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It’s a virtual dream (no pun intended) for IT and network administrators to open a single master data management platform and be able to control the movement and/or deployment of a production workload from an on-premises location, to one in a cloud, and then to another in a second cloud, if need be.
Not long ago, this whole process was either: a) very difficult to do without dropping a ball somewhere and causing ire, either for management or for a customer; or b) basically impossible.
This isn’t the case anymore. OpenText, the largest business software company in Canada and a global leader in Enterprise Information Management (EIM), now provides this type of platform. The Toronto-based company at its annual OpenText Enterprise World conference on July 10 released OpenText OT2, a next-generation hybrid-cloud platform that it claims combines intelligent automation, security and EIM applications in a unified platform.
All the Components for Building Cloud Apps
In other words, this suite of tools has all the ingredients to handle management of on-premises and cloud-based workloads in general. The company also is offering optimized versions for specific verticals, including life sciences, data quality management and legal sectors.
These are OpenText Quality, an application designed to meet the needs of the highly-regulated life sciences industry, and OpenText Legal, a cloud EIM app that integrates with OpenText eDOCS to manage client onboarding and document sharing.
“This is an all-new platform that runs parallel to our Release 16—it’s targeting the cloud and simplifying it all for our customers,” Muhi Majzoub, OpenText’s Executive Vice-President of Engineering and Cloud Services, told eWEEK. “It runs on a unified data model, with a standard user interface and standard architecture. The architecture includes creating microservices from many of our on-premises solutions, like media management, content suite, Documentum, AppWorks, communication management and others.
“Today’s launch marks OpenText’s arrival as a true applications and platform company.”
By the way, OpenText’s toolset can be started in small doses and expanded as time goes on, depending upon how fast the customer wants to proceed. The tools are in a zone of their own, able to work inside other clouds, such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and others.
There’s something to be said for independence in the cloud world, because there are so many cloud providers from which to choose.
Key Feature: Enablement of Microservices
The most important feature in this release is probably the fact that the platform enables microservices so that developers can run them in the cloud.
While this was announced a year ago at the company’s annual conference, here in mid-2018 it’s now fully tested and ready for prime time. It is the first toolset designed for container deployments of microservices in the OpenText Cloud.
Using this unified data model and a standard user interface, OpenText OT2 enables developers to bring together microservices for content collaboration, security, process automation and analytics, enabling customers and partners to develop and deploy business apps on the fly, if necessary.
“We are leveraging our knowledge of building EIM products to deliver a self-service, hybrid platform,” Majzoub said. “OpenText OT2 will allow our customers and partners to access pre-built hybrid applications that integrate deeply with their existing OpenText solutions. Developers can use either low-code or native development environments to build custom applications hours rather weeks.”
DevOps Tool? Not Exactly
Will the new platform serve as a sort of DevOps platform?
“Not exactly,” Majzoub said. “”You’ll be able to build apps that can work alongside the DevOps-type philosophy, but it’s not specifically a tool for DevOps.”
The OpenText OT2 platform, available now, will develop with quarterly releases, with all applications being tightly integrated with OpenText Release 16, Majzoub said. OpenText Quality and OpenText Legal will be generally available in the second half of 2018, he said.
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