Company introduces OpenText Aviator AI capabilities in Cloud Editions 23.4

OpenText™, the information company, today announced the latest release of its Cloud Editions (CE) 23.4, which includes OpenText Aviator artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that carry through the company's innovation roadmap. For over a decade, OpenText has been helping organizations manage and secure large complex data sets from IoT and robotics, to natural language processing, to complex systems and generative AI. OpenText Aviator empowers organizations to swiftly act on their data, make sharp decisions and evolve with intelligent tools that learn over time. OpenText Aviator uplevels information automation so organizations can easily make the AI pivot and conquer today's and tomorrow's business challenges.

"The AI revolution is creating an unprecedented platform shift – one that will transform all industries, all functions, and all roles," said Mark Barrenechea, CEO & CTO of OpenText. "OpenText has been developing AI capabilities for over a decade, and OpenText Aviators is an AI breakthrough for customers. OpenText Aviator will help customers massively increase productivity through new conversation interfaces leveraging Information Management data sets and language models."

The demand for and adoption of AI technologies continues to grow at record speed. According to IDC, global AI IT spending will surpass $308 billion by 2026. In response to this rapidly growing demand and market potential, OpenText introduced its opentext.ai vision and strategy for AI focused on helping organizations power and protect traditional operational and experience data while anticipating a new layer of learning data from generative AI and large language models (LLMS). Grounded in layering LLMs on top of private, secured data, opentext.ai allows for a full stack or modular approach to practical AI. Organizations can take advantage of LLM-based capabilities within applications, or they can utilize OpenText Cloud API Services to create the right sandbox to experiment with.

"From upstream and renewables to trading and transport to marketing and manufacturing, we keep goods and people moving. We span 160 markets, serve about 32 million people a day at 46,000 branded retail sites and work with more than 1 million business customers. We have been the No.1 global lubricants supplier for 16 consecutive years and offer our customers a strong portfolio of energy solutions they need today and tomorrow. AI is key to maintaining our performance in these areas whilst we play a key role in the energy transition and help our customers decarbonize their businesses in the journey to net zero," said Jonathan Cullender, Head of Integration at Shell. "We are excited to take the stage with OpenText in Las Vegas to explore the game-changing capabilities of AI within the energy sector and how OpenText solutions have been instrumental in improving our operational efficiency and security, ultimately leading to substantial cost savings."

"As generative AI moves on from the initial hype, the work to ensure a measurable return on investment begins," said Darryl Gray, Global Vice President of Software Partner Solutions at SAP. "SAP is committed to creating an enterprise AI ecosystem for the future that complements our world-class business applications suite and helps our customers unlock their full potential. We support the vision behind OpenText's opentext.ai strategy and are confident that OpenText's latest innovations will enable businesses of all sizes and industries to elevate their operations to unimaginable heights."  

OpenText Aviator enables AI orchestration and the creation of information flows across multiple clouds and knowledge bases allowing organizations to address multiple AI use cases for their enterprise without having to move their data. The latest Cloud Editions release includes:

OpenText Aviator for Business

• OpenText IT Operations Aviator™ is a cutting-edge generative AI virtual agent for OpenText Service Management Automation X (SMAX). The latest integration combines LLMs with OpenText's data security expertise to enhance the user experience, facilitate intuitive self-service, provide faster issue resolution and gain efficiency, ultimately reducing service management costs and improve end-user customer experience.
• OpenText DevOps Aviator™ revolutionizes software delivery with generative AI capabilities enabling organizations to deliver software at unparalleled velocity. This tool leverages AI to optimize software delivery with feature prediction, enhances test coverage with automatic test creation and authoring, and reduces points of risk that impact quality.
• OpenText Content Aviator™ optimizes information retrieval in the workplace, making it more efficient and productive. The interactive chat interface and natural language queries enhances user productivity and streamlines content discovery.
• OpenText Experience Aviator™ integrates Customer Communications Management (CCM) software with generative AI capabilities enabling marketing, communications and customer service support teams to produce well-formed and relevant material faster than ever, boosting development productivity.
• OpenText Cybersecurity Aviator™ offers AI-enhanced rapid deployment capabilities and cloud-based efficiency to help organizations implement new threat detection models designed to protect users from diverse, sophisticated and evolving threats.
• OpenText Business Network Aviator™ brings generative AI and large language models (LLMs) into the OpenText Business Network, placing the entire supply chain information flow into a single platform. By utilizing a comprehensive 360-degree perspective of end-to-end supply chain operations and an AI-powered conversational interface, businesses will gain access to information to respond quickly to dynamic and unpredictable market fluctuations and conditions.

