Executive Chair & Chief Strategy Officer, OpenText, Micro Focus (an OpenText brand)
OpenText Chair Tom Jenkins on company's 20th anniversary
Canada's largest software company, Waterloo based OpenText, celebrated their 20th anniversary, Friday. Chair Tom Jenkins ...
About P. Jenkins
Tom Jenkins, Executive Chair and Chief Strategy Officer of OpenText, has spoken about the company's global reach and the importance of Asia to Canada's future. He noted that 95% of OpenText's business is outside Canada and 50% is outside North America, with Asia being critical because it will represent half of the world's GDP. Jenkins emphasized the need for Canada to become more familiar with Asia through joint development and co-location, citing OpenText's experience in Hyderabad, India, where the company co-develops products for world markets. Jenkins has also discussed the company's history and the evolving nature of the internet. On OpenText's 20th anniversary, he highlighted milestones such as surpassing $1 billion in revenue and having 50 million users, as well as the company's role in managing content for governments and social media platforms. He noted that 98% of the internet is behind firewalls and that the volume of data is growing rapidly, with the internet now doubling every week. Jenkins has also addressed Canada's productivity challenges, attributing a significant portion of the decline to a lack of investment in information and communications technology, and has advocated for continued support for entrepreneurship and innovation.
Transcript (26 segments)
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Interviewer0:02
Over the past 20 years, what has been the number one highlight that you remember?
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Tom Jenkins0:07
Well, that's a tough question. 20 years is a long time. Probably the most recent highlight was for an internet company — because OpenText is an internet company — to go past a billion dollars in revenue. That sort of, I guess, is a signal you've arrived on the global stage if you can become that big and you have that many users, and that's 50 million users. So that's probably a recent highlight. But there have been so many other things that have happened over the years for OpenText. Doing the original internet search engine with Netscape and Yahoo was certainly a consumer highlight, but running the G20 several years ago — for governments throughout the world to trust us with all their secrets — was really something. So lots of memories.
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Interviewer0:57
How has social media — Facebook, MySpace — how has that helped tell OpenText's story not just to the consumer but the world?
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Tom Jenkins1:07
Well, it's actually driven our business, because all that content needs to be managed. Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter create an enormous amount of content. Just email alone in one day creates enough data equal to six Googles. And as those platforms grow, that content increases even more. Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn actually only represent about 2% of the entire internet — we manage the other 98%. And I have a new word for you: zettabytes. If everyone knows about gigabytes and terabytes, well, petabytes is above terabytes and zettabytes is above petabytes. We're now managing petabytes leading to zettabytes of information. The first original OpenText search engine of the web — our big issue was we had to crawl and provide search service for one gigabyte, which anyone can have on their phone today. So there's been a lot of change.
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Interviewer2:19
With so many people now connected, what are the challenges you see ahead over the next few years?
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Tom Jenkins2:28
Finding things. It's been our challenge since the first day of the internet. It will continue to be our challenge, and finding relevant things. That's why things like Facebook are so popular, because within our circle of friends it's already relevant. And why things like Google — we struggle for the relevance because it's not specific to us. So I think what we're going to find is personalized computing, personalized internet based on where we're located through our personal device, whether it's a BlackBerry or an iPhone or an iPad. And all the information will come to us. It's hard to imagine today, but it's something we call the semantic web, where the web itself actually figures out where you are and you're hungry and you want to know the location of the nearest pizza shop.
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Interviewer3:15
How proud are you to be the chair of Canada's biggest software company?
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Tom Jenkins3:19
Well, it's a humbling thing because a lot of what we do drives innovation in Canada now. My heroes of the past have retired or moved on, so it's a humbling experience. All of us at the company take that very seriously. We know that Canadians and innovation are a very important thing for the economy. So no, we're pretty serious about it — it's very humbling.
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Interviewer3:49
Speaking of innovation, what is the next step for OpenText?
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Tom Jenkins3:51
Oh, without a doubt, mobile platforms and the web becoming an operating system. Just as we were mentioning before about social media, the amount of information we're creating because we all have these gadgets in our hands is causing the amount of content that we need to store and manage and retrieve later to just absolutely explode. It used to be that the internet doubled once a year; we're now doubling every week. That may not sound like a lot, but that's tens of thousands of times of doubling in a year. It's just incredible what's happening.
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Interviewer4:29
What advice would you have for someone who is about to embark on what you just experienced for the next 20 years? What would you say to them?
