Dur­ing SAP­PHIRE NOW and ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence, SAP announced it was strength­en­ing its part­ner­ship of 25 years with Open­Text by extend­ing SAP Cloud Plat­form and pro­vid­ing enter­prise-scale doc­u­ment man­age­ment as a ser­vice with future inte­gra­tion into SAP S/4HANA Cloud and oth­er SAP appli­ca­tions. We learned more about what that means for SAP cus­tomers dur­ing Open­Text Enter­prise World. 

OpenText’s EVP of engi­neer­ing, Muhi Maj­zoub, intro­duced a series of new solutions includ­ing Open­Text Core Cap­ture for SAP, Open­Text Core for SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors, and Open­Text Extend­ed ECM Doc­u­men­tum for SAP.

“We’re build­ing key capa­bil­i­ties for our cus­tomers’ most com­plex dig­i­tal chal­lenges,” Maj­zoub said. ​“We are cre­at­ing addi­tion­al modes of secure col­lab­o­ra­tion, deep­en­ing automa­tion, and pro­vid­ing prac­ti­cal AI solu­tions for infor­ma­tion-inten­sive busi­ness­es. Release 16 offers a tool set to help com­pa­nies trans­form their busi­ness­es and devel­op a sus­tained and com­pet­i­tive infor­ma­tion advantage.” 

The Infor­ma­tion Advantage

Mark Bar­renechea, OpenText’s CEO and CTO sug­gest­ed the era of dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion is in fact in the rear view and, ​“We’ve moved beyond it. We are in a post ERP era and we’re now in the infor­ma­tion era.”

So, what makes infor­ma­tion so impor­tant and how does Open­Text pro­vide SAP cus­tomers access to the infor­ma­tion they need to make bet­ter busi­ness deci­sions? What makes this part­ner­ship so unique is the fact that it is based on inte­gra­tion. Open­Text extends its con­tent-relat­ed capa­bil­i­ties into SAP’s prod­uct port­fo­lio and it’s done seam­less­ly. With more than 5,000 shared cus­tomers, Open­Text is SAP’s strate­gic dig­i­tal con­tent plat­form provider. All the doc­u­ment cre­ation, pro­cess­ing, stor­age, and man­age­ment for all of SAP is pro­vid­ed through Open­Text, and they’re sold and sup­port­ed as SAP products. 

“That inte­gra­tion ulti­mate­ly pro­vides busi­ness val­ue and an infor­ma­tion advan­tage,” said Robert Thiele, senior direc­tor, ecosys­tem pro­gram man­ag­er for Open­Text. ​“When you have a solu­tion that isn’t inte­grat­ed, then you have gaps in the process. But when it is inte­grat­ed, then it makes it eas­i­er to dig­i­tize, inno­vate, and com­mu­ni­cate. It makes it eas­i­er to have an intel­li­gent enterprise.”

An Intel­li­gent Enter­prise Is Connected

SAP and Open­Text work togeth­er to devel­op prod­ucts that are aligned with SAP’s road map and release cycle. ​“I would say that Open­Text is the SAP HANA for dig­i­tal con­tent doc­u­ments,” Thiele said. 

Through­out var­i­ous break­out ses­sions, SAP cus­tomers dis­cussed how using Open­Text solu­tions helped sim­pli­fy process­es, added val­ue to the busi­ness inter­nal­ly and exter­nal­ly, aid­ed in data gov­er­nance pro­grams, or improved human resources operations. 

ASUG mem­ber, Salt Riv­er Project, looked to Open­Text Ven­dor Invoice Man­age­ment (VIM) sys­tem dur­ing its SAP ECC 6.0 imple­men­ta­tion to dig­i­tize its invoice man­age­ment sys­tem. Senior Com­put­er Ana­lyst Eliz­a­beth Mel Payne said, ​“We did every­thing man­u­al­ly in our old lega­cy sys­tem. We didn’t have any met­rics we could use, and we couldn’t see the prob­lems in our AP or pro­cure­ment. We knew they were hap­pen­ing; we just couldn’t prove it or zone in on them.” Using VIM helped the com­pa­ny iden­ti­fy the issues and improve process­es. ​“We’ve added more val­ue into the busi­ness and the AP depart­ment than just act­ing as data entry,” Payne added.

The Uni­fied Layer 

The Open­Text solu­tion exten­sions work across all lines of busi­ness by dig­i­tiz­ing and pro­cess­ing any inbound con­tent that comes into an orga­ni­za­tion. ​“We bring a uni­fied user expe­ri­ence where con­tent is part of the dai­ly work,” said Dr. Mar­cel Hoff­mann, OpenText’s senior direc­tor of SAP ecosys­tems. ​“We also deliv­er con­tent to inter­nal and exter­nal actors, which means more than just send­ing an email. It means assem­bling the con­tent, pulling data out of many sys­tems, bring­ing it togeth­er, and this is all under­pinned with a lev­el of secu­ri­ty, con­trol fea­tures, and archiv­ing capa­bil­i­ties to meet reg­u­la­to­ry requirements.” 

Open­Text pro­vides its own machine learn­ing capa­bil­i­ties to under­stand and iden­ti­fy the doc­u­ment type — whether it’s audio, visu­al, text, or some­thing else — and then place it where it should go. ​“We extract the data from the doc­u­ment, then we val­i­date the doc­u­ment and look for any incon­sis­ten­cies that may need checks or cor­rec­tions, and we can do this right away with­out hav­ing to learn from 100,000 dif­fer­ent sce­nar­ios,” said Dr. Marc Diefen­bruch, OpenText’s direc­tor prod­uct man­age­ment for enter­prise applications. 

Keep­ing the Con­nec­tion Strong

SAP and Open­Text will con­tin­ue to strength­en their part­ner­ship and deliv­er on the announce­ments made dur­ing both con­fer­ences. In the near term, Open­Text will work on com­plet­ing its jour­ney to move its exist­ing port­fo­lio into the cloud and expand appli­ca­tions solu­tions such as the one for SAP SuccessFactors. 

“We will build out three dif­fer­ent lay­ers with SAP,” Thiele said. ​“We will pro­vide stan­dard ser­vices, pre­mi­um appli­ca­tions, and then on top of that we will con­tin­ue to build new applications.” 

As for keep­ing in touch with ASUG mem­bers, Thiele said, ​“It’s very impor­tant to keep the con­nec­tion going through com­mu­ni­ty.” This is ulti­mate­ly how both Open­Text and SAP can con­tin­ue to learn from their cus­tomers and devel­op solu­tions that will help keep busi­ness­es mov­ing toward becom­ing an intel­li­gent enter­pris­es. For now, wel­come to the infor­ma­tion era, and enjoy the ride. 

Inter­est­ed in con­nect­ing with the lat­est ideas in enter­prise infor­ma­tion man­age­ment? Join us on Oct. 28 – 30 in Min­neapo­lis for ASUG Expe­ri­ence for Enter­prise Infor­ma­tion Man­age­ment.