This year, OpenText is celebrating our 30th anniversary. As I look back on our history, I am amazed at how far we have come, and how bright the future is. From a project at the University of Waterloo to create the first online version of the Oxford English Dictionary, OpenText has become the global market leader in Information Management — a market worth $84B and growing.

At the heart of our company has been our customers, our employees and the culture that brings us together. We are all global citizens. At OpenText, we believe that information and knowledge make businesses and people better. That is why we strive to be the leading cloud-based Information Management company in the world, empowering companies of all sizes to become more intelligent, connected and secure. While this past year has been challenging in many ways, the global pandemic has only strengthened our purpose and fueled our determination to build an inclusive environment where enthusiastic, skilled, and diverse employees thrive.

OpenText has always upheld high standards of ethics, integrity and corporate citizenship, and last year we launched our first corporate citizenship report to further elevate these priorities in our culture and business practices. In it, we committed to supporting our employees, customers and communities throughout the pandemic, as well as doing more to support Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (ED&I), continuing to improve our environmental footprint and supporting a culture of Tech for Good.

Over the past year, we have made important strides in each of these areas. We have also continued to improve our approach to corporate citizenship by defining our top priorities and strengthening both our supplier code of conduct and our Human Rights statement. In this year’s report, we will highlight our achievements, and also discuss where we need to do more, and how we plan to get there.

OpenText products are also making a significant impact around the world. Whether that is enabling life-saving work to continue remotely, reducing paper-use through digitization, stopping ransomware attacks or helping police forces to identify criminals– the work that we do every day continues to be a source of incredible pride.

This past year has made it even more clear that companies need to play a leading role on issues ranging from diversity to human rights and the environment. We are excited to share our vision and action plan for how we can strengthen our people, products, purpose and planet in the coming years.

Our COVID-19 Response

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been committed to ensuring the safety and well-being of our employees, supporting our customers and investing in our communities.

Employee health, safety and wellness has been our top priority throughout the pandemic. We moved to remote work in March of last year, and our employees have the option to continue working from home until January 2022. We have also established the $3M OpenText Employee Relief Fund to support employees in the event of financial hardship due to the pandemic, organized a vaccination campaign for our employees in India, and have worked with local leadership to make sure that our insurance and benefits cover tests and vaccinations in all of our global locations.

We have also taken a holistic approach to employee well-being by providing access to health and wellness consultants, hosting regular online events to keep employees engaged and informed about our response to COVID, and sharing expert advice through discussions with a wide range of guest speakers.

Throughout the pandemic, we have also continued to provide our customers with the same 24x7 support that they have come to expect. By fully leveraging the OpenText Cloud and our investments in digital infrastructure we have been able to continue innovating, developing new products and helping our customers to respond to the pandemic. This includes helping companies transition to modern work, re-working supply chains so that customers could remain competitive, and supporting the documentation of clinical trials to combat COVID-19. Our technology is also protecting enterprise systems, SMBs and consumers from ransomware and online scams, which became even more important with the proliferation of endpoints as employees worked from home.

OpenText has a long-standing tradition of volunteerism and supporting the communities in which we live and work. In 2020, we took that commitment to the next level by launching our OpenText Navigator Fund to address the most pressing needs in OpenText communities. For our first project, we chose to combat food insecurity by supporting food banks around the world. In total, we donated $1 million USD to food banks in 21 countries to supply over four million meals to those in need.

We believe those in a position to change the world for the better, should. The OpenText Navigator Fund provides us with an amazing opportunity to support our communities in new ways, and to build an even stronger and more engaged company.

Equity, Diversity & Inclusion

The social and racial unrest of 2020 increased our resolve to improve our own efforts around diversity. In a series of town halls, we brought together black and brown colleagues to hear their perspectives, which was a truly eye-opening experience. While I was grateful to hear that the OpenText culture has largely been an inclusive one, we also heard about specific areas that we could strengthen, and areas where we could do more. In response, we expanded our Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (ED&I) program, creating a dedicated team led by a new Director of ED&I reporting to our VP, Talent Acquisition and ED&I.

The focus of this program is on supporting and developing under-represented minorities, with a strong emphasis on gender, race and black communities. There are five strategic pillars to our ED&I approach: Awareness, Hiring & Development, Civic Action, Power of Business, and Analysis & Governance. For each pillar, we have impact teams composed of passionate volunteers that drive focused initiatives, and all employees are encouraged to participate in our ED&I programs.

We remain passionate about a work environment that is inclusive of everyone, regardless of culture, national origin, race, color, gender, gender identification, sexual orientation, family status, age, veteran status, disability, class, caste, or religion. We firmly believe in the power of diversity and the ability of multiple backgrounds and points of view to contribute to a stronger whole. The technology industry as a whole must be an inclusive one.

Environment

Over the past year, the world’s attention has been focused on the pandemic and our response to it. While that is understandable, the environmental challenges we face have not gone away, and climate change remains a fundamental challenge that we need to address urgently. As a tech industry leader, OpenText has both an obligation and an opportunity to take action to mitigate our environmental impact and help our customers do the same.

We have recently reaffirmed our commitment to the Ten Principles of the United Nations Global Compact, and we are continually integrating these principles into our business strategy, culture and operations. This includes setting goals for improvements to our own environmental performance, and helping our customers to improve their environmental performance by enabling modern work, digitizing paper-based processes and creating greater visibility into supply chains so that purchasing decisions can be based on ethical and sustainability ratings.

Looking ahead

I see so much cause for optimism in the years ahead. The growing complexity of global disruptions will continue to test our resilience ― yet now we know that together, we are capable of overcoming seemingly insurmountable challenges.

With the pandemic, we saw scientific communities working together to develop safe and effective vaccines in record time. These breakthroughs in research could also lead to advances that may combat other diseases. The reduction in travel led to less pollution, giving us a glimpse of what could be with a commitment to reducing carbon emissions. The global social justice reckoning is leading to much-needed reforms to improve our businesses and institutions at all levels.

We have also seen amazing acts of kindness and generosity, of people supporting their neighbors and communities coming together. As we move through the pandemic, we all must amplify our roles as corporate citizens. In work and in life, our mindset determines our path to service, satisfaction and success, and I envision a future that is more abundant, more purposeful and more sustainable. Ultimately, we want to create a better future for all ― and OpenText will be contributing to this goal.

At the beginning of the pandemic, we told our employees that we were Tous Ensemble or All Together. We meant it, and we look forward to continuing to work together for the next 30 years to support our employees, customers and communities to bring about positive change.

Tous Ensemble. All Together.

Mark Barrenechea
OpenText CEO and CTO