Exploring the OpenText Ecosystem with Joel Kremke at OpenText World 2024

This is Textron tv. Hey everybody. We're here at OpenText World in Las Vegas, and we're talking to my good friend Joel here.

And we're talking about the OpenText ecosystem and how big it is. And perhaps you could explain this, but the OpenText platform is broad, it covers a lot of ground. So where does OpenText kind of begin and end, and where do partners fit into the ecosystem and how does all this come together?

Well, Thank you. It's a great question. We, the OpenText partner network is, is quite big.

Um, so first of all, as a, as an organization, a significant portion of the company's revenues come from or are, are touched by or influenced by by partners. It's, it's quite large in that we have strategic partners, like our great partnership with SAP, we interact with all the big global system integrators across the board, the Capgemini of the world. We have thousands of technology partners.

Um, and we also have a huge, uh, distributor and reseller network who are sort of classic in that doing classic distribution and reselling of our product. So you ask the question, where does, where does OpenText end and, and the sort of the partners begin. Partners are there kind of every, every step along the way.

You know, they're at the first mile, they're helping us generate the leads or, or doing the co-innovation that might have led to the go, the go to market co-innovation together. And they're there helping us sell, uh, often in, in the middle of the deals. And they're at that, they're at the end, they're oftentimes helping us to, uh, to, uh, implement or, or have customer satisfaction taken to a different level inside of an organization.

So really, uh, across the board that, uh, partnerships are, are, uh, that we're dealing with are there for us everywhere. Partners come in multiple forms. Some of them are IS vs.

Some of them are traditional resellers, uh, among the resellers and integrators. Are there attributes that you're looking for that makes we're a good partner? That's a great question.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's course is different by segment, by by partner segment.

But, but mostly when we think about what differentiate us, differentiates us as a company and what we look for in our, our partners, therefore, as well is for companies, whether they're a tech partner or a, a cloud partner that, that would like a Google or a, an Amazon or a, a Microsoft or a strategic partner. Like, like an SAP. We're looking for those companies that have the ability to be transparent with us and wanna work on co innovation at a, and I know this sounds a bit trite, but it is, we're looking for that sort of interaction at a real level.

Yeah. So whether it's, as I said, the first mile or, or even before the first mile where we're, we're doing Koch product co innovation together. Yeah.

Like with a tech partner or with a, a strategic partner. Or it could be all the way at the back end, you know, where as a said, so the partners are delivering on the professional services or the customer satisfaction sort of pieces that are going on. It's, it's that kind of company that can, wants to be a collaborator, that wants to be transparent, that wants to be real.

That's what, that's what we're looking for too. And we are different in, in that, in that regard. We have very tight relationships as a result of that.

What is the opportunity for those partners? 'cause a lot of them are also sensitive to issues like profitability. So, um, is demand for this whole space around data and information management increasing and, you know, what kind of return can the partner expect?

Well, That's another good question. They, they're, first of all, we have different kind of partners by product line, uh, um, but they're all fundamentally looking for the same thing, right? Which is what accelerates their business in, in, in some way and in whatever way that's meaningful to them.

And that's, that's one thing if you are, if you're Google. Yeah. And, and what, what, what do you want out of a a com?

A company like OpenText? Well, you want more Google Cloud to be consumed ultimately. I mean, you want other things too, but that's ultimately what you're, what you're looking for or more of your artificial intelligence products or, or your large language models or whatever it might be to be used by a company like OpenText.

So if, if you, if you look at all at all of that, or, or a reseller who's, who's trying to ultimately say, is there, is this something the market wants? Right. So that I can go out there and, and sell and sell more of our job, our products really across the board, and I'm not just saying this, but it is absolutely the truth.

We have growth opportunities across the board in, in all of our buss with, with the partners. Our job really is to help the partners define both the micro or macro niches that, that we want to help them go after so they can maximize that growth and profitability for themselves. Ultimately, it's what's good for the, the customer that that's, that should be driving it.

But then it's gotta be good for the partner. It's gotta be good for OpenText too. And if we can help orchestrate all that, we have really good, a really good winning scenario between the three.

It seems to me, having watched the keynote today, that OpenText is kind of emerging as the hub around which the data workflows kind of move in the age of ai. Yeah. And there are connection points out to, as you pointed to SAP on one side and maybe different LLMs over here.

Um, is there an opportunity for the partners therefore, to kind of use OpenText as kind of the foundation for which they're driving any number of AI solutions? Oh, Yes. A absolutely.

So let's, let's imagine that you are a, uh, a partner. I mean, this is one example, but let, let's imagine that, that you are a partner and you've, you've derived an extension to some specific, uh, product line that we have. I won't even, I won't even bother name what it could be.

