Show me the money: Financials, sales and support at @OpenText Analyst Summit 2019

We started the second day of the OpenText Analyst Summit 2019 with their CFO, Madhu Ranganathan, talking about their growth via acquisitions and organic growth. She claimed that their history of acquisitions shows that M&A does work — a point with which some industry specialists may not agree, given the still overlapping collection of products in their portfolio — but there’s no doubt that they’re growing well based on their six-year financials, across a broad range of industries and geographies. She sees this as a position for continuing to scale to $1B in operating cash flow by June 2021, an ambitious but achievable target, on their existing 25-year run.

Ted Harrison, EVP of Worldwide Sales, was up next with an update on their customer base: 85 of the 100 largest companies in the world, 17 of the top 20 financial services companies, 20 of the top 20 life sciences companies, etc. He walked through the composition of the 1,600 sales professionals in their teams, from the account executives and sales reps to the solution consultants and other support roles. They also have an extensive partner channel bringing domain expertise and customer relationships. He highlighted a few customers in some of the key product areas — GM for digital identity management, Nestle for supply chain management, Malaysia Airports for AI and analytics,and British American Tobacco for SuccessFactors-OT2 integration — with a focus on customers that are using OpenText in ways that span their business operations in a significant way.

James McGourlay, EVP of Customer Operations, covered how their global technical support and professional services organization has aligned with the customer journey from deployment to adoption to expansion of their OpenText products. With 1,400 professional services people, they have 3,000 engagements going on at any given time across 30 countries. As with most large vendors’ PS groups, they have a toolbox of solution accelerators, best practices, and expert resources to help with initial implementation and ongoing operations. This is also where they partner with systems integrators such as CGI, Accenture and Deloitte, and platform partners like Microsoft and Oracle. He addressed the work of their 1,500 technical support professionals across four major centers of excellence for round-the-clock support, co-located with engineering teams to provide a more direct link to technical solutions. They have a strong focus on customer satisfaction in PS and technical support because they realize that happy customers tend to buy more stuff; this is particularly important when you have a lot of different products to sell to those customers to expand your footprint within their organizations.

Good to hear more about the corporate and operations side than I normally cover, but looking forward to this afternoon’s deeper dives into product technology.

Product Innovation session at @OpenText Analyst Summit 2019

Muhi Majzoub, EVP of Engineering, continued the first day of the analyst summit with a deeper look at their technology progress in the past year as well as future direction. I only cover a fraction of OpenText products; even in the ECM and BPM space, they have a long history of acquisitions and it’s hard to keep on top of all of them.

Their Content Services provides information integration into a variety of key business applications, including Salesforce and SAP; this allows users to work in those applications and see relevant content in that context without having to worry where or how it’s stored and secured. Majzoub covered a number of the new features of their content platforms (alas, there are still at least two content platforms, and let’s not even talk about process platforms) as well as user experience, digital asset management, AI-powered content analytics and eDiscovery. He talked about their solutions for LegalTech and digital forensics (not areas that I follow closely), then moved on to the much broader areas of AI, machine learning and analytics as they apply to capture, content and process, as well as their business network transactions.

He talked about AppWorks, which is their low-code development environment but also includes their BPM platform capabilities since they have a focus on process- and content-centric applications such as case management. They have a big push on vertical application development, both in terms of enabling it for their customers and also for building their own vertical offerings. Interestingly, they are also allowing for citizen development of micro-apps in their Core cloud content management platform that includes document workflows.

The product session was followed by a showcase and demos hosted by Stephen Ludlow, VP of Product Marketing. He emphasized that they are a platform company, but since line-of-business buyers want to buy solutions rather than platforms, they need to be able to demonstrate applications that bring together many of their capabilities. We had five quick demos:

  • AI-augmented capture using Captive capture and Magellan AI/analytics: creating an insurance claim first notice of loss from an unstructured email, while gathering aggregate analytics for fraud detection and identifying vehicle accident hotspots.
  • Unsupervised machine learning for eDiscovery to identify concepts in large sets of documents in legal investigations, then using supervised learning/classification to further refine search results and prioritize review of specific documents.
  • Integrated dashboard and analytics for supply chain visibility and management, including integrating, harmonizing and cleansing data and transactions from multiple internal and external sources, and drilling down into details of failed transactions.
  • HR application integrating SAP SuccessFactors with content management to store and access documents that make up an employee HR file, including identifying missing documents and generating customized documents.
  • Dashboard for logging and handling non-conformance and corrective/preventative actions for Life Sciences manufacturing, including quality metrics and root cause analysis, and linking to reference documentation.

