Happy birthday, OpenText
Posted Apr 20, 2012 08:09:20 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Canada’s largest software company, Waterloo based OpenText, celebrated their 20th anniversary, Friday.
Company Chair, Tom Jenkins say 1 out of 3 times you go on the internet, chances are you are using OpenText software.
View Jenkins meeting with reporters below.
Jenkins compared the internet to an iceberg, in that the things people see are really only about 2% of the internet, “a lot of people don’t realize that Google, and Facebook, and Linkdin actually only represent about 2% of the internet. We manage the other 98%.”
Jenkins said those kinds of social networking sites have “really driven OpenText’s business, because all that content needs to be managed.”
Jenkins said one of the company’s crowning achievements came 2 years ago, when OpenText software helped run G20 in Toronto, “for governments around to world to trust us with all their secrets, was really something.”
Jenkins said it was an absolutely tremendous undertaking, and that every G20 since, has asked for “the Canadian system.”
Jenkins also points to the early days, “doing the original internet search engine with Netscape and Yahoo! was certainly a highlight.”
Back then, OpenText managed one gigabyte of internet search crawls.
“Making the internet behind the firewall,” as Jenkins says, takes up a lot of space, “so if everyone knows about gigabytes and terabytes, well petabytes is above terabytes, and zettabytes is above petabytes… well were now managing petabytes, leading to zettabytes of information.”
Jenkins says his company made the decision early on,to focus on the computing that goes on behind the scenes.
Which is Jenkins advice to any of today’s upstarts. Simply to focus.
“In the early days of internet, we had to focus on one particular aspect of the internet. In fact, we gave up doing consumer search engines. So you could argue that while we could have been Yahoo! or Google, etcetera; but in fact we focused on inside the firewall. Our focus was ‘lets create the Google or Facebook or Yahoo! for corporations through-out the world.’ By focusing we could win.”
“The 100th version of Angry Birds perhaps would not be a good idea. You have to focus.”
Minister of State for Science and Technology, Gary Goodyear spoke at the event,
saying OpenText is an inspiration to companies across Canada.
