The IT Nerd

OpenText, the global leader in Enterprise Information Management (EIM), today announced findings from a new report indicating two thirds of legal professionals believe spending on artificial intelligence (AI) will increase in 2019. Survey results, previewed at Legaltech 2019 in conjunction with Ari Kaplan Advisors, demonstrate the convergence of multiple disciplines and the expanding responsibilities of corporate legal operations professionals. Today’s corporate legal leaders are shaping IT strategy with an eye towards litigation-readiness and partnering with security teams on data breach response plans.

The rise of the cloud and the emergence of AI represent progress, but technology adoption will be a long-term endeavor, and this study highlights the willingness to adopt new technologies. With discussions increasingly focused on innovation, efficiency and the next generation of legal practice, legal operations leaders are at the forefront of piloting new technology, executing strategic initiatives, and helping senior leadership navigate the evolving risk and compliance landscape.

Key findings from the survey include:

• Movement toward the cloud continues: The majority of respondents, 83 percent, rated their organization’s current use of cloud-based tools at a three or above on a 1-5 scale. Further, an impressive 94 percent rated their company’s openness to implementing cloud solutions in the coming year at three or higher.
• The use of AI is growing: Within legal departments, 34 percent of respondents currently use AI (up from 23 percent in 2017). However, 66 percent of respondents believe that spending on AI solutions will increase in 2019.
• Focus on security is strong, but sensitive: A full 91 percent reported the legal department’s influence on information security decisions has increased, with 49 percent claiming the legal team is much more involved in information security. Having a seat at the table is significant as 91 percent of respondents also reported they have data security concerns around distributing electronically stored information to multiple discovery vendors and law firms.
• The GDPR is driving major eDiscovery, privacy and security changes: With 80 percent of respondents advising data privacy concerns are affecting how they handle discovery and investigations, the impacts of regulations such as GDPR are starting to be realized by legal professionals. 49 percent of respondents reported the volume of government or regulatory investigations has grown over the past 12 months.
• ECM joins the legal tech development conversation: 74 percent of participants reported if their ECM systems were integrated with their eDiscovery systems, it would be beneficial for the legal department.

OpenText provides the legal market with a broad and diverse set of solutions for enterprise-grade eDiscovery, forensic data collection, legal documents management, AI-assisted search, contract analysis, and more. OpenText continues to invest in the legal sector and on January 31, 2019 announced the acquisition of Catalyst Repository Systems, Inc. (Catalyst), a leading provider of eDiscovery solutions for corporate legal departments and top law firms. Catalyst will be integrated into OpenText’s Discovery Solutions, helping customers further leverage their technology investments and benefit from OpenText’s continued investments in innovation.

Integrated products and services from OpenText support the business practices, information management, electronic discovery reference model (EDRM) needs, and proactive compliance requirements of the legal industry. For more information visit: https://www.opentext.com/products-and-solutions/industries/legal.

Research methodology

Ari Kaplan Advisors interviewed 35 legal operations leaders with Fortune 500 and 1000 companies between July and August 2018 (17 of whom were interviewed for the 2017 report). Eighty percent served as their organization’s director of legal operations (or in an equally senior role). Most had traditional responsibilities for outside counsel and vendor management, legal technology administration and budgeting, while others participated in or led initiatives related to e-Discovery, advanced strategic planning, talent utilization and business process improvements. Forty-nine percent were from companies with revenues of more than $10 billion and 83 percent were with organizations with revenues of more than $5 billion. Two-thirds were at companies with more than 10,000 employees and 91 percent were with organizations maintaining more than 5,000 employees.

OpenText a global leader in Enterprise Information Management (EIM), today announced it has acquired Catalyst Repository Systems, Inc. (Catalyst), a leading provider of eDiscovery solutions for corporate legal departments and top law firms.

Catalyst will be integrated into OpenText’s Discovery Solutions, helping customers further leverage their technology investments and benefit from OpenText’s continued investments in innovation.