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Tom Jenkins4:38
Focus. In the early days of internet, we had to focus on one particular aspect. In fact, we gave up doing consumer search engines. You could argue we could have been Yahoo or Google, but what we did is focus on inside the firewall. So our focus was: let's create the Google or Facebook or Yahoo for corporations throughout the world. And by focusing on that we could win. I think that's the most important thing for anyone starting today: focus and do something unique. The 100th version of Angry Birds perhaps would not be a good idea. You have to focus.
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Interviewer5:18
Tell me about the changes to the facility and how they're helping you, I guess, for the next 20 years.
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Tom Jenkins5:25
Well, today's a very exciting day for us because we opened Tower 2. Tower 2 was designed with state-of-the-art development in mind. When people go on the tour today they'll be blown away — there isn't an idea of a cubicle and there isn't an idea of an office. Instead, it's groups that form, disband, and reform in areas. The areas are all kinds of flexible walls and it's very funky. You'd sort of walk through and say, 'But where does everybody work?' Well, they work everywhere. And we don't have paper filing systems, so it's all now electronic and all of your information follows you with mobile devices. It's actually a building for this century. There's nothing like it in Canada.
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Interviewer6:13
Does the building space, workspace, reflect what's going on in the internet?
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Tom Jenkins6:18
Yeah, that's a good way to say it. In fact it is a reflection of it, and that's actually what we set out to do. We tried to model the building to emulate the way we were designing and how groups were forming and reforming and forming again with different people. So we tried to make the physical space match that. It's quite clever what all the folks came up with.
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Interviewer6:40
Sure. How important has it been to be in Waterloo region over the past 20 years and to continue to stay here?
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Tom Jenkins6:48
Oh, it's fantastic here. Canada as a whole is a great country for collaboration and research excellence. We produce some of the best people in the world without a doubt. Waterloo is one step on top of that because it's all in a really small community. It's very rare — as I've traveled the world, not just Canada but Germany, United States, Japan, China — what goes on in Waterloo is very rare. David Johnson always used to like to call it the Mennonite barn raising, and he's right. In Waterloo we help each other. It's a rare thing about this area, and yet at the same time cutting-edge innovation, very tough go-to-market, all those other attributes, and yet there's this collaboration that happens here.
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Interviewer7:38
So you've taken a big leadership role in looking at that next leap of innovation and providing leadership to that. And why is it that OpenText doesn't get recognized as being that leader in the community? You guys have worked behind the scenes and are getting more out in front now in taking leadership in that area.
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Tom Jenkins8:00
Everyone has different styles. This corporation by its nature is a behind-the-scenes corporation. It's behind the firewall. Much of what we do — I don't want to call it secret, but people don't want the content that we handle on the front page of a newspaper or up on a website. Think of WikiLeaks. So I think the culture of the company emulates that. The managers here that get involved, whether it's Communitech or at the national level, they tend to lead from behind. It's the nature of the company.
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Interviewer8:33
Sure, but you're taking a bigger role in stepping out and doing it on the national scene. We know in Stratford you'll be there, a prominent role to play next week as well.
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Tom Jenkins8:42
You know, again, that's part of the role. It's something that you have to approach with great humility because you're representing a lot of people. When you're the chairman of the largest software company in Canada, it's your role to represent those things. You just have to do it in an everyday, every-person way. I think that's what all of us try to do.
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Interviewer9:04
What's next for Tom Jenkins in terms of your role? I mean, are you going to continue here, are you looking towards, I guess, stepping onto more of a national political level?
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Tom Jenkins9:18
Oh no, I'm very much a stay-at-home person. I'll get involved — Minister Goodyear asked me to get involved at the national level with innovation, but that's the extent of my involvement. I'm quite busy at OpenText. This has been 20 all-consuming years and it's not stopping. The issues that we have at OpenText to manage all the content on all of your devices — that keeps me up at night. It's a pretty complicated problem. Many of us in the internet think that we're just coming up to the end of the first inning — there's a lot that's going to evolve in the next few years. I'm really excited to be part of it. It's really rare for a Canadian company to have 150 million users all throughout the world — it's like five times Canada's population. And we can set the standards on things. So there's no other place that I would rather be than here doing that.
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Interviewer10:19
Perfect.
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Tom Jenkins10:23
And by the way, I brought this — this is the history book. I thought it might be really cool to see this classic sort of content thing where you've got the playbook and the old paper style. This is the history of OpenText for the last 20 years. What you do is you go into this and it gives you all the interactive timeline. Everything that's in here plus video is here. So this is the playbook version of the paper version — all the history of the company over the last 20 years. It tells the story of the internet, but it tells the story most people don't know — the story of what we call big data and the hidden web. Everyone thinks they know the internet because they surf Google or use Facebook, but 98% of the internet is actually behind the firewall. And this tells the story of that and how it was all created.