Good set of business use cases to finish off our first (half) day of the analyst summit.

Snowed in at the @OpenText Analyst Summit 2019

Mark Barrenechea, OpenText’s CEO and CTO, kicked off the analyst summit with his re:imagine keynote here in Boston amidst a snowy winter storm that ensures a captive audience. He gave some of the current OpenText stats –100M end users over 120,000 customers, 2.8B in revenue last year — before expanding into a review of how the market has shifted over the past 10 years, fueled by changes in technology and infrastructure. What’s happened on the way to digital and AI is what he calls the zero theorem: zero trust (guard against security and privacy breaches), zero IT (bring your own device, work in the cloud), zero people (automate everything possible) and zero down time (everything always available).

Their theme for this year is to help their customers re:imagine work, re:imagine their workforce, and re:imagine automation and AI. This starts with OpenText’s intelligent information core (automation, AI, APIs and data management), then expands with both their EIM platforms and EIM applications. OpenText has a pretty varied product portfolio (to say the least) and is bringing many of these components together into a more cohesive integrated vision in both the content services and the business network spaces. More importantly, they are converging their many, many engines so that in the future, customers won’t have to decide between which ECM or BPM engine, for example.

They are providing a layer of RESTful services on top of their intelligent information core services (ECM, BPM, Capture, Business Network, Analytics/AI, IoT), then allow that to be consumed either by standard development tools in a technical IDE, or using the AppWorks low-code environment. The Cloud OT2 architecture provides about 40 services for consumption in these development environments or by OpenText’s own vertical applications such as People Center.

Barrenechea finished up with a review of how OpenText is using OpenText to transform their own business, using AI for looking at some of their financial and people management data to help guide them towards improvements. They’ll be investing $2B in R&D over the next five years to help them become even bigger in the $100B EIM market, both through the platform and more increasingly through vertical applications.

We’ll be digging into more of the details later today and tomorrow as the summit continues, so stay tuned.

Next up was Ted Harrison, EVP of Worldwide Sales, interviewing one of their customers: Gopal Padinjaruveetil, VP and Chief Information Security Officer at The Auto Club Group. AAA needs no introduction as a roadside assistance organization, but they also have insurance, banking, travel, car care and advocacy business areas, with coordinated member access to services across multiple channels. It’s this concept of the connected member that has driven their focus on digital identity for both people and devices, and how AI can help them to reduce risk and improve security by detecting abnormal patterns.

TechnicityTO 2018: Cool tech projects

The afternoon session at Technicity started with a few fast presentations on cool projects going on in the city. Too quick to grab details from the talks, but here’s who we heard from:

  • Dr. Eileen de Villa, medical officer of health at Toronto Public Health, and Lawrence ETA, deputy CIO at the city of Toronto, on using AI to drive public health outcomes.
  • Angela Chung, project director at Toronto Employment and Social Services, Children’s Services, Shelter Support and Housing, on client-centric support through service platform integration.
  • Matthew Tenney, data science and visualization team supervisor, on IoT from streetcars to urban forestry for applications such as environmental data sensing.
  • Arash Farajian, policy planning consultant, on Toronto Water’s use of GIS, smart sensors, drones (aerial and submersible) and augmented reality.

The rest of the afternoon was the 10th annual Toronto’s Got IT Awards of Excellence, but unfortunately I had to duck out for other meetings, so that’s it for my Technicity 2018 coverage.

TechnicityTO 2018: CIO @RobMeikle keynote

Rob Meikle, CIO at the city of Toronto, gave a fast-paced and inspiring keynote to close out the morning at Technicity. I can’t do justice to his talk here (hopefully there will be a video, because he’s a great speaker), but a few points did resonate with me.

  • There’s a correlation between digital access and socioeconomic level, and we need to use technology to drive digital inclusion.
  • Interactions between government and constituents needs to be more digital and more responsive.
  • The most inclusive cities are the most successful.
  • Focus on meaningful and measurable outcomes to make the city prosperous.
  • IT organization is being reworked to support a digital city model.
  • Policies need to be transformed faster to keep up with data usages: innovation is in policies, not just technology.
  • Increasing digital literacy is a mandate for the city in order to benefit residents.
  • The city creates a lot of opportunities, but also needs to focus on outcomes to benefit all residents — such as the one in four children in the city who live in poverty.

Good focus on how public sector technology should focus on social good as well as making government more efficient.

If I see a link to the video published, I’ll come back and update this post.

Update: here’s the video!

