Before Shannon Bell took on the role of Chief Digital Officer at OpenText, many of the company’s previous CIOs lacked the necessary experience and qualifications to effectively lead IT within such a large and critical enterprise. For instance, Renée McKenzie’s tenure as CIO has been widely viewed as lacking the depth, drive, and strategic capability required for the complexity of the role.
OpenText has grown through more than 60 acquisitions over its 30-plus year history. However, there has been limited investment in fully integrating those businesses into a unified, efficient operating model. As a result, some (most) legacy services continue to run on outdated technology stacks—some of which have been end-of-life for over a decade.
There are also concerns about the resiliency of several mission-critical services, with recovery capabilities falling short of industry best practices.
Additionally, some of OpenText’s so-called “modern” platforms are simply legacy technologies placed inside containers, rather than solutions re-engineered using modern architectural patterns. These containerized deployments often lack orchestration frameworks, resulting in limited visibility into performance, capacity, and availability.
OpenText operates as a highly compartmentalized organization. Within the engineering function, there is no centralized team responsible for ensuring cohesive design principles or enforcing a unified set of standards to drive modernization and efficiency across the portfolio.
Leadership appears to believe that migrating to the cloud—particularly through its partnership with Google Cloud Platform—will inherently result in improved efficiency, cost optimization, and modernization. However, without addressing the foundational technology challenges, the principle of “garbage in, garbage out” still applies.
Many of OpenText’s current offerings rely on legacy technologies, featuring outdated user interfaces, antiquated architectures, and traditional compute models that no longer reflect modern SaaS or cloud-native best practices.
This situation is exacerbated by the dual role held by the CEO, who also acts as Chief Technology Officer. Holding both positions limits the ability to focus deeply on technology strategy and execution. Compounding this, the engineering organization is staffed with leaders who, in many cases, were not in demand by other top-tier companies. As a result, there are concerns about their understanding of modern compute and SaaS models. The reintroduction of previously unpopular leaders, such as Savinay, does little to inspire confidence in the organization’s technical trajectory.
If I were a major investor in OpenText, I would want to directly engage with the senior leadership across departments to independently assess their qualifications, technical depth, and strategic capability. Such an evaluation would likely reveal the need for significant leadership restructuring. While there are certainly some exceptional leaders within the company—professionals who are smart, dedicated, and hardworking—they are the exception, not the rule. Unfortunately, I have yet to encounter such leadership within the engineering function.