'cause it could be, it could be dozens of product lines that, that would fall into this category. And then likely extensions, uh, via our APIs of our artificial intelligence products, or alternatively just our, our core products as well, all extensible by, by the partners. And that's just one go to market motion that, that we have with them.

But that's a big deal and that's an ongoing thing that the, the partner community is engaged with, with us on. And it's cool too because it, it brings innovation. Yeah.

So it's, you know, more, the more people that, that are involved, the more eyeballs, the more great companies that we have involved in this, the better it is for the customers. Uh, ultimately. Yeah.

So if I'm a partner and I invest to get to know the platform, it then becomes extensible to multiple use cases. So the ROI on that initial investment is pretty high because I can now work that through any number of opportunities. Yeah, Absolutely.

So a lot of the partners have some kind of domain specificity. Now, I'm gonna, I'm kind of speaking more of the distribution of the reseller, reseller channel right now. 'cause it's a little different for like a strategic, like SAP or for a, for a cloud company or GSI obviously, but, but let's say that they've got domain, you know, uh, specialty and what we're seeing, and we saw it in the, the partner advisory board that we had yesterday.

We saw it in our partner collaboration day that we had yesterday. We're seeing a lot of our partners who, because they understand the model now, they understand how we work. They understand the transparency and the, the co innovations that we're trying to derive either with product or we go to market.

There can be go to market co innovations too, right? It doesn't have to be, uh, just from a a product standpoint, the, the partners are also starting to think to themselves, okay, I've got expertise now in OpenText. I've got my master's degree in OpenText.

I know I know how to navigate this, right? And I actually could pick up more products now things that I maybe I wasn't doing before. So they got their domain expertise.

And now, you know, I'll use an example. You might have our, uh, content professor or a, uh, or a, a reseller that was really good in the content space and data orchestration space. And then they look at what we're doing from a security standpoint and we think, yeah, I could, I could put these things together Yeah.

And, and, and I could go sell that niche and I could become the expert on that. And we're starting to see more and more. That's kind of cool, uh, to see the partners pick up on that, On the technology partner side, you know, the Googles of the world, Amazon's, whatever it's gonna be.

Mm-Hmm. They don't like to acknowledge each other as competitors. Mm-Hmm mm-Hmm.

But in some ways, as OpenFin text emerging, as kind of a neutral territory where they can come and kinda interact with each other at the customer level without necessarily having to formally acknowledge each other. Yeah, that's a good, that's good. Uh, in Mark's keynote today, he talked about the platform of platforms, multi-cloud, uh, platform.

And that's exactly what we do. And not just across one product line, but across many of the product lines. There's, there's, it's not, they're cloud agnostic that they could be delivered on multiple clouds.

That's one thing. And we, and we are that today, but also that we can stitch clouds together. So that information, there's not a barrier that between, you know, how we would interface and move data from one system to another, or extract information from one system, maybe on the Amazon cloud, move it to another system, which might be on-prem or, or then maybe there's, there's, uh, some sort of, uh, data com computational work that goes on, and then maybe that gets dumped out to something on Azure, right?

That's what we do every, every single day. That's sort of, uh, complex data orchestration and, and, you know, security and governance. Is there something you wish, and I know there's multiple types of partners, so you can work your way through the list a little bit, but is there something you wish that, you know, your traditional reseller managed service provider understood then what a GSI might understood and then a technology partner would understand about OpenText going in before you have that conversation?

Yeah, Yeah, yeah. Um, it, it, I think I'll answer that question in two different ways. So the first is, if they understood this about us as an organization with just who we are and, and what we're all about culturally, it's that transparency that I talked about at, at the onset.

There sometimes is a built in amount of, uh, uh, you know, I'm not going to show you everything until you show me more. More. And we as a group from a a, across the company, so it's not, not just the partner team, but across the company, are very, very open to transparent partnering around these co innovations.

Again, that could be product oriented or, or go to market oriented. So if they knew that about us and we didn't, we didn't have to waste, uh, uh, six months or a year of, of, of going through that, that time and, and that, that we could accelerate, uh, uh, better together, they'd benefit, the customers would benefit, we'd benefit. Oh yeah.

I'd always like to go faster just by knocking down walls and barriers. They're on, on occasion, conflicts with partners will happen. Sure.

Uh, there are lots of people selling different things at different times. Is there a process for managing all of that? How does that kinda work itself out?

Yeah, Great. Great question. We have, uh, we have thousands of partners and, and, uh, thousands of transactions that are happening every year through partners.

So not everything's perfect, right? And, and, and sometimes there is, uh, a conflict between, you know, us and a partner where we're right there. Right.

Or maybe it's somewhere in the middle. Yeah. And, um, and I think, again, I talked at the beginning about that, those miles.

Yeah. You know, maybe they're miles zero where, where they're helping us drive the co innovation or maybe they're at the last mile where, where they're helping us get it over the finish line on, on, uh, satisfying the customer's needs. You know, uh, the, the truth is we have to see them as an extension of ourselves.

