Two-thirds of OpenText engineers are in India

Muhi Majzoub, executive VP & chief product officer at the $6.2-billion information management company OpenText, says he distinctly remembers his first visit to Hyderabad soon after he joined OpenText in 2012. The company then had about 290 employees in India. As he stood in front of his Hyderabad colleagues, one person in the audience asked him what his vision and plans for India were. “And I said, look, I started the India Bengaluru development centre for Oracle Corporation in 1992. And today, Oracle has probably 20,000 plus people in Bengaluru.

I then moved to CA Technology, where I was in charge of tripling the size of the Hyderabad development centre. I then went to England and was head of engineering for NorthgateArinso and one of the first things I did was start the development centre in Hyderabad. So, my answer to my colleague in 2012 was, India is an innovation centre. It is not a fixing centre, it is not a tech writing centre, it’s not a test automation centre. We’re going to hire the brightest minds. We’re going to hire innovators and we are going to double and triple and quadruple very quickly in India,” he says.

Today, over 6,300 of Majzoub’s 9,000 engineers globally are in India – about 4,000 in Bengaluru, 2,000 in Hyderabad, and 300 in Chennai. “I have dozens of products that are designed, strategically configured by product management, architected, executed in development teams, tested in QA, and then released and delivered to the market out of the India centres. And we continue to move more workloads here,” he says.

OpenText is present across the chain of information management – security, management, access, insight. The information can be a fax, document, PowerPoint presentation, an image, video, an audio. The AI platform can analyse, classify, and extract advanced metadata from any type of content.

Earlier this month, OpenText an nounced its latest AI suite called OpenText Aviator. These are a series of a dozen products that attach themselves to the different business platforms that the company has. Majzoub says two Aviator products were built in the US, one in Germany, the rest were all developed, designed, architected and coded by the India teams.

At the launch of Aviator, Mark Barrenechea, CEO & CTO of OpenText, described Aviators as “an AI breakthrough for customers.” They would, he said, help customers massively increase productivity through new conversation interfaces leveraging information management data sets and language models.

One of the Aviators, for instance, will help simplify the lives of IT operations managers. Majzoub says if he comes into the service desk today with, say, a problem with his laptop, the application will ask him numerous questions – like his IP address, gateway, DNS, username, what actions he had tried, like reboot, unplug and plug. The Aviator, he says, replaces all of that with one sentence.

“I log in, I go to the field for the Aviator to enable it, and say, I’m having a problem connecting my laptop to the network. The Aviator takes over, does behind the scene diagnostics, and will come back and tell me, you have a problem with your network card, I’ve opened a ticket, I have dispatched an IT analyst, they will come to your desk, they’ll replace your network card or replace your laptop. Here’s your ticket number. In 10-20 seconds, the Aviator answers my question, and gives me the proposed solution,” he says.

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