Bill Forquer is Executive Vice President, ECM Business Development at Open Text. He has been with the company for 10 years and has been involved with knowledge and content management for more than 30 years. We asked him about his company and how its many purchases, the changing economic conditions and CMIS are changing the way it does business.
FCM: Open Text has made a lot purchases over the years. How much of a challenge is it to fold all of these products under one brand umbrella and have them work together?
BF: One of things that people from the outside looking in tend to miss is how little overlap there has been between the products we’ve acquired and our current offerings to customers. We have tried hard to look at acquisitions that would bring new functionality and expertise to our solution set and that were compatible with our philosophies around product development, customer engagement and support.
Over the last five or so years, we've added capabilities, both organically and through acquisitions, which have created one of the industry's most comprehensive solution suites: The Open Text ECM Suite. We've added to our traditional strengths in areas such as records management, document management, web content management and collaboration, and integrated new capabilities such as archiving, email management, digital asset management and ECM solutions for SAP, Microsoft and Oracle. More recently, our acquisition of Captaris has added document capture solutions.
Open Text Content Services is our services-oriented architecture that underpins the Open Text ECM Suite and provides flexibility for Open Text and partners to integrate and assemble ECM technologies and solutions. And even though we’ve done well integrating the technologies, there are always deeper levels of integration on the horizon. But most importantly, we are respectful of our customers’ prior technology investments and allow them to grow their ECM footprint beyond that original investment based on their priorities and time line.
Branding is certainly a challenge. Some products we've acquired over the years had strong brand recognition in their segments and it’s hard for customers (and Open Text) to break old habits around naming. Given that customers are now, more than ever, developing holistic ECM strategies, we are being more aggressive transitioning product brands to match the deeper levels of product integration we have achieved within the Open Text ECM Suite.
FCM: You made a conscious effort to embrace Web 2.0. How has that played out across your product line?
BF: We are excited about the potential of Web 2.0 technologies in general to revolutionize employee, partner and customer communication and interaction, in companies and in government. The hurdle for many large organizations is to make the deployment of these technologies safe for the enterprise by taking into account compliance and regulatory requirements. We are bridging this gap and that is the focus of our strategy. Today, we are building on our collaboration and web solution offerings to a new level by providing integrated 2.0 capabilities--wikis, forums, blogs, tagging, moderation, communities and real-time collaboration--as part of the Open Text ECM Suite. These capabilities offer productivity gains by themselves, but we go a step further and integrate them into business processes while still respecting compliance initiatives.
We see a lot of what Web 2.0 has to offer as a natural extension of customers' current ECM initiatives. The content being managed by ECM systems is very important to the success of Web 2.0 initiatives, so this creates a natural starting point. In addition to Web 2.0 solutions behind the firewall, our Web Solutions Group has a full set of solutions to help companies add Web 2.0 capabilities to their public Web sites and extranets.
FCM: When I spoke to you last spring at AIIM, you said the company was making a transition from regulatory compliance messages to Web 2.0 knowledge sharing. In light of the financial market meltdown and subsequent bailouts, it looks like regulatory compliance will once again take a front seat. How do you see these two approaches coming together across your product line?
BF: That’s a great observation. And it’s true that regulatory compliance has gained renewed focus for customers. But I wouldn’t say that Web 2.0 has taken a back seat. In today’s tough market, the principal drivers are cost reductions and productivity--customers are viewing everything in the context of those two issues. Non-compliance, is very expensive, of course, and customers want a strategic approach to compliance and the flexibility to address changing rules. Compliance has always been an important area for us and giving customers comprehensive ways of managing compliance mandates across the enterprise will always be a key focus.
Web 2.0 is still very important as a way to boost productivity and get closer to customers, but retention and compliance with Web 2.0 content and technologies are still concerns. Our focus today is to give customers leading Web 2.0 solutions that address compliance and policy requirements.
One example of this is in our Web Solutions Suite. The latest release has a unique capability that can automatically scan blog posts and wikis for content that might run counter to company policies and notify managers of potential concerns. You’ll be seeing this type of technology become more mature and widely accepted and that will, in turn, open up wider deployment of Web 2.0.
FCM: One piece, I believe you don't have (and correct me if I'm wrong is a search tool). What role do you think search plays in content management and why have you chosen not to include one in your product family?
BF: Open Text has extensive search capabilities built into all of our offerings. In fact, the company got its start in search technology on the campus of the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, Canada, in the late 80s and early 90s. A group of university researchers were working on a project to convert the entire Oxford English Dictionary--all 60 million words--to electronic form. Not an easy task in the pre-Internet days. The work that went into this project launched Open Text as one of the Internet’s first search engine providers, which was soon adopted by Yahoo, one of our first customers.
Fast-forward to today--search is a fundamental differentiator of our ECM solutions, and so is scaling, which was another lesson learned from those early days. We are committed to surfacing content and search results from our ECM solutions to the maturing set of enterprise search tools available from infrastructure vendors. We have chosen not to compete directly with those vendors in this standalone enterprise search category. Our focus has been to make search an integrated part of the Open Text ECM Suite and offer customers a differentiated search experience tailored to their specific use-case.
FCM: We've been writing a lot about CMIS lately. What do you think the future holds for the specification and what are your plans for using CMIS in the future?
BF: We see a lot of upsides to CMIS. We are in favor of any break-through that allows our customers to get more value from their content. CMIS offers customers and ECM solution partners a standardized method to access content repositories. This provides a number of benefits including an improved end-user experience, more robust and flexible business process automation, and a breaking down of silos of content. Ultimately, it could lead to a new generation of content applications.
We are taking it very seriously and have devoted development resources to CMIS. In conjunction with SAP, we have already created a working prototype that uses the CMIS standard to manage content from SAP applications with Open Text Enterprise Library Services. This functional prototype demonstrates practically the theory behind CMIS. This is more than just “slideware” and I’m confident that CMIS will move into product over time. A standard such as CMIS in many ways represents the maturing of the ECM market.
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[1] http://www.fiercecontentmanagement.com/one-on-one