The purchase price of the acquisition is approximately $75 million in an all-cash transaction. Further information for investors, including an overview presentation regarding Catalyst, can be found at: investors.opentext.com/mergers-and-acquisitions.

Some of the technology experts at OpenText have put together their predictions for 2019 and they wanted to share a few with you. These are snippets of the larger predictions pieces by each expert but we thought it might give you a more interesting overview of some of the areas where OpenText is concentrating in 2019.

What will be the AI story for 2019?
The long-promised enterprise AI transformation is poised to begin in earnest in 2019. Most enterprises have reached a point of digital maturity, ensuring access to quality data at scale. With mature data sets, AI providers can offer lower cost, easier to use AI tools for specific business use cases. The effect of enterprise AI at scale will be significant. Gartner expects the business value of AI to hit nearly $3.9 trillion by 2022. Consumers also stand to benefit in almost every sector. They’ll see more innovative products and services, smarter homes, factories and cities, improved health, and a higher quality of life.
– Zachary Jarvinen, Head of Technology Strategy, AI and Analytics, OpenText
Increase in adoption of cloud and proliferation of new cloud solutions and services
The proliferation of new cloud solutions and services will continue in 2019 driven by customers who are looking to move faster into the cloud in the coming years. All industries are looking for a stable and secure infrastructure for information management in the cloud. This includes previously cloud-weary sectors such as manufacturing, financial services, legal, life sciences, and government. In fact, life sciences is one area where we are seeing customers move more aggressively to the cloud than ever before. Also – workloads matter. Typical workloads that are moving to the cloud faster are things like HR, contracts, legal, collaboration, digital asset management etc.
– Savinay Berry, Vice President of Cloud Services, OpenText
Privacy Regulations will drive more transparency
Privacy regulations will force vendors to abandon the black-box approach to AI. Vendors will need to be more open about what data is captured and analyzed by security and AI technology. This in turn pushes vendors to focus on more specific and achievable use cases. Enterprise consumers will benefit from more rapid ROI and simpler deployments of emerging technology.
– Anthony Di Bello, Senior Director of Market Development, OpenText

Blockchain talent will be in high demand and the industry will experience a skills gap 
As we’ve seen with AI, demand for talented engineers and developers in blockchain will surge. Organizations will find themselves ill-equipped to handle the supply-demand gap. To bridge the gap in skills and experience, we’ll start to see substantial investments from academic institutions and large enterprises in training courses and additional resources. In 2019 we will see an exponential growth in blockchain practices being established by global systems integrators such as Accenture.

– Mark Morley, Director, Strategic Product Marketing at OpenText

OpenText a global leader in Enterprise Information Management (EIM), today announced it has completed the closing of its previously announced acquisition of Liaison Technologies, Inc., a leading provider of cloud-based information integration and data management solutions.

Liaison’s ALLOY® Platform brings innovative and differentiated technologies to modernize, streamline and accelerate complex information integration for global intelligent and connected enterprises. This technology dramatically accelerates onboarding and migration, enabling OpenText customers to become more agile and responsive to changing market and customer demands.

Liaison will be integrated into OpenText Business Network, a suite of solutions that facilitate efficient, secure, and compliant information flows between people, systems, and things. OpenText Business Network is the global leader in enabling digital business, processing trillions in commerce every year and connecting over 1 million businesses globally.

Terms of the Agreement and Preliminary Outlook
The purchase price is approximately $310 million in an all-cash transaction. Liaison is expected to contribute insignificant revenue to OpenText’s results for the second quarter ending December 31, 2018, given that the transaction has closed during the holidays.

Liaison is expected to be on the OpenText target operating model within the first twelve months after closing. Financial details regarding the acquisition will be provided with OpenText’s second quarter fiscal year 2019 earnings materials and conference call.

