The Aviator era has formally begun for Waterloo, Ont.-based OpenText with the release this week of its Cloud Editions (CE) version 23.4, which contains a number of the recently announced Aviators that form the backbone of a new artificial intelligence (AI) product strategy.
Launched Wednesday at OpenText World 2023 in Las Vegas, each of the Large Language Models (LLMs) enables an organization to address multiple AI use cases without having to move their data, according to the company.
The Aviator product line, said Muhi Majzoub, the company’s executive vice president and chief product officer, is essentially split into two pieces.
“One is for business (the other being for technologists) where we look to bring the expertise that we have in our platform, like IT Operations Aviator. It brings the data that is today housed in our service management platform SMAX (short for Service Management Automation X) and it combines it with the predictive intelligence and the data that you can get out of an LLM model.”
In a blog post released to coincide with the launch, he wrote that in the technology industry, “change is inevitable. But sometimes this change is so revolutionary, organizations can struggle to keep up and understand exactly how to apply it to their business.
“Our opentext.ai strategy, introduced in August, builds on our decade-plus experience in applying machine learning and AI to our information management solutions to empower our customers to solve their most complex information challenges using AI and LLM capabilities.
“To start, we launched OpenText Aviator. (It) helps our customers make a seamless pivot to AI, implement new customer engagement strategies, and enable smarter decision making for their business.”
Some of the business Aviators include:
- IT Operations Aviator, which OpenText said will enhance the user experience, provide faster issue resolution and improve the end-user customer experience.
- DevOps Aviator: The tool leverages AI “insights to predict and anticipate delivery times. Minimize manual repetitive tasks, reduce waste and rework, and free up developers to use their skills on value-generating work.” It also “utilizes conversational search to drill down into problem areas in the DevOps lifecycle across all environments. Find and fix issues before they derail progress.”
- Content Aviator: Optimizes information retrieval in the workplace, making it more efficient and productive, an OpenText release stated.
Aviators for technologists include a platform that offers a suite of tools and connectors to administer enterprise-grade data warehouses, data lakes, analytics of structured and unstructured data, as well as another that “brings forward a collection of tools to better connect and protect millions of IoT endpoints to get real-time insights and visibility into assets location, condition, utilization, performance and health.”
Mark Barrenechea, chief executive officer (CEO) and chief technology officer (CTO) of OpenText, said of the Aviator launch, “the AI revolution is creating an unprecedented platform shift – one that will transform all industries, all functions, and all roles. OpenText Aviator will help customers massively increase productivity through new conversation interfaces leveraging Information Management data sets and language models.”
In his keynote on Wednesday, he likened the AI boom to not simply being technology, but an ontology (defined as the study of existence) “for new creativity, for new uses of data, new forms of trust. And it’s not rhetoric, every role, every organization, every industry, everything will change, no business or human will be spared from this new ontology. If we think of it as just a technology versus an ontology, we will lose this expressive power.
“I love the quote from CS Lewis, written many, many decades ago: ‘It’s not like teaching a horse to jump higher and higher and better and better. Let’s turn this creature into a winged creature.’ And I think this is what the AI revolution can do for us. It will change everything. Let’s change into winged creatures from this new ontology.”
Aside from focusing on GenAI advances, he also zeroed in on the fact OpenText has grown considerably, the result of last year’s US$5.8 billion acquisition of Micro Focus, a U.K.-based company that specialized in software and services designed around accelerating digital transformation.
“We’ve massively expanded our information management vision with the acquisition,” he said.
When the deal formally closed in the first quarter of this year, he said, “OpenText’s corporate mission expands to help enterprise professionals secure their operations, gain more insight into their information, and better manage an increasingly hybrid and complex digital fabric.”
In an interview, Majzoub told IT World Canada that Micro Focus is “fully integrated now into our business processes.”