OpenText Aviator lets AI fly across expansive enterprise software portfolio

Few technology vendors have as broad an enterprise software portfolio as OpenText, and it’s a portfolio that is now being broadly enabled with generative AI capabilities.

The new OpenText Aviator effort is launching today as a set of AI capabilities in the OpenText Cloud Editions (CE) 23.4 release. OpenText’s expansive portfolio includes enterprise content management, IT operations, cybersecurity, database and developer tooling. The portfolio has grown both organically and via acquisition, with a big boost coming from the $6 billion acquisition of Micro Focus that closed at the end of January.

With Aviator, OpenText aims to help organizations leverage AI to swiftly act on data, make sharp decisions, and evolve with intelligent tools.

“The OpenText Aviator is a new set of AI capabilities that attaches itself to our services in our business cloud,” OpenText EVP and chief product officer Muhi Majzoub told VentureBeat.

 The new Aviator capabilities span a diverse range of business functions including: 

• OpenText IT Operations Aviator – A virtual agent for  OpenText Service Management Automation X (SMAX) that utilizes large language models to enhance user experiences, facilitate intuitive self-service, and gain efficiency in service management.
• OpenText DevOps Aviator – Leverages AI to optimize software delivery through automatic test creation, feature prediction, and risk reduction.
• OpenText Content Aviator – Improves information retrieval in the workplace through an interactive chat interface and natural language queries.
• OpenText Experience Aviator – Brings the power of GenAI to  Customer Communications Management (CCM).
• OpenText Business Network Aviator – Brings AI and large language models into OpenText’s supply chain platform for a 360-degree view and conversational interfaces.

There is no ‘one LLM to rule them all’ for OpenText

The Aviator effort is a dramatic expansion of OpenText’s AI capabilities. In July the company announced a series of incremental updates designed to bring some limited AI into the overall platform.

The idea of integrating generative AI into enterprise software is not a new one at this point in 2023. Microsoft deeply embeds AI across its portfolio today as does Salesforce and other enterprise software vendors. Majzoub explained that the Aviator effort is designed to flow across the whole OpenText portfolio, with capabilities and expertise to help optimize each specific enterprise service that the company offers. 

“We are targeting specifically our data expertise in the platforms that we develop and manage,” he said. “We believe we are the best in knowing the platforms that we own the IP for.”

OpenText is not building its own large language model (LLM) to power the Aviator tools, rather it is using a series of different LLMs including models from Google, Facebook and OpenAI. Majzoub said that OpenText is using the different models to help power Aviator capabilities, with an eye to using the best tool for the specific use case, based on performance, accuracy and cost.

How the OpenText Aviator fits into enterprise software services in the cloud

The goal with the Aviator approach is to make it easier and faster for enterprise users to get things done.

Majzoub explained that for the IT Operations use case with OpenText Service Management Automation X (SMAX), the Aviator will use an LLM fine tuned with data from OpenText to solve IT problems. For example, if a user is having trouble connecting a laptop to the network, the Aviator will go behind the scenes, look at the configuration and then come back with a proposed solution or automatically open a trouble  ticket and to help an analyst to identify and solve the problem with the laptop.

The content Aviator serves a different purpose, optimizing information retrieval across document management services with a chat interface. As an example,  Majzoub said a content analyst in the legal department working on resolving a customer challenge could ask the Aviator for everything related to that customer and the Aviator will crawl across all of the content and come back with the documents and related content.

For the DevOps use case, OpenText’s Aviator is targeting specifically its testing capabilities with the  ValueEdge platform, which came to OpenText via the Micro Focus acquisition. The Aviator will crawl all of the projects in the development pipeline and can be used to identify if a project is at risk due to a lack of test coverage. The Aviator will also be able to remediate the situation by generating a test script that can be automatically run to expand the test coverage.

OpenText is also bringing the Aviator technology to the world of supply chain management, which can be extremely complex, involving multiple software components. Majzoub explained that with supply chains there is the concept of a canonical map, which details the intricate interaction across various producers and distributors. Each piece of the supply chain might be using different software and with the Aviator, the goal is to bring it all together, using AI to ease the process.

“If a company like Nestle is interacting with a coffee bean producer and distributor that is giving Nestle coffee beans for their manufacturing process,the Aviator will have the ability to do the translation between an SAP system, a NetSuite system or an SAP and a Microsoft Dynamics system all automatically,” he said.