India will soon house 70 percent of our R&D: OpenText's Muhi S Majzoub

“It was always the understanding that India is an innovation country. Not a bug fixing, sustaining engineering model,” Muhi S Majzoub, executive vice president, security products at the company, tells Forbes India. Until very recently, Majzoub was EVP and chief product officer at OpenText, and he’s immensely proud of the work being done by his top India reports.

Majzoub is based in California, but his work has brought him to India many times, often multiple times in a year. He recalled his first townhall with the India team in 2012, when they were less than 200 employees, mostly in Hyderabad: “When you go home and look in the mirror, I want you to see scientists and innovators,” he remembers telling them.

Today the company has not only R&D in India, but also finance, professional services, a NOC (network operations centre), an IT organisation and a cloud ops deployment team.

Consider some examples Majzoub offers: The entire Documentum platform team is Bengaluru, he says. The business is worth half-a-billion dollars to OpenText and the platform is used by customers such as DHL, Fedex, BMW and the Dutch government.

Also read:  Our work in India will have a global impact: Novo Nordisk's John Dawber

The company’s supply chain solutions are used by global giants such as Nestlé Corp who collectively do $6.5 trillion in commerce, Majzoub says. Nestlé alone makes millions of transactions with more than 16,000 suppliers, supported by OpenText’s software, he says.

When BMW orders components such as seatbelts, tyres or electronics from suppliers in Japan, France, the US and South Korea, “we manage all of that for them”, he says. And 95 percent of the engineers who work on this supply chain platform are in Bengaluru, he says.

In the case of the company’s “content and modern work platform” that integrates with business and productivity products and platforms from other large software providers, including SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Google and Success Factors, “80 percent of the innovation happens in Hyderabad”.

The company offers a media management and digital experience platform used by customers, including Disney, Hasbro, MGM Studios and 21st Century Fox, for which teams in both Hyderabad and Bengaluru are responsible.

OpenText’s AI and analytics platform Magellan “is 100 percent in Hyderabad”, he adds. With the advent of agentic AI, much of OpenText’s AI assistants, with the brand name Aviators, is also happening in India.

The push to expand capabilities in India is also happening at a time when OpenText is undergoing its own transformation, and in the backdrop of a tough couple of years that the software industry has faced, even as an AI-led disruption began to roll out across the globe. The company is rebranding its products to present itself with greater clarity in front of customers, CMO Sandy Ono wrote in a blog post on January 25.

In the quarters and years to come, expect OpenText India to play a bigger role in securing the company’s future. “We are excited about what India will do for AI,” Majzoub says. Over the next three to five years, he expects the company’s India workforce to touch 10,000 employees. “I expect it to be 70 percent of our R&D division.”