ITechnology Interview with Muhi Majzoub, EVP & Chief Product Officer at OpenText

“Organizations Need an AI Solution That Can Scale Not Only in Terms of the Processing Power Available In the Cloud Platforms but Potentially to Petabytes of Data.”

1. Hi Muhi, please tell us about your role and the team/technology you handle at OpenText.

I am Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer for OpenText, and I lead the development team responsible for defining the vision and strategy for OpenText products and their transition to the cloud.

2. How did you arrive at the company? What were the key milestones in your career that helped you scale to this level?

Before joining OpenText in 2012, I served as Chief of Products for NorthgateArinso where I also was charged with defining the company’s product vision, strategy, and the development life cycle. I focused on consolidating the software portfolio and developing new product capabilities for both cloud and on-premises solutions. Before that, I held executive positions in product development at CA, Inc. and Oracle.

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3. What is the most contemporary definition of “Cloud migration”?

I wish it were a simple answer! Cloud migration differs from organization to organization. Some organizations look at cloud migration as the adoption of cloud infrastructure (IaaS) and the migration of specific compute and storage loads to the cloud. In some cases, they are also looking for Managed Services to run these applications to further allow IT to focus on their core competencies and innovation. Other organizations look at cloud migration as the refactoring of applications to run as cloud native, using technologies like Kubernetes and Docker to optimize their applications for easy update, scalability, agility and security. Finally, many organizations are moving away from customized on-prem applications to adopt standardized, multitenant SaaS applications for the simplicity of adoption and constant innovation.

In fact, many organizations are doing al of the above.  That is why we think of it as a cloud journey – not just a migration.

The benefits of cloud migration include:

• The ability to achieve technical capabilities and/or operational efficiencies at significantly lower cost than what is required to host and manage similar infrastructure on-premises. Enabling an organization to adapt to changing business needs creates market differentiation and improves productivity, realizing up to 30% saving in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
• Empowering IT to create solutions that improve the digital experience and grow the business.
• Supporting new and changing business requirements by leveraging the scalability, agility, and flexibility of the cloud.
• Providing modern infrastructure to enable updates that are cost-effective and fast to deploy. Improving speed to market and reducing ramp-up time.

At OpenText, we are focussed on helping businesses shift to the cloud in the way that is best suited for them, both by providing our own solutions via public, private and hybrid cloud deployments, and as cloud services that can run on-premises in a customer’s data center if that is what they need.  We also offer our OpenText Migrate solution – recently certified as AWS Outposts ready – to help our customers lift-and-shift any workload to the cloud or any other destination, regardless of geographical location.

4. What kind of IT and data management infrastructure should a company have to successfully plan a cloud migration?

It is important to secure access to data and resources by using robust Change Management and Control, including a Configuration Management Database (CMD), activity monitors, Cloud Access and Security Brokers (CASB), Unified Threat Management (UTM), and Data Loss Prevention (DLP). You’ll need to protect your digital assets with solid network security (e.g., VPNs), at-rest and in-flight data encryption, Identity Management and Access Control, a reliable Disaster Recovery Plan to avoid the unexpected, and an archiving strategy to minimize the active data footprint and avoid unnecessarily sending legacy or unused data to the cloud.

Beyond securing resources at rest and in transit, you’ll need a good migration plan that is informed by a discovery and assessment tool which can tell you what you have, how it is being used (or not), what dependencies or relationships exist between all digital assets involved and to help with destination cloud resource usage estimates.

5. Tell us more about OpenText Cloud Editions 21.2. How does its integrations with AWS, Microsoft Azure, SAP and Salesforce, empower enterprises to accelerate their digital transformation regardless of Cloud choice?

The launch of OpenText Cloud Editions (CE) 21.2, is our most integrated, flexible, and secure software release to date. OpenText CE 21.2 delivers an Information Management platform that empowers modern work, delivers engaging experiences, sustainably connects businesses to suppliers, and improves cyber resilience. OpenText CE is delivered through 5 clouds, each focused on key areas of customer need:

• OpenText Content Cloud – Supporting Modern Work
• OpenText Business Network Cloud – Enabling Global Commerce
• OpenText Experience Cloud – Creating Engaging Customer Experiences or Modern Engagement
• OpenText Security and Protection Cloud – Building Cyber Resilience
• OpenText Developer Cloud – Providing Information Management as an API service

Anchoring CE 21.2 is a new Content Services platform to power modern work in the cloud. OpenText Core Content and OpenText Case Management are multi-tenant cloud offerings that are quick and easy to deploy and can be tailored to address unique line of business, departmental, and industry needs.

OpenText believes in empowered customer choice and flexibility, and OpenText CE is optimized to run anywhere – including the OpenText Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Amazon AWS. We also support hybrid and on-premises deployments based on whatever our customers’ needs are.

