It began with an early February call from Ian Mckay, Canada’s Ambassador to Japan: “Have you heard of OpenText? They came up under the radar, but apparently they’re now the second-largest Canadian operation in Japan. Are they a CCCJ member? You should write about them.” Conveniently, I found OpenText was planning a major event at a Tokyo hotel on February 26th, just before our deadline. And fortunately, we were able to arrange an interview with their CEO. So three members of our team were able to attend the half-day “OpenText Tokyo Summit.”

OpenText, a Waterloo unicorn

The University of Waterloo (U of W), Canada’s most prolific breeder of ‘unicorns,’ has spawned a stable of over 1,000 tech companies, including famous brands like Blackberry. It consistently ranks top in Canada and among the global top 20 universities in producing venture capital-backed founders.

In 1991, OpenText Corporation emerged from a U of W collaboration with the Oxford English Dictionary, searching and compiling every word in the language to create the first online version of the iconic reference resource. The purpose-built search engine developed by the Waterloo team proved so effective that it served as the basis for what became a powerful corporate content-management tool.

Where some Waterloo unicorns have galloped off to Silicon Valley and others flamed out, OpenText now has almost 23,000 employees worldwide and more than 120,000 customers in 180 countries. Still, it remains not only proudly Canadian but deeply rooted in its hometown, the twin Ontario cities of Kitchener and Waterloo.

James McGourlay was employee #175 when he joined OpenText in 1997. Today, he is OpenText’s “Interim CEO,” holding the fort for recently appointed CEO Aymon Antoun, who is coming home after positions with IBM in the U.S. Both executives grew up in Kitchener.

Curating content

As McGourlay explained, OpenText has from the outset focused on “curating content” for companies, governments and other large organizations. The goal is to make information instantly available and useable where it’s needed and securely locked down where it’s not. This has helped sprawling organizations overcome the handicap that has dogged management for centuries: the right hand has never known what the left hand was doing – until now. The corporate website brims with examples of dramatic increases in customer productivity.

“For starters, we manage content that humans create in writing, say, a Word document. So our system can harvest content from more than 1,500 apps,” McGourlay said. “You need to store it in context and add records management capabilities.” Among other things, that involves coding it with different permission levels. For example, users might be able to see that a document involved a certain medical condition but not the patient’s personal information.

“Then we have transactions between machines, he added. “For example, an auto manufacturer will have a supply chain with tens of thousands of parts that go into a car, coming from all over the world. That involves a huge volume of transactions from order through delivery. You need to know that every step has been handled appropriately.

“Financial transactions also go through our business network… then there’s what we call operations management: monitoring of networking equipment. Huge amounts of data, as you can imagine. We take all this data, context-manage it, and really turn it into value.

“We’ve grown both organically and through acquisitions,” McGourlay said. In each case, acquisitions have added to the core content-curation mission. For example, OCR technology that helps customers digitize paper content in their filing cabinets. Plus, adding Cloud capability and proprietary data centers (OpenText now 50 server farms worldwide, including one each in the Tokyo and Osaka regions) to enhance data security and another growing imperative…

Digital sovereignty

Countries and companies alike are now acutely concerned with “digital sovereignty,” maintaining control of their data assets in the face of growing threats. On one level, having your data stored abroad may expose you to intrusive investigation by foreign authorities or to espionage. On another level, organizations simply want to have their data stored on servers they control or at least trust, safe from hackers and hurricanes. As sales executive Todd Cione put it at the Tokyo Summit, OpenText offers a “trusted information backbone.”

McGourlay also suggested that being Canadian gives OpenText an advantage. “There’s a better cultural fit,” as he put it diplomatically, echoing Mark Carney’s “middle powers” thesis. With few axes to grind, Canada may just be more trustworthy.

In AI, “content is the new gold”

Artificial Intelligence may be somewhat mysterious to most of us, and perhaps a bit threatening. But if there’s one thing that everyone knows by now it’s that AI involves machines digesting vast mountains of data. Given the frequency of mistakes generated by apps like ChatGPT, you have to wonder if the developers just shovel in data indiscriminately. As the saying goes, “garbage in, garbage out.”

This is what makes OpenText fit to lead in the AI race. With content curation baked into their corporate DNA, the Waterloo company does not just ‘shovel it in.’ As Chief Information Officer Shannon Bell noted at the Summit, a data-management background is an essential prerequisite for AI. “You put in bad data, you get bad outcomes,” she said. “You need good, well-curated data.” Muhi Majzoub, VP of Product & Engineering, underscored that point. “Content is the new gold,” he said.

Bell cautioned companies to avoid trying to do too much at once when developing ‘AI agents.’ Instead, she recommended focusing on flawless handling of specific, well-defined tasks like claims processing or quality monitoring. In other words, start small.

Boots on the ground in Japan

When Canadian companies exploring Japan market opportunities ask CCCJ veterans what it takes to succeed here, the first piece of advice is often, “You need to be here, boots on the ground. This market does not reward dabblers.”

OpenText clearly got the memo.

OpenText K.K. was founded in 1997 when the parent company was just six years old. And McGourlay has been involved with Japan operations for much of the time since. “I counted them up the other day, and I’ve got more Japan stamps in my passport than any other,” he said.

After entering the market with the help of local partners, OpenText has steadily built its Japan team ever since. Where some competitors just have a sales team here and do all the work for Japanese customers overseas, McGourlay stressed the value of having a full-functioned team in Japan.

Today, with offices on the Yaesu side of Tokyo Station, OpenText K.K. has more than 300 staff (many working remotely), 120 partners and 2,500 customers in Japan. And, as evidenced by the turnout of over 500 people at the recent Summit, many more are interested.

Running the show in Japan is CEO Denise Miura (née Skarupski), who joined OpenText K.K. two years ago. She’s from 150 kilometers south of Waterloo, across the lake in Erie, Pennsylvania – close enough to Canada that she says she grew up watching Hockey Night in Canada on CBC TV. With that I’d say she qualifies as one of us.

After graduating from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie-Mellon University, like Waterloo a hotbed of computer science, she worked in Silicon Valley. Since coming to Japan in 2002, she and husband Toshi have lived in Tokyo and raised their two children here. During her time in Japan she held leadership roles in the Japan subsidiaries of U.S. IT firms MarkLogic and Medallia before joining OpenText.

Looking to the future, Miura noted that Japan faces significant challenges as it enters the ‘Cognitive Computing Era.’

“As Japan navigates this pivotal inflection point of digital modernization and AI adoption, OpenText’s decades of disciplined Enterprise Information Management can provide our customers with the essential guardrails of trust.

“Japanese organizations, aiming to leverage Agentic AI to amplify their traditional strengths in innovation and high service quality, must move fast but govern faster to balance progress with security, governance and data integrity.

“OpenText’s expertise in ensuring data quality and digital sovereignty – guaranteeing that proprietary information remains secure, transparent and in context – is vital for building a strong foundation for trustworthy AI excellence today and for decades to come. We will continue to invest in our team here in Japan, as well as our partner ecosystem, to provide the best possible advantages to our customers. The market is evolving quickly, and we are ready for the moment!”

Meanwhile, at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce in Japan we look forward to welcoming OpenText K.K. as our newest member.

“As Japan navigates this
pivotal inflection point
of digital modernization
and AI adoption,
OpenText can provide
our customers with
the essential
guardrails of trust”