OpenText releases customer data platform

Google connection runs deep

The OpenText Experience CDP also integrates tightly with Google Marketing Platform, more fruit of a long-term partnership between the two companies. Google's marketing automation tools, understandably, align closely with the search giant's ad platform, which makes its analytics and other capabilities tilt more toward adware than typical marketing automation, said David Raab, founder of the CDP Institute.

"OpenText recognizes the reality that people need to make their customer data accessible, actionable and usable," Raab said. "Even though they're coming out from the content management side, if they're going to have an experience management capability, organizing customer data is a critical requirement for that."

Majzoub said that while it's focused on the top-of-funnel marketing activity, the OpenText Experience CDP will be able to track all interactions between its users and their customers, to offer intelligence about interactions to more than just marketers. Users of the OpenText Experience Platform would likely be the early adopters of the CDP, which has found a foothold among OpenText users in the life sciences and retail sectors, according to Majzoub.

Content security gets booster

The OpenText Experience CDP was released as part of the quarterly omnibus Cloud Editions update, which includes many features and capabilities across the company's application and services suite. Another notable feature available now is Magellan Risk Guard, which scans networks for content that might pose a risk to an organization, based on pre-built AI data models as well as user-set rules.

Risk Guard was first deployed on OpenText's own corporate network.

"You ask a CIO, 'How much content do you have?' They can easily, top of mind, tell you, 'I have 69 million documents, 3 terabytes,' that's an easy answer to get," Majzoub said. "But if I ask any CIO, including our CIO at OpenText, 'Do you know if anyone is storing offensive material in your system?' The answer is, 'I don't know.'"

Risk Guard uses Magellan, OpenText's AI built on machine learning, image recognition and natural language processing. It deploys 20 prebuilt data models that can identify content across 50 different topics on enterprise networks -- cloud or on-premises -- to detect risky material that might include personally identifiable information for compliance purposes.

It can also detect content that corporate leaders believe represent risk to the company, such as that of a sexual or violent nature, and other topics configured by the user to be verboten in a work setting, such as drug abuse. Majzoub said OpenText will continue to add topics and refine Magellan Risk Guard in future quarterly releases.

Don Fluckinger covers enterprise content management, CRM, marketing automation, e-commerce, customer service and enabling technologies for TechTarget.