of key events from organic search, up from 30.9%
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OpenText Project KIS · Company rebrand, portfolio simplification, and demand transformation
Rebuilding the digital front door to a complex software portfolio.
OpenText had grown into one of the world's largest information management companies. That scale created enormous breadth, but it also created a problem familiar to many companies that grow through acquisition: the portfolio made sense internally in ways that were not always obvious to customers.
The challenge
The work was larger than the website.
A website is where a company's strategy becomes tangible. It is where buyers try to understand what a company does, how its products relate to one another, and whether any of it solves a problem they care about.
Project KIS was designed to make OpenText and its product portfolio easier for the market to understand. The work included a company rebrand, clearer product naming, and the redevelopment of more than 150 product pages. Customers would see the change first through the new digital experience, but the implications reached much further into how the company generated, routed, measured, and supported demand.
At OpenText, those decisions affected a broad portfolio spanning content, cybersecurity, IT operations, application delivery, business networks, experience, analytics, and legal technology. They also affected thousands of people who had to take the portfolio to market.
Changing a product name or page architecture had consequences across campaigns, paid media, search, events, nurture, field programs, partner materials, sales plays, forms, lead routing, attribution, and reporting. The work could not stop with a new visual identity. Every path into the company had to lead customers into a coherent experience, and every path out had to remain connected to the demand engine.
My role
Connect the transformation to growth.
Product Marketing owned much of the product-to-problem positioning that shaped what customers needed to understand. Brand and other specialist teams shaped the broader company expression. I was part of the cross-functional leadership effort that connected those decisions to how OpenText would take the portfolio to market.
At the time, I led the organization responsible for web, marketing technology, analytics and reporting, global campaigns, paid media and digital, lifecycle, account-based marketing, field marketing, and partner marketing. My responsibility was to connect the rebrand and product decisions to the customer journey and commercial system, then make sure the teams, channels, and operating infrastructure within my remit could carry them into the market.
That meant working across the CMO organization, business units, Sales, regions, agencies, and operations to translate Product Marketing's direction into practical channel and execution decisions. We used questions like these as shared design tests:
- Could customers understand how a product related to the problem they were trying to solve?
- Did the website hierarchy match the way campaigns, sales plays, and account programs were organized?
- What needed to change in campaign destinations, nurture streams, event content, partner materials, and paid media?
- Would the new content answer the questions buyers were already asking through search?
- Could forms, routing, tracking, attribution, and reporting survive the transition?
- Could regions and business units use one shared foundation without losing necessary market specificity?
The program also reached beyond the website. Product descriptions had to be updated in core systems that fed Salesforce, customer support, partner experiences, and other operational platforms. That is the part of transformation work that often goes unseen: a clearer external promise depends on disciplined internal execution.
That responsibility became concrete through the work of my teams. The web team redeveloped and migrated the product experience at scale. Campaign and paid-media teams rebuilt destinations and digital journeys. Lifecycle and ABM teams reconnected nurture and account programs. Field, event, and partner teams carried the new structure into regional, customer, and ecosystem activity. Marketing technology, analytics, and reporting teams protected forms, routing, tracking, attribution, dashboards, and performance visibility so the transition remained connected to the demand engine.
Search and measurement
A channel and a source of truth.
The transition also had to preserve and extend the organic-first approach the digital team was already building. Search behavior exposed the language customers used, the questions they asked, and the gaps between the company's internal vocabulary and the market's needs.
The digital and web teams in my organization used SEO guidance, content-gap analysis, competitive review, redirects, and ongoing optimization to preserve discovery through the transition and improve it afterward. This mattered because a rebrand can easily damage years of accumulated search equity if migration decisions are treated as a technical afterthought.
The work launched on schedule, and post-launch reporting provided an early view of how the broader digital experience was performing. Organic search accounted for 44.5% of key events, up from 30.9%. Engagement reached 78%, an improvement of 3.5%, and conversion increased 18% to 0.54%.
Those are employer outcomes produced by a broad cross-functional team. They are valuable not because they turn a complex transformation into one person's victory, but because they show that the change remained connected to measurable customer behavior.
engagement, an improvement of 3.5%
increase in conversion
post-launch conversion
What changed
From a brand decision to a market experience.
Project KIS created a more consistent way for customers to encounter OpenText and its portfolio. It also gave demand, field, partner, lifecycle, and sales teams a clearer foundation for taking the company to market.
The more important change was not the redesigned site by itself. It was creating a stronger connection among portfolio clarity, discoverability, campaign execution, downstream systems, and measurement. The operating value was the company's ability to carry a portfolio decision consistently through customer touchpoints, demand programs, and the performance views leaders used to track progress.
That connection allowed the organization to move from a brand decision to a market experience:
- Customers had a clearer path through a broad and evolving portfolio.
- Campaigns and sales plays could lead into more coherent product and solution experiences.
- Search and content became part of the transformation rather than a cleanup step.
- Operational systems and downstream teams were prepared for the naming and content changes.
- Leadership could evaluate the new experience through engagement and conversion evidence.
The leadership lesson
A rebrand succeeds only when the operating model changes with it.
The identity matters. The website matters. But transformation becomes commercially meaningful when teams across brand, product, demand, sales, regions, partners, technology, and analytics can carry the same direction into the market.
Project KIS reinforced something I have seen repeatedly: a company-level change becomes real only when specialist teams can carry it through the systems customers and sellers actually use. Product Marketing defined much of the product-to-problem foundation. I was part of the leadership effort that translated it into market execution, and I led the integrated marketing teams responsible for making that execution work across digital experiences, demand programs, routes to market, and measurement.
Connected perspective: How I Build an Integrated Demand Engine