I have been at Open Text for a while, and I still can't tell if leadership has any kind of long term strategy or if we are all just responding to whatever crisis popped up most recently. My previous employer had plenty of problems, but at least they had a roadmap. Here, it feels like we are always reacting to something and never actually moving forward.
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ask gartner
Everyone is a cyber seller…….
@a6 "managing the decline" is not a plan, it is an objective.
A plan consists of specific actions and steps.
It should be clear by now that the plan is to:
- Sell what they can.
- Increase margins for what they cannot sell with price increases, headcount reductions and cheap replacements.
There is no real growth in the plan. Growth requires investment to increase the desirability of products, thus increasing sales revenue.
Unfortunately, the leadership is clueless and maliciously incompetent. They have managed to destroy products that were valuable, like Fortify, with poor management, and cheap COE labour replacing decades of experience. Even HP/HPE/MF managed to somewhat preserve Fortify because they understood (after missteps) that AST industry was quite different than other areas they were familiar with. OTEX just slashed and burned with profound ignorance, and now those products are mortally wounded.
As a result of malicious incompetence, saleable assets have lost value, and the value lost is accelerating. Since they cannot sell zombie products at high enough prices, they are forced to eliminate and cheapen headcount, further reducing value.
TLDR: OTEX is in an unrecoverable stall, and will eventually crash to zero.
The only plan they ever had was acquisition and exploitation of the captured customers through that acquisition. Now that they can't do that whole substituting acquisition-as-innovation bullsh*t, the only plan is to cut and run, as in cut their losses by selling everything off but the furniture and running to leap out of the plane with their golden parachutes.
But, overall, the ELT was always reactive instead of proactive. They reacted to industry leaving them behind. They reacted to the cost increase from acquisitions by having mass layoffs that didn't take employee skills and knowledge into account. They reacted to stock price fluctuations with more layoffs and "restructuring."
Basically, the ELT is a scared chihuahua ready to run or bite at any loud noise.
managing the decline of the company is the plan
shrinking the company is the strategy. three divestitures so far, and more to come.