You have a very short window sir to do the right thing until the new CEO comes and sees right through your wall of snake oil and misdirection. Your presentation onstage at the internal kickoff was an hour of wasted time I will never get back. You showed Google AI and Notebook LM and pretended it was a technology forward development. It was not sir. We all saw through your charade.
If you want OpenText to succeed, you need to:
- perform deep product consolidation. Go from 1000 products down to 150. We need one product for each segment we want to play in. Why do we have content server, documentum and core content? Why do we have multiple faxing solutions in BN?
- The products you choose to keep need to be completely rewritten from the ground up using cutting edge architecture and memory safe development languages. Putting a legacy product inside a container doesn’t make it containerized. We need a real automated orchestration layer than can handle availability, capacity in real time by itself. Patching should be done in the middle of the day by scaling and moving without impacting customers.
- Security and privacy need to be designed into all of the products from day 1. As a European developer, I cringe every time someone tells me we will comply with GDPR. Our products are not designed for security and privacy by default. As governments become more demanding, we will be left in the cold. The time is NOW!
- Fire 50% of your direct reports. Most of your VPs and directors are incompetent and would be unable to find a job anywhere else. Most have been here too long and don’t know what modern software architecture looks like.
- Understand that AI is not a product and will quickly become a feature. Slapping AI on something (like Ollie AI) doesn’t make it modern or desirable. Where are your real product managers thinking about building world class functionality? Aviator is nothing more than a Google AI wrapped in OpenText clothes. It is NOT innovation. It is not unique and customers aren’t buying it.