OpenText World: OpenText Targets IBM With 'Bye Bye Blue' Initiative

OPENTEXT WORLD — During Tuesday’s virtual OpenText World, OpenText launched its new “Bye Bye Blue” initiative, saying it’s time for everybody to drop IBM and choose it instead.

OpenText also launched its biggest product release with Cloud Editions 21.4, and unveiled its zero initiative. It addresses diversity and inclusion, sustainability and the environment.

Earlier this month, OpenText, parent company to Webroot and Carbonite, announced it plans to launch a “powerhouse” SMB platform with its $860 million acquisition of Zix

Mark Barrenechea is OpenText’s CEO and CTO. He launched OpenText’s latest battle cry against IBM.

OpenText’s Mark Barrenechea

“When we look at our business network cloud and our content cloud, we are way ahead of FileNet and Sterling Commerce,” he said. “Let’s have the facts speak for themselves. We are in the upper right quadrant of Gartner for innovation in the CSP market. IBM has moved lower left. Any lower left and they wouldn’t even be on the chart. We’re talking about a technology platform to drive your future of growth.”

IBM No Longer Has Public Cloud

Second, OpenText has a public SaaS model and a full private cloud, Barrenechea said.

“IBM just carved out their private cloud offering to a company called Kyndryl,” he said. “There are no vowels in it so I’m not sure how to pronounce it. If you need a private cloud offering, you’re going to discontinue operations, you’re going to have to negotiate multiple multiple SLAs. With OpenText, we’ll stand up for one SLA and we’ll give you performance guarantees of what we’re doing.”

OpenText is offering a free migration assessment and “we’ll have you say bye bye blue in 90 days or less,” Barrenechea said.

During the pandemic, OpenText doubled down on its R&D, he said.

“We’ve spent the last two years doubling down on the OpenText Cloud, and you can see this in our road map,” Barrenechea said. “Our battle cry is every 90 days … we bring thousands of facets and features to market, and we do this automatically now.”

CE 21.4 introduces new integrations, applications and products. They help customers adapt to modern work, navigate global supply chains, connect with customers, protect information and optimize developer experiences.

“CE 22.1 will come to market in January and then CE 22.2 in the second quarter of next year will be public cloud with more features than the private cloud,” Barrenechea said. “By CE 22.4, we’ll have a fully integrated public cloud information management platform. And by the time we get to 23.2, you will see that more than 80% of our R&D investment will be in the cloud.”

Scroll through our slideshow above for more from OpenText World and CE 21.4.