OpenText expands enterprise portfolio with AI and Micro Focus integrations

OpenText is enhancing its growing software portfolio with the integration of AI capabilities to help enterprises better utilize and benefit from data.

The company has been in the enterprise software business for decades and its portfolio has grown a whole lot bigger thanks to the $6 billion acquisition of Micro Focus that 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 moved largely to a cloud delivery model, with the OpenText Cloud Editions serving as the company’s leading platform. Today, OpenText announced the release of Cloud Editions 23.3, bringing together the former Micro Focus assets with OpenText’s information management and security assets, while pouring a healthy serving of AI into the overall mix.

“Micro Focus brought no overlapping competitive products and it filled white spaces in our portfolio that completes our information management story,” OpenText EVP and chief product officer Muhi Majzoub told VentureBeat.

Vertica gets new direction with Magellan

The Vertica database has gone through a number of ownership changes since it was first created in 2005. Hewlett-Packard (HP) acquired the company in 2011 and joined Micro Focus in 2017 as part of an $8.8B 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 an on-premises database. As part of the OpenText move, the tool is also moving to the cloud.

An overall part of the OpenText strategy is to create synergy across its expanded portfolio. Previously, Majzoub noted, Vertica did not have a native studio to help enterprises 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 that Vertica is a columnar database that can house trillions of rows, providing users with sub second response time to queries. That database is now integrated with Magellan Studio for BI to enable organizations to get even more benefit from their Vertica data, with an easier way to build dashboards and reports.

Autonomy IDOL helps power OpenText’s AI ambitions

Another key part of the Micro Focus acquisition are the assets attached to software vendor Autonomy.

Autonomy was founded in 1996 and acquired by Hewlett-Packard (HP) in an $11.7B deal in 2011, which was labeled just one year later as one of the worst corporate acquisitions ever. The Autonomy portfolio came over to Micro Focus in 2017 and is now part of OpenText.

A core part of Autonomy is the IDOL engine, which OpenText sees as a powerful machine learning (ML) technology that it is aiming to deeply integrate across its expanded software portfolio. According to Majzoub, the IDOL technology provides an AI engine and capabilities that OpenText can integrate into its various products and clouds to drive automation, insights, and innovation.

“We believe IDOL needs to be integrated everywhere in 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 help aid fraud detection efforts. 

“AI will help us innovate faster and add value to our customers in many different ways in every one of our product areas,” said Majzoub.