication to accurate, verifiable AI results. There’s really conscious effort on how generative AI is used. There’s not hallucination in it, that they’re trying to provide you A, accurate information and also things that you can do to verify the accuracy of that data. And fourth, it’s promoted the common good. They also have changed the interface or redesigned the interface across OpenText products. Some they refer to as JATO, kind of an old term, out of the Rocket and Air Force era. A Jet Assisted Takeoff. Then what do they mean by that is yes, it’s an update in refreshed modern interface, but it also has AI designed into it or designed a part of the interface rather than I described it. Rather than bolting it on, here’s a button over here that gives you the access to the AI, making that part of the Aviator experience, things like that.

Last but not least is security is job one. There’s a lot of discussion around what the organization is doing to enforce or reinforce taking extra precaution and steps, implementing security, whether it’s in the software, data protection, the operations of the business with customer data being very sensitive to that. Also announce a moving to not just data encryption, of course, which they already do, but also masking all data. So even when it’s unencrypted, it’s not necessarily recognizable without some transformation and eventually moving away from passwords to biometrics. So rather than those yellow stickies, we’re going to need to use the thumb prints, facial recognition, things like that and more. So lots of great things happening here. Please check out, we’ll have some more videos from Six Five Media, Six Five On the Road. We look forward to sharing more with you, but it’s been a great day and a half plus so far here at OpenText World ’24 in Las Vegas. Hope you’ll come back and join us soon. Great talking with you.