OpenText is the global leader in Enterprise Information Management (EIM) software and cloud services. The company works with the largest organizations in the world to power digital transformations and empower the intelligent and connected enterprise. OpenText offers greater business insight to make data-driven decisions for success by enabling companies to digitize processes and supply chains and discover value in their information with analytics and artificial intelligence.

OpenText provides Big Data Analytics solutions with an easy-to-use, visual environment where business users can upload their own data, clean and enrich it, and blend data from disparate sources. They can then apply pre-coded algorithms and analytical techniques to gain insights from massive datasets – millions of rows – on the fly. In 2017, OpenText launched Magellan, a comprehensive AI and analytics platform that derives insights from Big Data and Big Content. Magellan is a pre-integrated solution that delivers machine learning, text mining, predictive analytics, and enterprise-grade business intelligence (BI) to enable enterprises to unlock the value from their stores of structured and unstructured data and inform better decisions.

OpenText began its life in the early 90s as a spin-off company from the University of Waterloo and by 2012 emerged as the global leader in EIM via a strategy that combined strategic acquisitions with organic growth. With 58 completed acquisitions since 1991, today more than 12,000 OpenText employees serve 120,000 customers and more than 100 million end users.

A Distinguished Product Leader

Mark Gamble is the Senior Director of Product Marketing for Analytics at OpenText. He has been involved in all aspects of architecting, developing, implementing and marketing enterprise analytics solutions for over 20 years, with expertise in embedded analytics and Machine Learning. He started his career in BI and analytics as a field engineer helping implement analytics solutions for customers in manufacturing, health care, financial services and other industries. Mark is currently responsible for marketing the OpenText Analytics product line and solutions to the largest enterprises, governments and organizations around the world.

At the Forefront of Innovation

For AI and analytics, OpenText is doing several core things differently than competitors like IBM Watson:

First, the company combines the strengths of OpenText and the open source community. OpenText Magellan is built on the powerful, open source Apache Spark computing foundation (including MLlib, its built-in machine learning library). Because Apache Spark is open-source, Magellan allows taking advantage of the flexibility, extensibility, and diversity of an open product stack while maintaining full ownership of the data and algorithms.

Second, Magellan includes powerful text mining and sentiment analysis functions, based on innovative computational linguistics research, which give it the power to understand nuances of meaning, emotional tone, and intention in unstructured data such as memos, news articles, and social media, not just numbers, labels, and other inputs in structured data.

Finally, OpenText is integrating this new technology directly into its applications for Enterprise Information Management, creating convenient solutions to business challenges such as content capture for paperwork processing, or predictive maintenance for machinery and vehicles. This allows the company to create a more accessible, scalable and affordable future for AI.

The result of this innovation is in the ability to operationalize models in business-friendly interfaces in OpenText's vast portfolio of enterprise information applications and services including Customer Experience Management, Business Network, Digital Process Automation, and Content Management.

IoT and AI Combine to Deliver Intelligent Insights

The combination of IoT and AI is revolutionizing business today. Together AI and IoT represent 10 billion smart machines connected to the internet or more machines than humans. Companies are using AI and machine learning to understand supply chain behavior, transportation, inventories, demand, production, maintenance needs, customer behavior, etc. like never before. This allows AI-enhanced applications to do amazing things like:

•  Move inventory and re-align supply chains on the fly to deliver instantly.

•  Analyze the text of user interactions to gauge consumer sentiment, improve customer service, and drive product development.

•  Identify customers in real-time to more accurately target offers, leading to stronger sales and higher profits.

•  Anticipate wear patterns and maintenance needs to forestall breakdowns, increase uptime, and reduce unnecessary service work.

•  Distinguish routine cases that can be automatically processed from problematic ones requiring human judgment; reduce the cost and administrative burden of processing claims or submitting government paperwork to improve service and regulatory compliance.

Awards and Achievements

OpenText has received very positive feedback from customers, major industry analysts and industry award groups. Most recently, OpenText was a finalist in the 2018 PwC Canada Vision to Reality Awards, honoring Canadian companies whose innovative ideas have added value to people, business or society. Recently, Magellan as an innovative AI platform won a bronze 2018 Stevie Award, from the American Business Association, for New Software Product of the Year in the AI/Machine Learning Solution division.

Challenges Faced by the Industry

Mark believes the analytics market is crowded, changing rapidly, and very competitive. It presents several unique challenges, including:

•  Ever-rising customer expectations: OpenText users are accustomed to the visual appeal and ease-of-use of consumer apps. The company is committed to delivering the same intuitive design and experience with its enterprise-grade analytics and AI solutions.

•  An expanding user base: It's not just data scientists; business analysts and executives also want access to AI solutions. They are demanding software that is state-of-the-art, powerful, with specialized analytics functions for experts, but within the reach of a wider range of users.

•  Ever-growing data volumes: 90% of the data generated in all of history was generated in the last two years. A more connected world, IoT, and other forces continue to accelerate the rate of data generation. This pushes companies like ours to continually increase the capacity to process large volumes of data.

AI is the Future of Growth

As AI goes from innovative concept to imperative for business, OpenText Magellan is poised to meet today's needs as well as tomorrow's emerging trends in AI. Mark feels organizations should be ready to consider the emerging ethical concerns in the AI market, which include:

•  Talent re-assignment. What happens when AI automates jobs? OpenText believes that AI will optimize tasks, not eliminate jobs. Magellan and its AI will create room for people to assume more complex roles, moving from the physical work that dominated the pre-digital era to the augmented workforce that characterizes strategic and administrative work in our digitized society.

•  AI bias. While artificial intelligence makes decisions with speed, and accuracy far beyond that of humans, it cannot always be trusted to be fair and neutral. We shouldn't forget that AI systems are created by humans, who can inadvertently pass on their own biases and judgements into learning models, with sometimes disastrous results. Magellan allows for auditing and monitoring of Machine Learning models, which can be validated and adjusted against undue bias through transparency. If used "for good", AI has the potential to advance social progress and become a catalyst for positive change.