OpenText Aviator for Technologists

• OpenText Aviator Platform offers a suite of tools and connectors to administer enterprise-grade data warehouses, data lakes, analytics of structure and unstructured data, and visualization for intelligent decision-making.
• OpenText Aviator Search introduces a new advanced capability to go from clicks to conversations with search that spans all data types across multiple repositories to build any custom solution, portal, or experience for an enterprise. 
• OpenText Aviator IOT brings forward a collection of tools to better connect and protect millions of IoT endpoints to get real-time insights and visibility into assets location, condition, utilization, performance and health.
• OpenText Aviator Thrust & Thrust Studio is a set of robust cloud API services and developer tools built over the last three years that can power secure information flows, fuel custom AI solutions, and fast-track new AI-embedded applications.
• OpenText Aviator Lab is a partnership for experimentation with professional AI experts to help customers accelerate AI development through rapid prototyping, AI reference architectures in a secure sandbox environment.

DXC will manage the implementation and development of private and public cloud infrastructures for the Spanish Autonomous Community

DXC Technology, a leading Fortune 500 global technology services company, has been awarded a transformation contract by the Technological Modernization Agency of Galicia of its cloud platforms and solutions.

The Xunta de Galicia is the public administration of the autonomous region of Galicia in Spain. DXC will coordinate, manage and develop the organization's cloud infrastructure and solutions across private, public and cloud environments.

The agreement will have a positive impact on the government agency's decision-making processes. DXC advises the agency on methodologies, best practices, cost optimization, compliance, governance and the implementation of new cloud services.

Xunta de Galicia aims to become a service provider for public institutions in the region and will offer regional public institutions a flexible and secure cloud infrastructure through a cloud consumption model.

The two organizations will work together to determine the most efficient and successful cloud infrastructure strategy in the region. This also includes the ability to have a “cloud dashboard” to monitor projects and platforms to provide a holistic view of cloud technology performance in the region.

“Almost three million Galician citizens rely on our public services. Cloud technologies provide us with a flexible platform to optimize processes while ensuring the stability and security we need to protect our operations 24/7. Now we have the proven experience of DXC as a partner to pave our path to the cloud," said Miguel Montero , Head of Cloud Infrastructure at Xunta de Galicia.

“Our contract will define and implement the cloud strategy for Xunta de Galicia. We will become a reference point for Spanish public administrations by modernizing and improving services for various Galician organizations and institutions, benefiting citizens throughout the region," said Elías Castro, Territorial Director of DXC Technology Iberia in Galicia. "With our expertise in cloud architectures, we will help introduce new solutions and services that will drive innovation and improve the operational efficiency of Xunta de Galicia."

Crayon, a global leader in IT services and innovation, today announced it is expanding its partnership with Google Cloud to deepen its expertise on Google Cloud generative AI through Crayon's Centers of Excellence in Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East and Africa region.

With more than 150 data experts, and the increased focus on Google Cloud AI, Crayon will be able to deliver more best-in-class AI projects and solutions to its customers and partners, including helping customers pilot and deploy products like Duet AI and Vertex AI.

"We are excited about expanding our partnership with Google Cloud and the business value that we will create," said Crayon CEO Melissa Mulholland. "Our customers and partners increasingly see the need for using generative AI to provide better services and solutions. With our AI Centers of Excellence, we have the capabilities to help companies explore their own data and use it to accelerate their business. Google Cloud is a great partner to help customers get the best data and AI experience."

"Crayon's long-time experience in digital transformation, its AI Centers of Excellence and deepening of its expertise on Google Cloud will help global business more quickly adopt and see value from AI," said Bron Hastings, VP, Partnerships at Google Cloud. "Through this new and growing partnership, we will work together to accelerate customers' AI-driven transformations with Google Cloud technology, models via Vertex AI, and expert services from Crayon."

In the past several months, there has been a massive acceleration of generative AI technologies available to power and accelerate digital transformation across all industries. There is an unprecedented demand from customers asking for help in understanding how to best leverage generative AI to accelerate their transformation and deliver business impact.

