OpenText Launches Legal And HR Tools Alongside EP5 And Partners With Google Cloud

OpenText on Wednesday will introduce an enhancement pack to version 16 of its enterprise information management system dubbed EP5, along with new applications for departments like HR and legal while also announcing a partnership to offer its technology as managed services through Google Cloud.

Waterloo, Ont.-based OpenText said EP5 will bring richer user interfaces, deeper integration between its products and an array of artificial intelligence capabilities. The latter include the use of text mining from its Magellan technology into its Workforce Engagement Management tool, as well as a way to capture and extract information from SAP software through machine learning.

OpenText vice-president of marketing Stephen Ludlow explained how Magellan could be used in combination with Qfiniti, the company’s contact center tool, to look at support call recordings, for example, and assess the sentiment of customers in different situations based on keywords and other data.

“Customers are looking for the analytics to be embedded as part of the solution as opposed to a separate piece,” Ludlow told B2B News Network in advance of Wednesday EP5 announcements. “AI is really moving from science projects to a search for more packaged solutions.”

OpenText’s latest line-of-business applications, meanwhile, will become part of its OT2 software-as-a-service platform, designed with hybrid cloud users in mind. OpenText Legal Center, for example, will allow in-house counsel to share and collaborate on documents with new clients, while OpenText Quality Center will help securely manage information in highly regulated industries such as life sciences.

“When we acquired Documentum, there were a number of questions of what would happen to it, as well as our own products in that space,” Ludlow explained. “Our answer was that, absolutely both will not only be around, but also that we will continue to support them and add new features. That was what this release was about.”

Beyond EP5 and the OT2 announcements, the partnership with Google Cloud is focused on helping OpenText customers that want to scale their deployments of its software more easily using the former’s massive on-demand infrastructure. While he said nothing is “off the table,” Ludlow admitted the agreement does not include a joint sales or go-to-market component, nor have the two firms committed to any exploration of how OpenText software might work with G-Suite, Google Analytics and some of its other products and services.

“The starting point is that this is a joint engineering activity to optimize some of our key platforms,” he said. “Right now the MOU is really just the (focusing on) activity to make use of their hyper-scale capabilities and make what was traditionally thought of as our on-premises applications easy to spin up as SaaS applications.”

On Tuesday, OpenText also announced a partnership whereby its customer communications software, Exstream, will be available through Salesforce’s AppExchange marketplace for enterprise SaaS tools. Ludlow said the partnership will be a boon to business professionals that are focused on activities such as fostering document generation directly within Salesforce applications.