Further information for investors, including an overview presentation regarding Liaison, can be found at: investors.opentext.com/mergers-and-acquisitions

OpenText today announced the launch of OpenText Release 16 Enhancement Pack 5 (EP5), OpenText Business Network Cloud 16.10, and a series of new SaaS-based applications for the legal, life sciences and HR markets on its next-generation cloud platform, OT2.

These portfolio-wide enhancements simplify the path to modern and secure EIM deployments, with secure and flexible options for AI, automation, IoT and content services for on-premises, across public, private, and hybrid cloud deployments.

OpenText Release 16 Enhancement Pack 5 (EP5)
OpenText Release 16 EP5, extends this market leading EIM platform to increase user satisfaction and adoption, enable deeper insights and connect information, people and processes in a secure and flexible deployment environment. Specific enhancements include:

• Artificial intelligence – EP5 adds increased AI and automation capabilities across the EIM portfolio with OpenText Magellan. This includes predictive research for Discovery, AI-powered rich media analytics for Customer Experience Management, sentiment analysis for Workforce Engagement Management through Magellan Text Mining, and machine learning for capture and information extraction for SAP solutions.
• Deeper integration – Seamless integration brings advanced AI, enhanced security and deeper information workflows to the Intelligent and Connected Enterprise. EP5 delivers OpenText Information Hub (iHub) integration with OpenText EnCase Endpoint Security to build threat-hunting dashboards. Closer integration between OpenText AppWorks and OpenText content services solutions (OpenText Documentum, OpenText Content Suite and OpenText Extended ECM) enables rapid deployment of OT2 applications including People Center and Contract Center
• Rich user experiences – EP5 enables a richer experience with enhanced developer controls, improved mobile experiences, and new employee self-service experiences. A highlight of EP5 is addition of the Smart UI for Documentum D2, further building towards a common, flexible, responsive UI across OpenText content service.

This release builds on a string of recent analyst commentary, including:

• OpenText’s position as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms and Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management,.
• Recent rankings as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Digital Asset Management For Customer Experience and as a Strong Performer in both The Forrester Wave™: Notebook-Based Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning Solutions⁴ and The Forrester Wave™: AI-Based Text Analytics Platforms⁵.

New applications for OpenText OT2
First announced at OpenText Enterprise World 2018, OpenText OT2 delivers compelling applications for business users, a modern developer platform, and hybrid EIM services on a single Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform. New OpenText applications built on OT2 include:

• OpenText Legal Center – a cloud-based, process-centric approach to addressing specialized legal use cases like client onboarding, external sharing & collaboration, and document management.
• OpenText Quality Center – building on OpenText Documentum for Life Science and OpenText Life Science Express to deliver secure collaboration solutions for the highly-regulated life sciences sector.
• Extended ECM for SuccessFactors Public Cloud Edition – the latest collaboration between SAP and OpenText, delivering secure content management solutions for SAP’s popular talent management platform.

Commenting on OpenText OT2, Holly Muscolino, Research Vice President, Content Technologies and Document Workflow at IDC states, “OT2 will begin to bring SaaS into the product mix for the large customer base running OpenText’s on-premise/managed hosted solutions, and it will extend the value of customers’ investments in significant ways. It will also serve as the foundation for newborn SaaS applications that OpenText develops in the future. Its evolutionary approach should give its customers a graceful path to the cloud, enabling them to derive new value from their existing investments without disruption.”

OpenText Cloud
OpenText Business Network 16.10 expands and enhances the OpenText cloud network, facilitating efficient, secure and compliant collaboration across people, systems and things. This release includes key enhancements for industrial IoT, Identity and Access Management (IAM) and security, supply chain and vendor management, fax and secure information exchange.

OpenText Anywhere
Today, OpenText also announced it has selected Google Cloud as its first partner to support OpenText Anywhere, making OpenText solutions and managed services available in the Google Cloud.

As part of this collaboration, Google Cloud and OpenText will work together to deploy OpenText’s enterprise information management solution suite on Google Cloud Platform. This work will include a containerized application architecture for flexible cloud or hybrid deployment models. Deploying OpenText solutions on Google Cloud Platform will help customers to autoscale their deployments as their businesses demand.

