OpenText, a $6 billion revenue company held its annual OpenText World conference in Las Vegas this week, and took the opportunity to show partners and customers how it was using its own products and services to save big, $1 billion in fact, or one sixth of its current sales.
Okay, the information management firm is giving itself some time to do it, ten years that is, but that’s still an average of $100m a year, and it’s already started.
With many tens of thousands of OpenText partners across the world, potentially, many of them may well now look at some of their own tricks they can pull to save cash using OpenText’s blueprint presented to delegates at the Las Vegas event, albeit at a smaller scale to OpenText’s efforts.
Shannon Bell, OpenText chief information officer and chief digital officer, is leading the firm’s savings effort. She told the conference: “We’re our biggest customer, and are using over 60 products to make these $1 billion in savings in our operations, while we continue to grow as a company.
“These are savings we are just targeting at our operations,” she stressed, “they are not targeted at the rest of the company, and focus on six key areas.”
These areas are: data centre consolidation and cloud optimisation; systems, tools, and hardware rationalisation; process improvement, automation and AI; employee productivity and efficiency improvements; cost avoidance; and customer experience improvements.
As part of the effort, the firm is focusing on three key areas, among others, to make savings. The company has 10,000 developers around the world, using over 50 tools to bring products and services to market. The move towards one integrated toolset ecosystem is now underway, which will also reduce the number of tools used, to speed products to market and cut costs.
Secondly, the firm has around 22,000 staff in total globally, and most of them use the IT helpdesk and HR services in one way or another. Bell said OpenText was now “streamlining” helpdesk operations. For instance, password resets took up 30% of the volume of calls to the helpdesk. Instead, resets will be done through self-service, and we were told that the helpdesk has already reduced the number of staff managing it by 25%. HR has also brought in more self-service and decreased the number of tickets as a result, while decreasing staff numbers too.
Thirdly, the company has 330,000 customers, and is making improvements in customer operations to improve customer experience. “Our network is complex,” said Bell, “and we need to improve IT operations management, use CloudOps, and reduce time to restore for customers, for instance.”
She said: “People make mistakes, and machines are very unforgiving in response to mistakes. We are removing errors through automating server changes, for example, instead of relying on humans. And while we are removing manual processing, we can increase quality of service.”
On cloud operations, Bell told press and analysts in a sit down: “There will be data centre consolidation and cloud optimisation. If I was deploying a product now, I would use less resources in the cloud to do it, using not only automation, but also things like FinOps to handle the hyperscaler strategy.”
Further on data centres, she added: “Not all data centres are created equal, many of ours were integrated into our footprint from the many acquisitions we have completed over the years. Lift and shift into the public cloud can sometimes be cheaper, and some data centres don’t have the right connectors to the power grid, or have the right racks, and are therefore not as efficient as other data centres.
“I’d much rather have less higher-performing data centres, with power and technology that is superior to others that we currently run. Overall, we are looking to get more out of our assets.”
So, do the proposed savings stack up? Helpfully, Bell presented a slide to the conference audience showing how the $1bn golden fleece would be found within ten years (see picture above). No percentage or value was assigned to customer experience improvements, but the five other areas added nicely up to $1 billion.
More from OpenText World 2024 in Las Vegas to follow...