Crayon has developed expertise to support customers and partners on their generative AI journey. With Google Cloud, the data experts at Crayon have found an impressive array of innovative, open, scalable, secure, and enterprise-ready generative AI solutions.

Industry's most complete, cloud-based enterprise AppSec solution leverages groundbreaking AI technology, streamlines end-to-end developer experience and expands Supply Chain Security capabilities

Checkmarx, the industry leader in cloud-native application security for the enterprise, today released version 3.0 of its AI-powered Checkmarx One™ enterprise AppSec platform. Purpose-built for enterprise cloud development, Checkmarx One 3.0 dramatically improves the end-to-end developer experience while expanding the AI-driven security capabilities of the platform's CheckAI Plug-in, its reporting and analytics capabilities and its Supply Chain Security solution.

"Checkmarx One is the AI-driven AppSec platform for today and for the future. Enterprise CISOs now see the strength of their application security as critical to their overall security postures," said Sandeep Johri, CEO at Checkmarx. "Leveraging the power of AI to protect the most complex enterprise applications is critical. Yet it's also important to ensure that the platform is easy and rewarding for developers to use and offers the most robust defense possible against software supply chain attacks."

Checkmarx One Version 3.0 now offers:

• AI-Powered Application Security: The CheckAI Plugin for ChatGPT is joined by AI Query Builder for SAST, AI Query Builder for Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) Security, and AI Security Champion to both secure changing developer workflows and make AppSec easier for overburdened enterprise AppSec teams.
• Seamless Developer Experience: Checkmarx One integrates easily into the most popular integrated development environments (IDEs) and feedback tools to increase adoption and help teams find and fix vulnerabilities swiftly. New features such as the presentation of the attack vector, linked directly to the line of code within the developer IDE, save substantial time for developers.
• Expanded Supply Chain Security Capabilities: In addition to the detection of malicious packages and the Checkmarx Supply Chain Threat Intelligence feed, Checkmarx One now includes a Secrets Detection Engine and Project Scorecard.
• Advanced API Security: Checkmarx One offers the industry's most complete API Security solution, automating the discovery and testing of an organization's shadow APIs and expanding from pre-production to runtime.
• Consolidated, Simplified AppSec: Through integration of runtime insights from Sysdig as well as App Risk Management, Checkmarx One now consolidates vulnerabilities, risk ratings and prioritization guidance across an organization's entire application portfolio. One comprehensive dashboard helps direct developers toward the riskiest application vulnerabilities first.
• Advanced Reporting and Analytics: An all-new reporting module elevates risk comprehension through sharper insights and drill-down analytics.

"Checkmarx One offers tremendous and measurable benefits for our customers, improving both application security and developer experience for a more seamless AppSec experience and faster time-to-market," said Amit Daniel, Chief Marketing Officer at Checkmarx. "One Fortune 500 customer customized their AppSec solution, strengthened their AppSec skills with secure code training and created a security champions program to build a bridge between development and AppSec teams. All of this resulted in a 1600x increase in the number of vulnerabilities remediated for a significant boost to enterprise security."

• BT announces new strategic security partnership with Google Cloud, targeting a range of joint innovation opportunities.

• As a first step, BT becomes an official reseller of Google Chronicle, including its Autonomic Security Operations framework.

• The move builds on existing collaboration between the companies across data, cloud migration, and AI programmes.

BT and Google Cloud today announced a new partnership focusing on an enhanced commitment to cybersecurity innovation. Serving customers in more than 180 countries and with a team of 3,000 security professionals, BT works with the security industry's leading vendors to provide managed security solutions to private and public sector organisations around the world.

As part of the partnership, BT will become a managed services delivery partner for Google's Autonomic Security Operations (ASO) offering based on Google Chronicle. ASO is a holistic framework that combines principles, practices, and tools that enable organisations to take an adaptive and automated approach to threat management. Underpinned by Chronicle's peta-byte scale detection, a data lake powered by Google Cloud's data and analytics platform BigQuery, and rich, compelling analytics via Looker, the solution decreases the time to detect and respond to threats—which is essential in the face of the increasing volume and complexity of cyber-attacks.

