Three things from OpenText World.
- The people running product and tech have no engineering background.
Shannon Bell is the new Chief Product & Technology Officer. Her resume is product management at Amdocs, IT at Rogers, then CIO at OpenText. No engineering org, no R&D org, ever. The guy before her, Savinay Berry, actually ran product and engineering at Vonage.
Same story with the new hires. Anupam Khazanchi, the new CIO, came from Rogers IT. Lise Lefaive got bumped to SVP from running a PMO. IT delivery people, not software people.
Compare that to anyone else. SAP's CTO has a PhD in computer science. ServiceNow's Chief Product Officer did 24 years of product development at Oracle. Workday's product and tech president started as a developer.
Every engineer, intern, or internal transfer at OpenText has to prove the skills in an interview before they get the job. Apparently that rule stops at the executive floor. Terrible.
- They're cutting R&D while promising more AI.
Keynote: agentic AI, a Global Command Center, an AI-first platform. 10-K: R&D spend down 14% in a year ($756M to $648M), last quarter down 20%, EBITDA margin up to 36%.
Two cost programs at the same time. "OpenText Trusts OpenText" wants $1.5B in savings. The Business Optimization Plan is cutting around 2,000 roles, about 1,280 of them this year. Next year's "growth investment" is $100–200M and the only specific line item is sales hiring. Zero number for engineers.
You can't keep cutting the people who build the product and still promise a new platform.
Shannon Bell made her name as CIO by cutting costs with the "OpenText Trusts OpenText" program. That was the right job then. It's the wrong job now. As CPTO her job is to fight for R&D budget, not keep bragging about savings. If she's still on stage talking about $1.5B in cuts instead of what she's spending on engineers, she hasn't made the switch. She's running the product org the way she ran IT: as a cost center.
- The future is dimmer than the keynote.
Execs with no engineering background, a shrinking R&D budget, and a growth plan that's basically hiring salespeople. That's not an AI strategy. That's a cost-cutting plan with an AI sticker on it. Until someone senior owns R&D investment with an actual number, the AI targets are just slides.
Last year OpenText cut 1,091 R&D heads and 19 in sales and marketing. The plan isn't finished. More layoffs are coming.
So who's responsible for engineering investment, and how much is it?