With over 300 customers in India, OpenText intends to double its business in the country. Graham Pullen, Senior Vice President, OpenText, discusses with Heena Jhingan the company’s strategy to accelerate business in India. Excerpts
How has OpenText fared in APJ and what inspires you to expand in India?
We started building our base from Australia, which historically has been mature in the Enterprise Content Management space. Singapore became the next important destination as it was the hub in the Southeast Asia to get in to Malaysia, Thailand and Philippines. Even though Japan is a flatter market, it is important. In the past, we acquired many customers in India, but we did that mostly through partnerships. We have an office in Mumbai and plan to have another in Delhi. The Enterprise Content Management market has mostly been eaten up by larger players and the remainder is a very strong Enterprise Information Management (EIM) market. We have acquired companies in the past like Rightfax, a fax automation player. Fax was a siloed application earlier. We also acquired technology with semantic search capability, which puts the search in the context. We live in a world where the enterprise has multiple repositories of information—structured and unstructured. We recently announced InfoFusion, the piece that glues everything together so that all these repositories, no matter what they are can be accessed. EIM to us, is the ability to leverage content or information within or outside the firewall with security managed by OpenText. We at present are an $800 million company, but the addressable market is expected to expand by at least five times. ECM is not the only pillar that we are trying to play around with. The trend is around EIM that includes Enterprise Content Management, Business Process Management (BPM), Customer Experience Management (CEM), Information exchange and discovery.
The business is about extracting the best value of ERP systems, for this we partner with players like SAP and provide solutions around Human Capital Management, Travel Receipt Management, and Employee Form Management. We integrate these into the ERP system to improve its productivity. The ERP market is growing at about 15%. From the India perspective, BPM, CEM solutions fall under the umbrella of application infrastructure and middleware. This again is growing at 15%, which motivates us to invest here.
Gartner puts OpenText among the leaders in its ECM magic quadrant with players like Oracle. How challenging does it become to survive here?
One thing that we do really well is to help companies manage and govern information and content. We don’t do storage devices or hardware; we have always managed content. As an ISV, this keeps us focused on what our customers want. This is how we differentiate ourselves from our competitors that are larger than us. Even with companies like IBM and Oracle, the piece that matters to the CIO talking information governance, is much smaller. It is also not just about having the product, but also about execution. We invested $5 billion in the last five years and are committed to deliver another $5 billion in coming years. Oracle is a partner organization, we recognize their strengths, and we will continue to work with them in the EIM space.
What part of this investment is expected to be directed to the India market?
We are about 350 people India at present and will be doubling that commitment. We recognize India as an important market for us. We have acquired other companies that will reinvest their technologies in the India base. The Canadian government has been very supportive to us, they have been using OpenText solutions, and we are spending time with the Canadian High Commissioner here to connect with Indian government officials and introduce OpenText to them. The recently appointed the head for India business is expected to double the business that we did last year.
In India, the challenge is not just around the format of content but also diverse languages. How do you plan to handle this diversity?
We have had similar discussions in China, Japan and Korea. There are issues, but none that cannot be handled. However, India is not as complicated as these markets. We are talking about search algorithms in different languages. We are working with customers to do that. Our software is designed to be configurable. We probably don’t know all the answers but we are working with two large India organizations to understand the requirements of the market.
In India we have to have a community of partners. We believe the government space is going to be a huge market for us, though not at this point of time; but for that, we need partners who can help us understand government processes. We are trying to understand it from the likes of TCS, Wipro, HCL, but we want to build more localized and focused relationships with those working in the field of defense, oil and gas (we have great references here), banking and insurance. We will be selective about picking partners and focus on new areas.
