Among the various announcements that accompanied OpenText’s recent Enterprise World (Disclaimer: OpenText paid my way), one of the most intriguing to me centered around the joint keynote appearance of Mark Barrenechea and Google’s Kevin Ichhpurani (Corporate Vice President, Global Ecosystem at Google Cloud). Here are the core elements of the press announcement:

1. OpenText intends to leverage Google Cloud’s multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud offering, Anthos, to deploy and manage containerized EIM application workloads in a multi-cloud environment. Today, OpenText is announcing the general availability of containerized versions of several EIM applications including Content Server, Extended ECM, Documentum, InfoArchive and Archive Center on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

2. OpenText intends to use Google Cloud to enable multi-layered global disaster recovery services for customers with business-critical EIM workloads running in the cloud, on-premises, and in hybrid cloud architectures.

3. OpenText intends to integrate its portfolio of products with G Suite allowing a seamless experience of using G Suite with various EIM activities and ensuring the world’s largest organizations can unlock the full value of their data.

4. OpenText intends to integrate with key Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning services from Google to create purpose-built solutions for specific industries as well as overall value add to the existing OpenText EIM Suite of products.

5. Google and OpenText will partner on expanded joint go-to-market activities to help enterprise customers move critical workloads to the cloud quickly and effectively.

6. Joint go-to-market activities will initially focus on industries including financial services, media and entertainment, healthcare and public sector.

These are all intriguing, especially considering the arms-length relationship that the content community has seemed to have over the years with Google. But I’m most intrigued by #4 and the implications of this mash-up for two particularly vexing – and rising -- forms of non-document content, video and audio.

This is unstructured information at its most annoying; content that often winds up being a mess of storage hogging files that are often impossible to slice or tag into usable content assets. Far too often, these assets are viewed only through the prism of archive and the challenges of mitigating storage costs rather than through the prism of potential value.

But how does the value equation change if you view this less from a storage perspective and more from a mash-up perspective? What does it mean if when a video or audio is created, a transcript is also automatically created (ala YouTube)? And if that transcript could be used to create search capabilities that can zero in on the exact segment of a video that is of interest? And what is the additional value of automatically making video and audio assets accessible to those with vision or hearing problems? Or the value of automatically making this content available to those who speak languages different from those of the original content creators? How does more information about the actual content of a video or audio asset change the information governance equation? Many of these advanced AI capabilities are already in play, but they are often difficult or expensive to access. What if all this was more automatic?

I suppose a fair amount of this kind of untapped mash-up potential is at the root of the OTEX stock uptick reported by Bloomberg that followed the announcement:

Open Text rose to a record high Tuesday [Jul 9] after the software company said it had expanded a partnership with Google’s cloud division, including integrating its own products with Google’s G Suite brand applications. A number of Open Text’s applications will be made available on Google’s cloud platform, Anthos. Similarly, Google’s G Suite applications such as Drive, Sheets and Hangouts will be integrated with Open Text’s enterprise management software. Open Text will also integrate artificial intelligence and machine-learning capabilities from Alphabet Inc.’s Google into its own software.

Interesting times.