Moving to the Cloud with OpenText Cloud Edition (CE)

By Ecodocx Team
14 April, 2020

 

Organizations using OpenText Enterprise Information Management (EIM) are moving to the cloud at different paces, with sometimes different destinations. Considering the unique business requirements of each company, our experience partnering with OpenText/SAP, their product offering, and supporting over 200 Fortune 500 and SMB companies in the U.S., we established a proven path for them to whatever destination they’re headed when it comes to cloud/hybrid or on-premise deployment.

OpenText quickly understood that each enterprise’s journey to the cloud will differ. That is why their cloud strategy delivers solutions that include OpenText Cloud Edition and OpenText OT2. Also, customers can move existing solutions to a virtual private cloud. Let’s discuss what pros and cons each of these options bring. In this article, we are going to talk about OpenText Cloud Edition (CE).

 

 

What is OpenText Cloud Edition (CE)?

OpenText Cloud Edition (CE) is a private cloud that can run anywhere. It is based on proven solutions that can run in customers’ data centers, in the cloud of their choice (AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google) or the OpenText Cloud (partnership with Google Cloud).

The goal here is to reduce the amount of work associated with the maintenance of OpenText applications. Future version releases will be delivered as quarterly container updates. So customers never have to upgrade again. OpenText CE enables multi-tier global disaster recovery services and integration between G-Suite and OpenText EIM applications.

 

What Products are Available in OpenText CE?

As of now, not all OpenText products have a cloud edition. Here is an overview of what we have as of April 2020:

Some of the OpenText EIM products, a cloud editon is planned for the next release (release 20.2), such as Exstream; Magellan Text Mining; Media Management; Output Management (including Output Server); TeamSite (including LiveSite and OpenDeploy); Workforce Optimization (Qfiniti/Explore).

 

Functional Restrictions in OpenText Cloud Edition

Depending on the product implementation approach, customers can make OpenText responsible for maintaining their OpenText CE solution. Making OpenText responsible for maintaining the application will mean that customers will not need to worry about security, system maintenance or version upgrade their OpenText EIM solutions. This also means that organizations might face major functional restrictions in system administration, inability to do scripting or customizations, or to add additional modules, as well as number and competence of system/application admins/developers. The type and degree of restrictions will vary from application to application. 

 

OpenText Cloud Edition Licensing Cost

Organizations that decide to implement an OpenText Cloud Edition software product, will have to purchase subscription licenses.

In addition, they will have to pay a one-time professional services fee. OpenText Cloud Edition solutions can be implemented on-premises, in a hybrid environment, or in preferred virtual private clouds, such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, or Microsoft Azure. When hosting the CE products in the cloud of choice, customers can maintain their OpenText Cloud Edition solutions themselves or have a 3rd party provider do the job for them. Ecodocx provides OpenText managed services for a variety of SMBs and Fortune 100 leaders.

Organizations can also host their Cloud Editon solutions in the OpenText Cloud. One of the main reasons why customers consider moving to the cloud is to reduce the cost of ownership (software hosting, maintenance, upgrades, enhancements). With the perpetual license, customers had to pay one time for a perpetual license, and yearly for maintenance, with the Cloud Edition in the OpenText Cloud, customers will have to pay for yearly subscription renewal, which will cover the Cloud Edition solution usage, hosting costs (optional), managed services (optional).

 

Moving OpenText to Cloud: Advisory Service

The OpenText Cloud Edition is an exciting new option of running OpenText solutions in the cloud. It allows users to benefit from new functionality without having to host solutions on-premises and not having to worry about onboarding qualified resources, regular upgrades, maintenance or enhancements. Most of the job will be done by OpenText, as part of managed services, except enhancements. Most Cloud Editions will not allow any custom development or integrations. From our point of view, the Cloud Edition is a great option for those customers that only use the out-of-the-box functionality and run light-weight solutions. It’s also a great option for new customers that plan to migrate from 3rd party solutions to OpenText. 

As for those, who have a lot of custom modules, have a lot of complex applications running based on OpenText solutions, need flexible configuration and integration capabilities, care about high availability and performance, it makes sense to make an audit and define which strategy would work best to move to the cloud in the most efficient manner. We at Ecodocx are a recognized OpenText service provider with almost 20 years of market experience. Helping customers, like Washington Gas, Sysco, New York Life Insurance, Chance Healthcare, Continental Resources, McKesson and many more, we provide OpenText advisory sessions to help organizations build their future product strategy. Contact us and schedule a free consultation.

 

In the meanwhile, subscribe to our blog to read more interesting content like this. In our next article, we are going to talk about moving to cloud with OpenText OT2, and later about private cloud options. Stay tuned!

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