Availability
Release 16 EP5 and OpenText OT2 is available now. OpenText Legal Center, Quality Center and Extended ECM for SuccessFactors are currently available for qualified customers.

OpenText today announced that OpenText Exstream for Salesforce is now available on Salesforce AppExchange, offering users a powerful solution for personalized, consistent customer communications management.

OpenText Exstream is an industry-leading platform for managing multi-channel, global customer communications. With sophisticated workflow automation, compelling design and branding features, and options for infinite personalization, OpenText Exstream allows business users to easily manage their customer communications programs and campaigns without intervention from technical experts.

This expanded collaboration builds on the success of OpenText Extended ECM for Salesforce, which delivers sophisticated and secure content services. OpenText Extended ECM for Salesforce is available on Salesforce AppExchange.

OpenText Exstream for Salesforce is available on Salesforce AppExchange immediately.

OpenText who a global leader in Enterprise Information Management (EIM), today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Liaison Technologies, Inc. (Liaison), a leading provider of cloud-based enterprise application integration and data management solutions.

The acquisition of Liaison is expected to further enhance OpenText’s offerings in digital ecosystem and business-to-business integration solutions, application-to-application integration and master data management capabilities. The proposed acquisition also expands OpenText’s capabilities within key verticals such as life sciences and healthcare. Additionally, the acquisition enables OpenText to address fast-growing adjacent market segments, including integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) with a managed services approach.

Terms of the Agreement The purchase price is approximately $310 million in an all-cash transaction. The transaction is expected to close within 90 days and is subject to customary regulatory approvals and closing conditions.

More information can be found in our presentation at investors.opentext.com.

OpenText a global leader in Enterprise Information Management (EIM), today announced the availability of OpenText Extended ECM Enabler for Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Service. The new solution, developed in partnership with Contesto, integrates OpenText’s leading Enterprise Content Management (ECM) portfolio with Dynamics 365 for Customer Service to deliver a complete set of content services to enrich business processes flows, and enable seamless customer engagement.

OpenText Extended ECM Enabler by Contesto for Dynamics 365 for Customer Service enables intelligent and connected enterprises to transform sales, marketing, customer and field service automation by securely and seamlessly integrating content services into business processes.

The integration of OpenText’s ECM solutions with Dynamics 365 for Customer Service enhances business processes – specifically in sales and service scenarios such as lead-to-cash and problem-to-resolution – driving improved productivity, collaboration and customer service. The integration also enables the enterprise to maximize the value and insight from both unstructured content and structured data.

The OpenText Extended ECM Business Workspace is at the center of the integration. It allows customer-facing roles to remain within the Dynamics 365 business application, while simultaneously having access to the full breadth of information and documentation from across the organization needed to provide efficient and outstanding customer service.

OpenText also continues to invest in connecting the digital workplace to the digital business. Customers can now benefit from a tighter integration with Microsoft Teams. OpenText Extended ECM for Microsoft Office 365 allows organizations to augment the repeatable and consistent collaboration of Business Workspaces with the workplace chat, meetings and notes that Teams brings to internal and external stakeholders,

Additional certified OpenText EIM solutions available on the Azure platform include:

• OpenText Content Server
• Documentum Content Server
• Media Management
• Archive Center
• Application Governance & Archiving for SharePoint
• Extended ECM Platform
• Web Site Management and Capture Center.

OpenText a global leader in Enterprise Information Management (EIM), today announced the availability of OpenText Qfiniti for Amazon Connect, a self-service, cloud-based contact center solution that enables any business to deliver better customer service at a lower cost. OpenText Qfiniti is available now on AWS Marketplace.

OpenText Qfiniti provides organizations using Amazon Connect with a robust SaaS workforce optimization solution, including full call playback and advanced analytics. Qfiniti offers enterprise-class capabilities including contact center recording playback, custom quality monitoring forms, desktop screen capture, user configurable muting and masking of voice and screen activity for payment card industry compliance, and advanced analytics.