Customers will benefit from the new partnership by gaining the technological capabilities of Google Chronicle, combined with BT's track record of delivering cybersecurity services to organisations with complex estates and requirements. Customers will be supported by experts from BT's Security Advisory Services team, who leverage BT's deep experience in security operations and integration to help organisations ensure that they have optimised their wider security architecture to fully align with their priorities and ambition.

"Combining Google Chronicle's capabilities with BT's view of global networks and experience of providing managed security services is a really exciting prospect. The ASO solution will help our customers to rapidly identify risks and automatically enhance their cyber defences—providing the speed that's essential to combating cyber-attacks. It represents the first step in our partnership with Google Cloud on cybersecurity, with both companies committed to providing new innovations and solutions that help organisations stay ahead of an increasingly threatening cyber threat landscape," said Tris Morgan, Managing Director, Security at BT.

"Our partnership brings the best of BT's experience in deploying big data-based security platforms with Google Cloud's innovative security capabilities to help our multinational customers transform their approaches to cyber risk management in the face of a rapidly changing threat landscape," said Magali Bohn, Global Director, Partnerships & Channels at Google Cloud Security.

The partnership builds on BT Group and Google's existing relationship to house BT Group's data in Google Cloud to support its analytics and AI ambitions. BT and Google Cloud will also seek to incorporate solutions from Mandiant, a market leader in threat intelligence solutions acquired by Google in 2022, as an additional aspect of the partnership. Finally, BT is working with Google Cloud to trial Google's Vertex AI and Duet AI capabilities.

• The app connects Unilever's factory-based colleagues across the globe to Unilever systems

• It supports Unilever's commitment to putting people at the heart of digital transformation, leveraging technology to support employees

• The app allows secure, quick and easy access to key Unilever systems all in one place, and enables one-click access to collaboration tools on Google Workspace including email, chat, and document sharing

Google Cloud and Unilever have partnered to launch a new app for employees, My Unilever. The app has been designed to digitally connect Unilever's factory-based colleagues across the globe, enabling them to tap into Unilever's digital resources from any location or device.

Built on Google Cloud, and delivered in partnership with Accenture, the My Unilever app unlocks the opportunity for Unilever's 53,000+ factory-based colleagues to have easy and secure access to key Unilever systems. It also enables one-click entry to Google Workspace, which includes the communication and collaboration apps such as Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, Chat, Meet, and more, relied on by more than three billion users and over 10 million customers. The app also utilises Appsheet, Google's no-code platform, as the main end-user interface for the My Unilever application.

The My Unilever app will also give users access to a variety of third-party tools including learning and payroll, some of which were previously only accessible through paper-based methods or via time-consuming in-factory processes. In streamlining these previous methods, My Unilever helps to save time and increase productivity - benefits that will continue to grow as the application expands into more use-cases.

Adam Raeburn-James, Chief Technology Officer at Unilever comments: "Digital transformation, at its heart, is about people. In launching the My Unilever app, we're helping our factory-based colleagues to become digitally connected. By giving all of our people access to key HR, support and learning systems, we can continue to work towards our goal of ensuring that everyone at Unilever can develop the future-fit skills they need for the evolving workplace by 2025.

"Our partnership with Google Cloud allows us to continue taking our use of technology to the next level. Alongside this, we're drawing on Accenture's global expertise in deployment, change and adoption, to ensure the best possible transition and experience for our colleagues. We've already received great feedback across our recent pilot programme."

"This partnership will help support Unilever in building this capability for the future, and we are excited to be part of this journey," said Laurence Lafont, Vice President, Strategic Industries EMEA, Google Cloud. "With Google Cloud's technology, Unilever's factory-based colleagues are now able to connect in a new way, supporting them to develop and thrive. The My Unilever app brings the business closer together as one team, empowering them to achieve more."

• Partnership will involve Gymshark using Google Cloud's data analytics and AI tools to improve customer experiences during November's Black Friday sales event and beyond

• The fitness retail leader will explore key generative AI use cases to further enhance its personalisation and relevance to the Gymshark community

Today, at Google Cloud Next London 2023, Gymshark, the fitness community and apparel brand, announced that it has selected Google Cloud to support the next phase of its digital growth. Gymshark will use Google Cloud's technology to enhance its data analytics capabilities, improve customer experiences, and drive innovation and growth with generative AI.