TechnicityTO 2018: Administrative Penalty System case study

We had a quick review of the City’s Administrative Penalty System (APS), which lets you pay or dispute your parking ticket online, with a panel made up of Lenny Di Marco, senior systems integrator; Kelli Chapman, director of prosecution services; and Susan Garossino, director of court services.

Technologically, this was a challenge to integrate old COBOL systems and newer systems across both city and provincial agencies, but there was also a cultural change to do some level of dispute resolution online rather than in the courts. Paying online isn’t new (I seem to remember paying a ticket online years ago when I still had a car), but the process of requesting a review and appealing a review result now happens in a matter of weeks rather than years. In addition to the obvious benefit of a timely outcome – which is better for citizens to get things sorted out, for the city in terms of resolving tickets faster, and for police officers who don’t have to attend court if the issue is resolved online — this also frees up court time for more serious charges. It’s still possible to do this in person, but a lot of people don’t have the time to get to a city office during business hours, or don’t want to go through the face-to-face process.

This is not just a matter of keeping up with regular day-to-day parking violations, but managing peaks that occur when the city has ticketing blitzes (usually caused when an elected official wants to make a statement about being tough on parking offenders).

The whole project took 12-14 months from inception to rollout, and is based on integrating and extending their COBOL back end and other existing systems, rather than purchasing new technology or bringing in outside help. Definitely some technology challenges, but also assessing the needs of the stakeholders from the city, the province and the police so that they can do their job including the new online review and adjudication roles.

Cool stuff, even if you don’t like paying parking tickets. Sounds like they’re already working on another integration project for next year related to Vision Zero, although we didn’t get the details.

TechnicityTO 2018: Innovative Toronto

The second session at today’s Technicity conference highlighted some of the technology innovation going on at the city, with a panel featuring Grant Coffey, director of strategy and program management at the City of Toronto; Tina Scott, Blockchain proof of concept lead for the city; and Gabe Sawhney, executive director of Code for Canada and a representative for Civic Hall Toronto. Jim Love, CIO of IT World Canada, moderated.

There are a number of different technology innovations underway at the city: some of them are public services, such as public WiFi and the offerings of Code for Canada and Civic Hall, while others are about how the city does business internally and with its commercial partners, such as blockchain in procurement processes.

Civic Hall has some interesting programs for connecting city government with other organizations for the purpose of building solutions together — I’ve been aware of and involved in things like this over several years, and they can yield great results in conjunction with the open data initiative at the city. Toronto also has a Civic Innovation Office as an in-house accelerator to help come up with innovative solutions to tough problems. These private and public programs aren’t in competition: they both foster innovation, and support different constituents in different ways.

Blockchain is starting to gain a foothold in the city through some training and an internal hackathon earlier this year to develop proofs of concept; this provided exposure to both business and technology areas about the potential for blockchain applications. Now, they are trading ideas with some of the other levels of government, such at provincial ministries, about using blockchain, and developing use cases for initial applications. They’re still just coming out of the experimental stage, and are looking at uses such as cross-jurisdictional/cross-organizational information sharing as near-term targets.

It’s not all positive, of course: challenges exist in evolving the city employee culture to take advantage of innovation and do things differently (which is pretty much the same as in private industry), as well as changing policies and governance best practices to be ready for innovation rather than playing catch-up. Sharing success stories is one of the best ways to help promote those changes.

TechnicityTO 2018: Taming Transportation Troubles with Technology

Every year, IT World Canada organizes the Technicity conference in Toronto, providing a technology showcase for the city and an opportunity to hear about some of the things that are happening both in the city government and organizations that operate here. Fawn Annan, president of ITWC, opened the conference and introduced the city manager, Chris Murray for a backgrounder on the city as an economic engine, and how technology enables that.

The sessions started with a panel on transportation technology, moderated by Jaime Leverton, GM of Cogeco Peer 1 and featuring three people from the City of Toronto: Barb Gray, General Manager of Transportation Services; Ryan Landon, Autonomous Vehicle Lead; and Jesse Coleman, Transportation Big Data Team Leader. Erik Mok, Chief Enterprise Architect for the Toronto Transit Commission, is also supposed to be on the panel but not arrived yet: hopefully not delayed on the TTC. 🙂

They spoke about the need for data collection in order to determine how to improve transportation in the city, whether related to personal vehicles, public transit, cycling or walking. In the past, this used to require manual data collection on the street; these days, the proliferation of traffic cameras, embedded sensors and smartphones means that a lot of data is being collected about how people are moving around the streets. This creates a need for understanding how to work with the resulting big data, and huge opportunities for gaining better insights into making the streets more efficient and safer for everyone. Since the city is a big proponent of open data, this means that the data that the city collects is available (in an anonymized format) to anyone who wants to analyze it. The city is trying to do some of this analysis themselves (without the benefit of a data scientist job classification at the city), but the open data initiative means that a lot of commercial organizations — from big companies to startups — are incorporating this into apps and services. For the King Street Pilot, a year-old project that restricts the travel of private cars on our busiest streetcar route in order to prioritize public transit, the city deployed new types of sensors to measure the impact: Bluetooth sensors that track devices, traffic cameras with embedded AI, and more. This allows for unbiased measurement of the actual impact of the pilot (and other initiatives) that can be communicated to constituents.

