Guest Column: Open Text opens up opportunities for Australian channel

In recent months, Open Text has hired a new senior management team in Australia with many years of experience in the information management business and we are very much focused on leveraging worldwide partnerships in Australia.

At the same time, we are increasingly zooming in on cross-skilling our business partners in the broader portfolio of Open Text Products. This has taken shape, for example, in the training sphere in enabling eDOCS, formerly Hummingbird, partners on the LiveLink product range and vice-versa.

Microsoft and SAP, both global partners of Open Text, are being leveraged through our resellers to broaden the product offering out to market. The Microsoft partnership also answers some key requests from our customers who have been asking what we have to offer around Microsoft Sharepoint Server.

Some organisations think that Microsoft Sharepoint Server is a competitive offering to the Open Text product portfolio. However, this is not the case.

We have plug-ins into Sharepoint which now enable our existing customers to have a single view into their Sharepoint sites. In addition, we have also built on top of Sharepoint Server and have a key offering in the legal space built on Sharepoint. This is what makes us a Microsoft Gold ISV partner worldwide.

As an industry category, Document Management and Records Management have one key certainty: the data that people want to keep will increase in complexity and size as we in businesses and as individuals consume more information.

Business partners offer great value in ongoing consultation with our customers to ensure best practices are being applied to help minimise this growth of information on various storage devices.

At the same time, business partners help our customers to keep informed of the new solution offerings being announced from Open Text throughout the year. Artesia in the Digital Asset Management space is just one key offering that Immersive, one of our key partners in Melbourne, is currently evangelising in Asia Pacific.

Another strategy confirming our market momentum is the fact that we are looking for new partners.

Open Text has grown over the years with a number of best-of-breed solutions. However, we are hand picking partners throughout Asia Pacific that can speak the language of the products that they are talking about.

For example, web development houses for RedDot Web Content Management, major global system integrators for an end-to-end Enterprise Content Management solution rather than just Document Management or Records Management. We believe this will make a big difference for our customer success strategy.

At the end of the day, our best partners speak the language of our local customers.

At the same time, we are ramping up our channel partner teams and we have a fantastic worldwide partner enablement team who are building accreditation courses that will include our key product brands. This will provide our partners with the ability to achieve accreditation for the first time as partners.

Sales training will be staged in Australia in September and other technical courses are being offered from August onwards. Demand from our customers around Business Process Management has meant that we are now skilling up our partner base around the world on this brand new product.

Its a great time to partner with Open Text. We’re the only enterprise software company in the world focused exclusively on enterprise content management. At the same time. companies need better ways to manage information and improve collaboration and the volume of information continues to explode.

Finding what you need, when you need it, has become a huge productivity drain in companies today. ECM is at the heart of these initiatives to drive cost reductions, and improve processes and productivity – all good market opportunities for our channel partners in a period of economic uncertainty.

information management open text software