By Gina Ferrara, Senior Analyst, Madison Advisors

In July, I attended the OpenText Enterprise World conference held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre in Toronto, Canada.  This event, which attracted over 5,000 attendees, offered something for everyone, including pre-conference training sessions, innovation & developer labs and numerous breakout sessions.  As a first-time attendee, I looked forward to being a part of this event and have the opportunity to learn the latest on specific OpenText products, including CCM and CEM.

Mark Barrenechea, Vice Chair, CEO and CTO, announced the release of OT2 during the opening keynote session.  OT2, formerly known as Project Banff, is the next-generation hybrid-cloud platform that brings together intelligent automation, security and EIM applications in a powerful unified platform.  Based on a micro-services architecture, this platform supports native SaaS applications running in the cloud and enables integration as well as new capabilities for on premise products.

The Enterprise World Expo was filled with OpenText pods, partner booths and OpenText theaters. They all allowed attendees to meet individual product managers outside of the breakout sessions to learn new features and functionality via a software demo and get the latest product roadmap details.

On the first day of the event, I focused on the CCM and CEM software products to get updates on xPression and Exstream.  Since Madison Advisors has several clients using xPression, that roadmap was of particular interest. Some quick points to note:

• xPression is not going away and there are no end-of-life plans for this product
• OpenText is offering an upgrade path to Exstream for its xPression customers, which includes services such as migration planning, best practices for implementation and automated conversion tools
• Plans for release 4.7 are currently in process; this release is expected to be available in May 2019 and will include many enhancements based on requests submitted by customers

I also attended the Exstream 16.4 update and product roadmap session to understand how OpenText is positioning Exstream as the CCM solution of the future.  The Exstream product is the CCM offering included in the OpenText Experience Suite. It combines the transactional processing model and integration strengths of StreamServe with the high throughput engine and interactive capabilities of Exstream into a single integrated solution.  Now, StreamServe and Exstream customers can upgrade to a single product, with minimal disruption and utilize the design and production environment of their choice.  With its vision to integrate, engage and deploy anywhere, OpenText is positioning Exstream as a leading solution in the industry with integration into existing business platforms (EIM and ERP), omnichannel engagement across any touchpoint, and a rapidly deployable platform designed for on premise, cloud or hybrid environments.

With Madison Advisors’ current focus on inbound mail, intelligent forms and RPA, I spent most of day two attending breakout sessions related to intelligent forms automation and the OpenText Liquid Office, TeleForm and Captiva solutions.  An abundance of information was collected at these sessions that will contribute to the insight we have into this industry.  Enterprise World was an extremely informative event and I look forward to next year.