Regardless of the preferred deployment, OpenText CE helps customers accelerate digital transformation. Benefits include:

• Reduced TCO: With OpenText, customers spend less time and money managing, updating, and integrating applications while also reducing risk and improving security.
• Reduced IT dependency: OpenText CE uses Docker containers and Kubernetes for automated deployment, dynamic scaling, high availability, and simplified management in any environment.
• The ability to customize with confidence: Customers can isolate custom changes to minimize the effort involved in syncing with future updates.
• Improved application portability: Experience ultimate application portability, moving between environments faster and easier, whether testing new capabilities or migrating production environments.
• Helps meet regulatory requirements: Customers can reduce organizational risk with regular security and process enhancements to stay current with regulatory and compliance requirements.

6. How do you see AI, ML, and Cloud computing platforms scaling from here? How would these computing trends in Data management and security practices evolve with the increased adoption of AI ML applications?

AI and ML in cloud computing is exciting because as it scales up, it typically means access to more data. Combining volumes and varieties of data generally translates into increased quality of data, and with better data we can produce better answers. However, there are challenges:

• Regulatory requirements like GDPR require organizations to support private and hybrid cloud deployments to ensure data is hosted and accessed in a compliant way. OpenText customers can tune our AI models for their specific business requirements and content, in a way that keeps their data private and secure, never sharing model metadata metrics.  This is important differentiator from opensource models where any changes to the model are shared openly.
• Hybrid models also require hybrid analytics – where analysis can be performed where the data resides, or data can be migrated and analyzed on its way to a new location. By reducing the distance between analytics and where the content resides, analytical projects require less processing time and power, giving decision makers answers faster to their business-critical questions. This can be further accelerated by using summaries about data sets to focus analytic projects on specific subsets of data that are relevant and high value.
• Organizations need an AI solution that can scale not only in terms of the processing power available in the cloud platforms but potentially to petabytes of data. AI cloud services provide preconfigured space for developers to build cloud applications with features like text mining, BI, etc., where they don’t have to worry about scale, because scale is already built in. OpenText services can integrate process automation, allowing for actionable AI, and integrate with OpenText solutions like content services, business network, and more.
• Finally, with scale comes more need for governance, accountability, usage tracking, auditing, and security. Organizations need visibility into, and control over, who can access the data, the metadata created, and the insights derived from the data. AI solution should be open to everyone who needs it within the enterprise at scale while simultaneously keeping the information secure.  This is a big challenge and one that Magellan has tackled for a long time.

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7. Your prediction on the “future of IT / Cloud Management platforms – how are you planning for the future at OpenText?

I believe that we truly are experiencing a once-in-a-generation opportunity as the legacy systems and applications at the heart of the modern enterprise move to the cloud. This includes the databases and ERP systems that manage operations at the world’s largest companies. As these business-critical workloads move to the cloud, new opportunities emerge to modernize systems and integrate modern technology to create purpose-built solutions leveraging advanced technology.

Tomorrow is a cloud-first world. Evolving capabilities, like SaaS, containerization, the API economy, edge computing and artificial intelligence, are taking the cloud to the next level. These technologies have the potential to transform the market―in ways as profound as the move from client-servers to web application architectures 20 years ago. “Never upgrade again” is a disruptive value proposition. New business models are opening up to innovative companies in the information era.

8. Could you tell us about your remote workplace technology stack and how these tools help you in your product lifecycle management / marketing?

By the end of March 2020, 98 percent of OpenText’s global workforce of more than 14,000 had pivoted to remote work due to COVID-19.

Our own solutions, like OpenText™ Core Share and OpenText™ Core Signature allowed us to continue to securely share, store, and electronically sign files working remotely. Core Share integrates seamlessly with OpenText Information Management (IM) solutions as well as with Microsoft Office 365.  We also leverage Microsoft Teams to ensure our internal teams can collaborate and communicate effectively, regardless of location.

Throughout the pandemic, I have been so proud of our teams’ ability to adapt to new circumstances and embraced remote work to continue and deliver on our commitments to customers. Despite challenges, our teams have not missed any deadlines and we continue to deliver updates across our portfolio every 90 days.

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9. Any advice to every CIO / CISO looking to adopt / upgrade Cloud platforms in 2021

Organizations expect to solve business challenges and not just implement feature-rich technology. They need to deliver a great user experience that is available all the time, performs well, and secures information. I’d urge CIOs, CISOs, and any technology decision makers to speak with their strategic partners to better understand how Professional Services can help deliver business success using proven strategic best practices and ensure they get the most out of their technology investments.

10. Tag a person from the industry whose answers you would like to read here:

Stephen Ludlow, Senior Vice President, Product Management at OpenText.

Thank you, Muhi! That was fun and we hope to see you back on itechnologyseries.com soon.

[To participate in our interview series, please write to us at sghosh@martechseries.com]