OpenText World: 8 Takeaways from Mark Barrenechea's Keynote

Artificial intelligence (AI) is more of an ontology than a technology, and OpenText is focused on helping companies realize and maximize what AI can offer them to improve business outcomes.

That’s according to Mark Barrenechea, OpenText CEO and CTO. He gave the opening keynote at this week’s OpenText World in Las Vegas. The conference is titled “Welcome to the AI Revolution.”

OpenText’s Mark Barrenechea

“I think AI is much beyond a technology; it’s an ontology,” he said. “It’s an ontology for new creativity, for new uses of data, new forms of trust. And it’s not rhetoric. Every role, every organization, every industry, everything will change. No business or human will be spared from this new ontology. And if we think of it just as the technology versus an ontology, we will lose this expressive power. I love this quote from CS Lewis written many, many decades ago: ‘It’s not like teaching a horse to jump higher and higher, and better and better; let’s turn this creature into a winged creature.’ And I think this is what the AI revolution can do for us. It will change everything. Let’s change into winged creatures from this new ontology.”

OpenText World: Big Year with Micro Focus Acquisition

It’s been a big year for OpenText. It has “massively” expanded its information management vision with its acquisition of Micro Focus, Barrenechea said. Micro Focus is an enterprise software provider that helps customers accelerate their digital transformations.

“We’ve massively expanded our information management vision, from modern work, business fabrics, experience, the developer security and information, infrastructure and apps automation, with the OpenText Cloud in the center and information management as our North Star,” he said at OpenText World. “We are going to work really hard to integrate all this automation to bring you an information management integrated cloud. This is where we’re focused. We spent time and deep thought of what we think the definition of information management is. And we’ve spent the last 35 years automating in these domains, our business clouds and creating some very large data sets along the way.”

It’s been a big year for OpenText in terms of innovation, Barrenechea said.

“I wanted to go into the engineering bucket and pick out just 20 of the big innovations,” he said. “[Those include] core content and SaaS, a SaaS version of enterprise content management, deep integration to Google Workspace, and [AWS] Control Tower in the business fabrics. We’ve expanded our business network to include the midmarket to now bring in NetSuite and Microsoft Dynamics. On the experience side, we’ve moved it to a cloud platform and opened it up for you to build applications on top of that VR API services. For the developer, no-code testing, and soon you will see a no-code developer as well.”

See our slideshow above for eight key takeaways from Barrenechea’s OpenText World keynote.