OpenText partners core to success in APAC

“We spend a lot of time with the partners talking about how we're going to broaden our reach, work across the region, and we see our core capability that we're bringing to our customers as our domain subject matter expertise around the products,” says Shannon Bell, Executive Vice President, Chief Digital Officer, and Chief Information Officer at OpenText.

With Ayman Antoun announced as OpenText’s new CEO effective April 20, 2026, the cybersecurity vendor is also looking to grow its presence in the Asia Pacific region. Core to the growth will be its partner ecosystem which continues to help customers not only deploy OpenText’s technology but also deal with the many challenges businesses have in the region.

In a conversation with CRN Asia during OpenText Summit in Singapore, Shannon Bell, Executive Vice President, Chief Digital Officer, and Chief Information Officer at OpenText shared that the vendor’s partners continue to bring use cases to OpenText, especially in deploying the technology as well as use cases from customers that the partners feel will benefit OpenText and make their products better and more competitive.

“So on one hand, partners are providing direct feedback. On the other hand, as users of the technology, and as being exposed to other technologies, they've been instrumental in helping us integrate our AI ecosystem into the broader ecosystem. So one of the things that's been very important to us is building a very open AI technology stack,” Bell said.

Bell explained that as customers have different language models, they have different approaches, which are deployed in different clouds. Hence, she belives the partners have really helped OpenText develop that and build that open ecosystem with access to different technologies.

“We've worked with the hyperscaler partners, and we've worked with the global system integrators to build out what the right approach is for our customers. So one hand, they're feeding us roadmap capabilities, things that would make deployment easier and benefit the customers. On the other hand, they're helping us with the broader open ecosystem of technology that we need to integrate into to deliver our capabilities,” Bell added.

Bell also pointed out that partners have become increasingly important to our ability to scale the business, especially in the APAC region.

“We spend a lot of time with the partners talking about how we're going to broaden our reach, work across the region, and we see our core capability that we're bringing to our customers as our domain subject matter expertise around the products. But when you think of a successful implementation, there's integration, there's different systems, there's transformation, there's business processes, there's data cleanup, and so on. That is the expertise of many of our partners. So, we're not trying to replace that, and it's a core part of our go-to-market strategy in this region,” Bell explained.

Partner enablement

For Bell, the focus will also be on providing more training and access to the product teams to provide feedback and influence on the roadmap and understanding broader sets of use cases around what other customers are doing. This includes understanding and enabling partners to bring that value to their customers.

“We want partners to spend more time with us to make sure that we have all the tools that we need to be successful in the market and increasingly focused on bringing innovation to customers. So, who are your most innovative customers? How do we benefit and bring those capabilities to our customers? When I speak to CIOs, everyone's looking for what is successful, and how do they look at replicating that in their environment, or de-risk what they are doing with success use cases of what others are doing,” Bell said.

This is also why Bell feels why OpenText is very open with their story because they want to benefit customers and let them see what OpenText is doing.

“We want them to see what we're doing. If it worked for us, great. Equally, what didn't work for us, these are lessons learned, and we share that openly with our customers, including the financial benefits. Ultimately, we want to share the learning so people can benefit from what worked,” she concluded.