Cloud services and AI are reshaping how enterprises operate, and OpenText is at the forefront of this transformation. In this OpenStudio interview from Nashville, we discuss how OpenText delivers managed services to over 650 private cloud customers worldwide, leveraging AI tools like Aviator to detect and resolve issues before customers even notice them, while improving productivity across global delivery teams.

Watch the full interview:

Introduction

Ajit: Hello everyone, welcome to Nashville. My name is Ajit Yohannan. As you're hearing, a lot of good conversations about AI and how we're helping our customers, a lot of different conversations, and I'm so glad to have with me Rajiv Krishnan, Vice President, Cloud Services at OpenText. He's a good friend back from Bangalore. We connected in Canada, in Waterloo last week, and we had some great conversation. I said, Rajiv, why can't we share this in open studio as well. Thank you, Rajiv, for agreeing to do this show.

Rajiv: Thank you for having me, Ajit. Nice to see you.

Experiencing OpenText World in Nashville

Ajit: I want to start asking by how's been your experience at OpenText World this year. You want to talk about that in Nashville, Music City?

Rajiv: Oh, it's been fantastic. I mean, first of all, I've lived in the US for quite some time, but Nashville is unique. Never seen an experience like this. It's got its own unique atmosphere, buzz around it, loved every minute of it.

Ajit: Awesome. Would you also take us through your work profile, what you're managing, just give us a sense of it so we can actually dive into it, how you're using some of our products as well.

Managing global delivery and customer success

Rajiv: Sounds good, Ajit. I'm responsible as part of the customer success services organization here at OpenText. I manage the global delivery teams that provide managed services for over 650 private cloud customers and over 100+ on-prem customers. In some sense, we are the ones who are helping our customers see the best of OpenText technology and put that to use into their day to day operations and businesses. Coming into OpenText World and seeing some of the exciting announcements around the OpenText data platform that is powered by AI, the Aviator studios, it leaves me tremendously energized on two counts. Number one, it's an exciting opportunity to be able to bring the best of these technologies to bear for our customers, and as a managed service provider who's responsible for all of those cloud footprints for all our cloud customers, it gives us a tremendous leg up to be able to improve our productivity, our time to resolution for customer incidents and tickets and improve the customer experience as well. I'm really excited to see what OpenText has in store for us this year.

Leveraging AI for customer centricity and productivity

Ajit: That's awesome. I remember the conversation last week. I want to touch upon some of those that you gave, very good examples of how you're using your teams and technologies to help our customers. You want to talk about that? That's something that you want to share.

Rajiv: Absolutely. Look, for this year, we've been focused around two central themes. It's about improving customers' centricity and experience for our customers, and the second is improving our productivity. I think AI fits right into both of those themes. Let me start by giving you a couple of examples. We are actively exploring the OpenText Aviator product line to be able to take a lot of the tribal knowledge that we have acquired about our customers, about our products from our—I have a 400 member global organization, so all of that expertise, all of that knowledge that we've acquired over several years from our customer base, we want to be able to put that to great use for our customers and be able to solve for problems and detect problems for our customers as soon as possible. What better way than to be able to use something like an aviator as almost like a personal assistant for every single engineer in my team, who can then identify, diagnose, troubleshoot, and present the solutions and short circuit that cycle of an incident for our customers as soon as possible. I think that's a fantastic opportunity from an incident standpoint.

We are also a great proponent of OpenText consumes OpenText for the benefit of our customers. For example, we use the Opsbridge platform as the key hub for monitoring all of our customers, and we have the aviator plugged in as part of our Opsbridge platform, which means our engineers get to see issues even before customers see them and have an opportunity to be able to fix them before even customers realize them. Nothing better than that to deliver that superior customer experience which we are aiming for. In doing so, I think you're just basically improving the productivity of every single engineer because they're focusing on the more higher order tasks and the more lower order but important tasks for our customers can increasingly be orchestrated through AI agents potentially delivered through our aviator studios. That's technology we are very excited to unpack in the near future.

Ajit: That's awesome. That's something that customers can take advantage of our examples as well.

OpenText's competitive edge in the AI era

Ajit: I also want to know from you what's the competitive landscape based on your experience you've seen. The technology landscape. Where do you see OpenText versus other competition? Do you see a unique value that we offer to our customers?

Rajiv: That's a great question, Ajit. I've been in this industry for almost 28+ years now, and I've seen the evolution of the whole internet age and the introduction of cloud, and I've been part of cloud for almost 27 out of those 28 years. Now to see AI kind of coming in, I see those technology manifesting into distinct life cycles. I think the foundation has been built and is getting rapidly evolved around large language models, which I call the almost the foundation layer where companies and both consumers of AI and also product companies can take advantage of. That's the first layer that is getting built.

The real fun starts in my view, in the 10 years to come right now, where enterprise software companies will race to kind of make the best use of that technology, embed that within their products, and make that available to their customers, and that spawns the next wave of innovation. That's where I think today's announcement in the last couple of days, the announcement that we've seen with the OpenText data platform, the aviator studio, the agentic AI technologies that we are putting to use, I think OpenText is taking an early lead in kind of not only taking advantage of those technologies but playing to its strength by looking at the bottom of the iceberg as Muhi was saying in his keynote, which is all the data that the enterprise has, which is untapped today, which is not in the public domain, it's unique to that company, it is unique to that enterprise and through our software we now have the ability for our customers to take the best and most possible use of that data. To me, that means we are racing, we're really ahead in terms of winning that race for the next decade in terms of software companies. I'm super excited by some of these announcements.

Leading a global team with passion

Ajit: Thanks for sharing that, very passionate and positive. I want to also, as you said, you're leading a team of 400+ people. How do you make the team also share the same passion and energy that you have? How do you do that?

Rajiv: Thanks a lot, Ajit. Look, I'm deeply blessed and privileged to be able to have that opportunity to lead the talent that I have, which is literally across the globe, spanning several countries. I don't spend a single day without thanking myself for the opportunity to lead such talent. That's the beauty—this talent is motivated, they're excited by what we're doing here at OpenText, and they're passionate about not only upskilling themselves and bringing the best of this technology to our customers. That's literally half the battle done. I think as a leader, my role is to be able to give them the right kind of path to channel their passion and their energies to not only elevating their skills, but also learning some of these technologies and helping them see how they can benefit from those technologies and make those benefits also be seen and visible to our customers as well. I think we've had a really good landscape laid out for our engineers and I'm super excited to see how they really upscale themselves in the years to come.

Message to OpenText customers

Ajit: And what's your message to the customers out there, those whom you're already serving, and those who you would love to be partnering with, what's your message to them?

Rajiv: Look, we're deeply grateful for your partnership, for your endorsement of OpenText, for your faith in our products, our solutions, our services. We do not take that responsibility lightly. There's not a day that goes by where we think in terms of how do we bring the value of our products and our solutions to the benefit of your business. We really look to be able to continue to enhance our portfolio of services for you to be able to get the best out of our software and solutions. I think these are great technologies at play. I think OpenText has been your custodians for your data, your information for over three decades. Look, we are excited to partner with you in this new era that is heralded by AI.

Closing

Ajit: Thank you, Rajiv. Thanks a lot for talking, and thanks everyone for tuning in. Please do reach to the customer success team if you have any further questions, and always they're ready to help you. Thank you so much for joining in.

About OpenStudio

OpenStudio is OpenText’s media hub for thought leadership and innovation. This series explores stories of progress and success from industry experts, visionaries, and trailblazers. Our goal is to inspire, inform, and connect audiences with the people and ideas shaping the future of the digital world.

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