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Companies and organisations produce voluminous content every day. As they engage with their ecosystem partners, a lot of structured and unstructured data is produced. In order to make it accessible to some and bar it from others, one needs to collate, secure and organise it well.
This is more important in the times of a pandemic where almost all of the employees are working from home, handling a variety of responsibilities with restricted access to different sets of data, which is generated from multiple sources.
Organisations pile up humongous amounts of data, like e-mails, invoices generated in supply chains, documents, videos and audio files – a lot of which is generally unaccounted for and remain inaccessible.
OpenText, a Canada-based information management solutions company with one-fifth of its 15,000 global employees working in India, is helping organisations manage their structured and unstructured data.
The firm, which registered a revenue of $3.15 billion last year, has development centres in Hyderabad and Bengaluru. The firm started off its operations in India in 2009 at Hyderabad.
“What has happened with the pandemic is now, even within an organisation, information is kind of scattered. Information needs to be enabled for remote work, then along with that, a movement to cloud becomes very important,” Isaac Rajkumar, Managing Director (India) of OpenText, told Business Line.
“If it is more and more people that work together, centralising the environment becomes important. Not only do you also deal more with data security, backup, all these things become more important as the workforce becomes more distributed,” he said.
“It is not just about handling things within an organisation. You need to engage with people outside the organisation – documents getting created, e-mails sent, videos and audio files are produced. You need to factor in this data,” he pointed out.
The firm helps organisations collate all the structured and unstructured data, which includes documents and invoices, e-mails, videos and audio records.
“For example, information in paper form or it could be old records, such as land records that are in paper form or maybe a contract that was written. So all of this is unstructured,”
All this data is useful for an organisation, but is stuck somewhere and not handy. The unstructured data also throws some questions like – how long should it be there? And when should it be pulled out?
“So if you look at all these problems, we call it a lifecycle of unstructured content, from the time it is created to when its dumped or becomes redundant. Some people might need access to it and it has to be protected from certain people. Certain parts of a document could be seen by some people,” he added.
After archiving the content, the key thing is how to make it available with relevant stakeholders. A complex supply chain flows would involve sharing of documents, invoices and other content between vendors and enterprises.
OpenText’s solutions promise secure flow of content between relevant employees and other stakeholders. It deploys artificial intelligence (AI) analytics to visualise how this process happens.
Outlook for India
“We have two segments of customers in India. A large part of our business comes from enterprise customers for our enterprise product, document management and data protection solutions. Through two acquisitions (Carbonite and Webroot), we have customers in the small and medium segment,” he said.
Besdies the Mumbai-based sales team that focuses on enterprise customers and channel partners, the company reaches out to small and medium businesses through channel partners.
Internship programme
OpenText uses its internship programme to find good talent for the company. “We have about a hundred interns at any given point of time in our organisation. They all come from regional colleges and are offered six month internship for the final year students,” he said.
“We, on an average hire almost one third of the interns. We hire them as full-time employees when we have open positions available,” he said.
“We take about 200-300 internships in a year and we select about one hundred for jobs,” he said.
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