OpenText today announced the findings from a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of OpenText. The study confirms that migrating content management to the cloud remains critical for digital transformation. However, it also shows that a hybrid approach of both cloud-based and on-premises solutions can provide many of the same benefits, including improved flexibility, sales and service cycles, collaboration, and customer satisfaction.

The study, "Hybrid Cloud Enables Agile Content Management and Collaboration," includes insights from 208 respondents with responsibility for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) decisions at enterprises in North America and Europe. The study explores the use of hybrid infrastructures-a combination of cloud and on-premises-for content storage, management and collaboration use cases.

"OpenText, the global leader in Information Management, has been helping companies of all sizes and industries gain an information advantage for over 30 years," said Savinay Berry, SVP Cloud Services Delivery at OpenText. "A hybrid cloud approach provides organizations choice and flexibility. It allows them to manage and grow their content services solutions while expanding functionality and scale."

Key findings from the survey include:

• A modernized content management approach helps accelerate digital transformation objectives: Over three quarters (76%) of organizations cite improving content management as being significantly important to accelerating their digital business as demands for improved collaboration and customer experiences grow.
• Cloud is critical to a modern content strategy: Cloud content services simplify access, content creation, and interaction with both customers and business partners. Organizations that are using cloud for content storage, management and collaboration cite considerably greater improvements than their on-premises peers in the areas of customer satisfaction (72% vs. 25%), security (70% vs. 16%), and usability (64% vs. 16%).
• Companies mired in migration paralysis are being left behind: Nearly two thirds (64%) of organizations with content exclusively on-premises believe they face a competitive disadvantage and half (51%) struggle to keep up with customer expectations for self-service.
• A hybrid architecture provides a phased approach to content in the cloud: Hybrid cloud options allow organizations to move content and collaboration apps to the cloud at their own pace while still benefiting from the agility that comes with moving to the cloud.  Like organizations taking a cloud-only approach, those that adopt a hybrid approach report improved flexibility (70%), faster sales and service cycles (73% and 58%), and better collaboration (67%) and customer satisfaction (80%).
  

"We didn't have to move to the cloud all at once," said Joanne Bell, Information Management Team Lead at Waikato Regional Council, a local New Zealand government. "Instead, we took a hybrid approach with OpenText Core Share, a SaaS application to extend our existing investment in content services for improved securing, sharing and collaborating in the cloud with external partners and contractors."

The study also found that those looking to modernize their content management approach expect improvements in collaboration (52%), security (51%) and productivity (43%). OpenText is uniquely positioned to improve productivity and collaboration without compromising governance, security, and control through its integrated cloud-based information management solutions, which include content services and sharing, as well as data back up and endpoint protection. With flexible cloud-deployment options and managed service expertise, OpenText enables organizations to take advantage of the cloud in ways that best suit their needs.