Greater solution integration to drive transformative OpenText security play

OpenText is ramping up the integration of its existing and recently acquired security-related solutions. That is the foundation for three newly-announced OpenText service offerings. These integrations will also have significant importance for OpenText’s channel partners.

Gary Weiss, OpenText’s General Manager Security, Discovery, Analytics Business Unit

Improved integration of existing OpenText solutions will drive highly transformative solutions to the edge of the network, and will present new opportunities for OpenText and its channel partners. That was the message related by Gary Weiss, OpenText’s General Manager Security, Discovery, Analytics Business Unit, in his keynote today at the OpenText Enfuse security and eDiscovery conference, being held this year at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. Weiss unveiled three new OpenText services stemming from those integrations. However, these integrations will also have direct benefits for OpenText’s channel partners.

“We are highlighting our security products this year, not because they are new products, but because of the way in which we are now integrating and using them,” Weiss said. “Some of them are very transformative in the market. They are very different, and play in different markets from eDiscovery, to analytics to endpoint security.” What OpenText is doing that is new is integrating these technologies into three new services –  around operational readiness, endpoint threat assessments, and data breach incident response – to further extend their security technologies and capabilities.

“We are taking several of our solutions and putting them altogether with analytics, to create custom predictive detection and response systems.” Weiss said. “We have made more functional improvements to the products, and added more features and more support for languages.”

A key in the enhancement of OpenText’s capabilities here was their acquisition last fall of Guidance Software, and their EnCase forensic security solutions.

“We already owned Axcelerate, which is a  complete, end-to-end e-Discovery platform, and now we have added EnCase on to that,” Weiss said.  “EnCase has very strong capabilities around evidence collection. We now have the ability to provide a single unified view and produce for the EDRM [Electronic Discovery Reference Model] model. This has always had to be done with third party integrations. The fact that we now have all these capabilities together around one engineering team is very special. We will be stressing how it makes the lives of eDiscovery managers better, because it streamlines the whole process.”

OpenText is also emphasizing the importance of the forensics products acquired with EnCase, for their ability to manage data visibility, reveal risk, discover malware, and empower response.

“I’m really excited about this because it is something that is really dynamic and innovative,” Weiss said. “We leverage our EnCase agent, which allows us to look at anomalies in endpoints and provide a response. The market has different solutions that do this, and this in itself is not unique. However, it becomes exciting when you add Magellan to it. Magellan is a behavioural analytics solution. The behavioral analytics provide the ability to have a predictive detection response, which offers customers really unique knowledge. It will be an important element of our new managed services offering for predictive detection response.”

OpenText Magellan was internally developed and released in 2017. Its AI-augmented analytics capabilities combine machine learning, advanced analytics, and enterprise-grade business intelligence  with the ability to acquire, merge, manage, and analyze any structured or unstructured data. These capabilities will enable AI-enhanced decision making, process automation, and overall better business outcomes at scale.

“Magellan will be with everything, but the primary focus is on detection and response, and taking it to a behaviour and analytics level,” Weiss said.

The other product being featured is OpenText Covisint, which OpenText also acquired in 2017. Covisint is a cloud platform that provides the IoT and identity management platform for digital business transformation. It allows organizations to securely connect and manage the complex digital business ecosystems of connected products, people, and processes.

Weiss tied all these together with the announcement of a suite of three new OpenText Security Services for operational readiness, endpoint threat assessments, and data breach incident response. These services and the OpenText consultants who deliver them rely on the integrated and enhanced OpenText EnCase security solutions.

The operational process service develops a well-defined incident management and response strategy along with a corresponding implementation plan to react to a breach. The endpoint threat assessment service offers a comprehensive, agentless scan of the enterprise’s environment to expose any hidden threats. The Threat Triage and Incident Response service is all about remediation, as well as a complete forensics investigation.

For OpenText’s channel partners, the ramp-up around security also has much of interest.

“We have a big partner ecosystem around Guidance, and this will let them reconfigure Guidance, which had gone somewhat stale,” Weiss said. “In the period before acquisition, Guidance hadn’t had a lot of investment happening. When we bought it, we reinvested in it because we were in already in eDiscovery with Axcelerate in a  big way, and we recognized how this would help us bring a complete solution, which we will market strongly.”

OpenText’s greater focus on the continued enhancement of endpoint detection and response will also be critical for partners.

“It will allow partners to provide even more comprehensive security solutions to customers, and should provide service opportunities for the channel partners as well,” Weiss said.

Less sexy, but also important for the channel, is the continued investment in forensic investigative solutions, Weiss said.

“The channel is the primary route to market for this,” he stated. “We will continue to invest and deliver the best solutions for covering all operating solutions and devices. We will continue to bolster security in the products so they are more scalable. We will have more connectors, IoT device support, global device support, and a GUI in 14 different languages. Partners can have confidence that we will continue to invest heavily in forensics.”