There are privacy safeguards in place for ensuring that Bluetooth devices that are tracked can’t be traced to an individual on an ongoing basis, but video is a larger issue: in general, intelligence related to the transportation issues is extracted from the video, then the video is discarded. They mentioned the need for privacy by design, that is, building in privacy considerations from the start of any data collection project, not trying to add it on later.

They also discussed some of the smart sensors and signals being used for controlling traffic signals, where the length of the waiting queue of vehicles can influence when the traffic signals change. This isn’t just related to vehicles, however: there’s an impact on pedestrians that use the same intersections, and on public health in terms of people with mobility challenges.

Cities like Seattle, San Francisco and New York, that started with transportation data collection much earlier than Toronto, are doing some innovative things but the panel feels that we’re catching up: there’s an autonomous shuttle project in the works now to fill some of the gaps in our transit system, for example. There’s also some work being done with drones to monitor traffic congestion around special events (presumably both vehicle and pedestrian) in order to understand dispersal patterns.

Interesting audience questions on data storage (Amazon AWS) and standardization of data formats, especially related to IoT.

As a Toronto resident who uses public transit, walks a lot and sometimes even drives, some great information on how big data is feeding into improving mobility for everyone.

Webinar: Unlocking Back Office Value by Automating Processes

I’ve been quiet here for a while – the result of having too much real work, I suppose Winking smile – but wanted to highlight a webinar that I’ll be doing on December 13th with TrackVia and one of their customers, First Guaranty Mortgage Corporation, on automating back office processes:

With between 300 to 800 back-office processes to monitor and manage, it’s no wonder financial services leaders look to automate error-prone manual processes. Yet, IT resources are scarce and reserved for only the most strategic projects. Join Sandy Kemsley, industry analyst, Pete Khanna, CEO of TrackVia, and Sarah Batangan, COO of First Guaranty Mortgage Corporation, for an interactive discussion about how financial services are digitizing the back-office to unlock great economic value — with little to no IT resources.

During this webinar, you’ll learn about:

  • Identifying business-critical processes that need to be faster
  • Key requirements for automating back office processes
  • Role of low-code workflow solutions in automating processes
  • Results achieved by automating back office processes

I had a great discussion with Pete Khanna, CEO of TrackVia, while sitting on a panel with him back in January at OPEX Week, and we’ve been planning to do this webinar ever since then. The idea is that this is more of a conversational format: I’ll do a bit of context-setting up front, then it will become more of a free-flowing discussion between Sarah Batangan (COO of First Guaranty), Pete and myself based around the topics shown above.

You can register for the webinar here.

Unintended consequences (the good kind) of DigitalTransformation with @jkyriakidis

Jordan Kyriakidis, CEO of QRA Corp, spoke at a session at ITWC’s Toronto digital transformation conference on some of the unexpected consequences of technological advances in terms of collaboration and cross-fertilization of ideas. QRA is a tech startup in Atlantic Canada, and Kyriakidis’ examples are about how companies in that relatively small (economically) region are encouraging new ways of thinking about solving business problems through these sorts of “collisions”.

Addressing the complexity introduced by advancing technology means that we have to invent new methods and tools: he gave the example in industrial complexity where design moved from paper to computer-aided design, then added electronic design automation when the complexity of where to put which chip overwhelmed human capabilities, and now design verification allows for model-based (requirements-driven) design to be validated before more expensive engineering and production begins.

Another example in precision diagnosis and treatment was around data-driven farming, combining computer vision and big data analytics (plus drone delivery of individual plant treatment) to optimize crop yields.

His third example was of integrating and analyzing a variety of data sources about a specific athlete to allow a coach to optimize training and performance for that athlete in their chosen sport.

His main theme of precision diagnosis and treatment — essentially, doing something different for every case based on the context — can be extended in pretty much any industry: consider the attempts by many consumer-facing companies to customize individual customer experiences. Interesting look at companies that are actually doing it.