To support its growth strategy and expansion into new territories, Gymshark needed to become more targeted in its decision making, and its incumbent data management and analytics solutions had become outdated. Gymshark will now take advantage of Google Cloud's best-in-class data warehousing and analytics suite, real-time analytics, and AI and machine learning tools to help the company provide unique and more personalised experiences for its customers all over the world.

Gymshark will also experiment with various generative AI use cases, leveraging Google Cloud's AI platform, Vertex AI. This will include the creation of new expert assistants that will guide consumers through the product selection process. Or supercharging the Gymshark training app to be able to seamlessly record activities via text and dynamically provide new insights to help customers reach their fitness goals.

In the coming months, Google Cloud, together with partner Deloitte, will support Gymshark with multiple data-centric initiatives, including:

• Enhancing customer experiences during this year's Black Friday shopping season by improving the breadth, relevance, and availability of its offering to customers.
• Accelerating growth by equipping Gymshark with a highly scalable, flexible, and performant technology stack, future-proofing its IT requirements.
• Optimising internal operations and supply chains with technology that will ultimately become ground truth for the entire business, enabling more granular and time-relevant insights, enhanced decision making, and forecasting capabilities.
• Driving innovation with Google Cloud's Vertex AI, which will help turbo-charge Gymshark's innovation work streams and create new competitive differentiation in products, such as its new training app.

Gymshark will also use Google Cloud's BigQuery to replace the central repository of all data, as well as Looker—a unified business intelligence platform—as its visualisation and reporting tool.

"We are proud to work with a British-grown company and to be part of Gymshark's global growth journey. With our technology, the Gymshark team is now equipped to go from digital native to data native and unlock transformative experiences for customers all over the world," says Helen Kelisky, Managing Director, Google Cloud, UKI.

"We have come a long way since founding Gymshark 11 years ago, and we are ready for this partnership to kickstart the next phase of our transformation and future growth. Data is at the heart of this evolution, and with the help of Google Cloud's game-changing technology and data analytics experts, we are certain that we will be able to reach our goals and remain a leader in this competitive industry," said Ben Francis, CEO and Founder of Gymshark.

Weaviate—the AI-native vector database and generative AI platform that weaves models and databases together to easily create secure, stateful, and scalable AI applications—is now available through Google Cloud Marketplace

Weaviate's mission is to make it as easy as possible for developers to build production-ready AI. Today, in conjunction with Google Cloud Next London, the company announced that its AI-native vector database is even easier to deploy because it's available to developers with one click in Google Cloud Marketplace.

As a Google Cloud partner—now making its open-source software available on the Marketplace—Weaviate enables customers to create and deploy generative AI apps that meet enterprise needs with the convenience of being billed through Google Cloud. Compliance, regulation, and vendor-approval hassles are minimized.

Customers deploying Weaviate via the Google Cloud Marketplace can bring the latest generative AI models to their data while keeping that data safe. Weaviate can be provisioned directly into a customer's tenant, including their virtual private cloud. Customers can be confident that proprietary data won't be used to train models that may later be used by competitors, consistent with Google Cloud's commitments to data privacy and security.

"Most businesses cannot use LLMs in critical applications because they'd put proprietary data at risk, models were trained on old or irrelevant data, or results aren't explainable," said Bob van Luijt, CEO. "Weaviate's developer-friendly platform solves all those problems. Making it available through Google Cloud Marketplace makes it even easier to move generative AI from 'someday' into production." 

"Bringing its platform to Google Cloud Marketplace means Weaviate customers can procure, deploy, and manage its capabilities quickly and securely," said Dai Vu, Managing Director, Marketplace at Google Cloud. "Our partnership means developers can utilize and scale Weaviate's capabilities on Google Cloud's trusted, global infrastructure - increasingly the destination of choice for developers building generative AI."

Weaviate's vector database supports searching both vectors and source objects, as well as data exploration and analysis on unstructured data of all types. Generative AI capabilities are enhanced by retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and generative feedback loops.

Now that Weaviate is available on Google Cloud Marketplace, it's even easier for customers to put generative AI to work with minimum cost and worry. Users can deploy their first cluster in minutes. Built-in ML modules allow developers to just load and search regardless of data type, model, or use case. It's effortlessly scalable with straightforward consumption-based pricing.