And, and, and when you deal with them that way, and we do, and, and the truth is, whether it's Google, uh, you know, the biggest companies in the world or whether it's the smallest reseller that, that there might be, we try to have that exact attitude, right. And, and deal with them with that sort of, you know, not to be trite, but affection and, and, and transparency. We, uh, you know, we have a, a incredible relationship with SAP.

It's spanned several decades. It's a massive business between the, the two organizations. And we often refer to each other as a family, as a, as opposed to, you know, even talking about the partnership, you know, per se.

Because we, we genuinely view it that way. Not just OpenText, but, but SAP, uh, does as well. And, uh, and that's a testament, I think, to that culture that, that I talked about before, which comes right from the top of the company.

It's, uh, it's, you know, it's, uh, a pleasure to work here. From that standpoint, What's the level of investment required on the part of the partner to come up to speed on the platform? There's a lot of training.

There are various certifications that people have to get from time to time. And when you talk to partners, there're always kind of like, well, how much do I gotta put in on the front end of this thing to get the expertise before I start to see the return? Yeah, sure.

Um, a couple things. It's really dependent on the kind of partner that, that we're talking about. But let's, let's use, you know, an example like in the global system integrator space, they can only spend money and invest personnel if they're going to have a substantive return, you know, on it.

So our job is to, I talked about that transparency. It's actually to set that out and talk about that, uh, upfront. How big could this really be?

And really do detailed, you know, total addressable market analysis and talk about the kind of commitments that we need to make to each other, to, to achieve the sort of, uh, levels that, you know, that we might be talking more that they may need. And if it's not there to also be honest enough and open enough to say, that's not gonna work, uh, in, in this, you know, doing it this way might be beneficial to me, but it's ultimately not gonna be beneficial to you. We have those conversations.

Yeah. And, uh, and that's kinda what partnership's all about. Mm-Hmm.

One of the things that has struck me as I walked around here is that every partner's probably trying to figure out, how do I cash in on this AI thing? But if I go back and I use the gold rush metaphor, all the people who made the real money we're like handing out shovels and dungarees. And so is that kinda like what data management's gonna be like for ai?

It's gonna be the, the thing that makes all the money isn't necessarily the ai, it's gonna be the data and the platforms to fuel the ai. Yeah, It's, I think a couple things. One, we are sitting on, uh, a AI gold mine here because of all the, think about a data management company, and then imagine all the, the, uh, managed unmanaged data, the metadata layering that, that goes into ai.

It's the heart of ai, right? Yeah. And, and that's the heart of OpenText.

That's, uh, that's, that's what we do. So I think we're extremely well positioned from that standpoint. But the second thing I was gonna tell you, I, I like the idea of like, who ultimately made the money in the gold rush.

Right? That's a good, good, good analogy. Who's gonna make the money in ai?

And no one's figured it out yet. I mean, really, I mean, there, there really isn't, uh, uh, a clear, not only is there not a clear leader, there's not a clear path, uh, really yet either. For many companies, it's the companies that partner together that get more value to the end customer and figure out how to drive that, that value across the chain in AI specifically, not just generally across systems, but in AI specifically, I see this little corner of the world that I sit in and in partnerships as just the crucial hub of, uh, of that future unlocking of the AI value for the customer, for the partner, for us.

Yeah. Uh, you know, across the board for the, for the hyperscaler, the, the cloud companies, all of them, right? They like, we're, it's how we get more together to deliver that end value is, is what's gonna, that's who's gonna win the race.

It's a put race, and that's who's gonna win the race. You talked about the technology partners. Each of them has their own partners.

So where do all the partners kinda meet together in the ecosystem? I mean, 'cause I could be a Google partner. Yeah.

And how do I kind of cross pollinate into the OpenText channel as it were? Yeah, Well, right here at OpenText World, uh, the truth is we have a lot of partners who are, who are multiple, they're an SAP partner, they're an OpenText partner, they're a Google partner, and they're a reseller, uh, you know, of, of ours. Or, uh, they're a solution extender, uh, for us.

And they're an SAP reseller and they're, uh, an iation partner That's really common, uh, for us. So, uh, so part of it is that's kind of the ecosystem that we run around in on a, on a day-to-day basis. But then it's also incumbent on a good partnership team, like the one that we have here at OpenStax to pull in other members of the ecosystem who may be only a Google partner as a, for instance, but who are crucial to delivering the end value that we're trying to do either in a co-innovation or to an end customer.

And that's, and that's what my team does. Alright, folks, you're already, if you're a partner and you wanna make some real money in the age ai, think data management, It's right here. Hey buddy, thanks for coming.

Yeah, great job. All right. We'll be back in a minute.