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OpenText is enhancing its growing software portfolio with the integration of artificial intelligence capabilities to help businesses better use and benefit from data.
The company has been in the enterprise software industry for decades, and its portfolio has grown significantly with the $6 billion acquisition of Micro focus which closed at the end of January. The Micro Focus portfolio has a long list of software assets, including the Vertica database and the Autonomy IDOL platform.
In recent years, OpenText has largely moved to a cloud delivery model, with OpenText Cloud Edition serving as the company’s leading platform. Today, OpenText announced the release of Cloud Editions 23.3, bringing together Micro Focus’ legacy assets with OpenText’s information management and security assets, while adding a healthy portion of AI into the overall mix.
“Micro Focus has not brought competing overlapping products and filled in the blanks in our portfolio that complement our information management story,” OpenText EVP and Chief Product Officer Muhi Majzoub told VentureBeat.
Vertica takes a new direction with Magellan
The Vertica database has undergone a number of ownership changes since it was first created in 2005. Hewlett-Packard (HP) acquired the company in 2011 and became part of Micro Focus in 2017 as part of an $8.8 billion deal that saw a large number of HP’s software assets become part of the Micro Focus portfolio.
For much of its history, Vertica has been a local database. As part of the OpenText move, the tool is also moving to the cloud.
A general part of OpenText’s strategy is to create synergies across its expanded portfolio. Previously, Majzoub noted, Vertica lacked a native studio to help companies easily develop business intelligence dashboards and reports. As it turns out, the OpenText Magellan platform is all about business intelligence reporting and data discovery.
Majzoub said Vertica is a columnar database that can host trillions of rows, providing users with sub-second query response times. That database is now integrated with Magellan Studio for BI to enable organizations to get even more benefits from their Vertica data, with an easier way to create dashboards and reports.
Autonomy IDOL helps power OpenText’s AI ambitions
Another key part of the Micro Focus acquisition is the assets associated with software vendor Autonomy.
Autonomy was founded in 1996 and acquired by Hewlett-Packard (HP) in a $11.7 billion deal in 2011, labeled just a year later as one of the worst corporate acquisitions ever. The Autonomy portfolio moved to Micro Focus in 2017 and is now part of OpenText.
A key part of Autonomy is the IDOL engine, which OpenText sees as a powerful machine learning (ML) technology that it aims to integrate deeply into its expanded software portfolio. According to Majzoub, the IDOL technology provides an AI engine and functionality that OpenText can integrate into its various products and clouds to drive automation, insights and innovation.
“We believe IDOL should be integrated everywhere into every part of our portfolio,” said Majzoub.
For example, he explained that the IDOL AI engine can be used to analyze content to look for personally identifiable information (PII). It can also be used in OpenText’s security products to aid fraud detection efforts.
“AI will help us innovate faster and add value to our customers in many different ways across each of our product areas,” said Majzoub.
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