OpenText enables organizations to gain insight through market leading information management solutions, on-premises or in the cloud. For more information about OpenText visit opentext.com.

OpenText has officially opened Enterprise World 2018, welcoming 5,000 attendees to Toronto for presentations from leading EIM experts and innovators.

• Defining the Future of EIM

At Enterprise World 2018, OpenText will announce OT2, a next-generation hybrid EIM platform based on a micro-services architecture. OT2 supports native cloud SaaS applications that can integrate with on-premises deployments to extend new capabilities to customers’ existing investment. This new platform will allow OpenText customers and partners to build the next generation of EIM applications and services, gaining greater insight and value from the information that underpins their businesses. More details on that in a moment.

• OpenText Release 16 in action

Released in April 2016, OpenText Release 16 is the most comprehensive, integrated digital information platform available on the market. A single platform that manages and analyzes the entire flow of information, addressing key areas of the user experience, machine-to-machine integration, automation and other aspects of the digital-first organization. Over the last 24 months, OpenText has continually innovated on the platform, providing organizations with new features and integrations to help solve their greatest information challenges, from the changing workforce, the exponential increase in IoT devices, gaining more insight into vast information lakes, and supporting new regulatory requirements like GDPR.

• Information Security and IoT

In a world where more and more devices are connected, endpoints can be anywhere. At Enterprise World 2018, OpenText will demonstrate how combining the innovative identity and access platform acquired from Covisint in July 2017, with market-leading endpoint security acquired from Guidance Software in September 17, will enable a new generation of secure IoT applications and services.

• Delivering the Future of AI for EIM

Augmented Intelligence (AI) is automating decisions and transforming the relationships between humans and machines. OpenText is building AI into the DNA of its market-leading EIM platform. Out-of-the-box integration and new business-user enabled interfaces in OpenText Magellan will provide enterprises with deep and immediate insight into the organization’s information lakes.

• Delivering on Enterprise-Grade Cloud Collaboration

Demands for increased mobility and workforce collaboration are changing the way companies approach productivity. With new developer functionality added to OpenText Core, organizations can build applications and work-flows on top of their enterprise-wide Core implementations. The addition of forms to Core also allows users to collect data and information for simple and secure business collaboration.

• OpenText Prime Gives Customer Flexibility to Innovate

At Enterprise World 2018, OpenText officially launches OpenText Prime – a pricing model that allows companies to access the full power of OpenText managed services at a single, per-user price. This gives customers the flexibility to break down operational silos and build company-wide digital platforms that leverage the full OpenText portfolio.

At the same time OpenText also announced the release of OpenText OT2, the next-generation hybrid-cloud platform from OpenText that brings together intelligent automation, security, and EIM applications in a powerful unified platform.

With a unified data model and a standard user interface, OpenText OT2 enables developers to rapidly build SaaS applications in the Opentext Cloud. OpenText OT2 brings together micro-services for content collaboration, security, process automation, and analytics, enabling customers and partners to rapidly develop and deploy powerful business applications to drive digital transformation further into their operations.

The OpenText OT2 platform, available now, will develop with quarterly releases, with all applications being tightly integrated with OpenText Release 16.

OpenText OT2 applications launching at Enterprise World 2018

In his keynote address at Enterprise World, Muhi Majzoub, Executive Vice President, Engineering and IT at OpenText will preview the first generation of transformative applications built on the OpenText OT2 platform.

Deepening collaboration with OpenText partners

OpenText is opening its cloud infrastructure to select members of its partner ecosystem. This will enable the world’s most innovative global systems integrators to create and market applications on the OpenText cloud, helping to further extend OpenText’s global reach. With the support of our partner ecosystem, more customers in more markets will have access to the advanced Enterprise Information Management applications from OpenText.

OpenText OT2 is available immediately. OpenText Quality and OpenText Legal will be generally available in the second half of 2018.