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Global Security Mag: Jitesh, thank you very much for your time. Please, can you introduce yourself and tell us how your professional journey brought you to your current position?

Jitesh S. Ghai: My pleasure. Happy to do so. I’ve been in the industry for 25 plus years. I’m formerly trained as an electrical engineer and over my 25 plus years I’ve had the great fortune of understanding customer needs, pain points, challenges, and based on those building compelling innovative offerings to make our customers successful, solve their problems, and help them drive compelling business outcomes across industries. Whether as a hardware engineer, I started my career as a chip designer hardware engineer for Cisco. You mentioned Juniper (the competitor) as part of your background, I was a chip designer at Cisco for their telco routing products, the core backbone of the internet, gigabit and terabit switch routing products, product lines. Along the way I got really excited about not just building products but understanding and connecting them to customer needs. Through that journey I had the great fortune of bringing innovative products to market and financial services for electronic trading at a start-up based out of Chicago called 29West and that start -up was building messaging middleware technology to help with real-time systems, help applications communicate with each other to build trading systems. Fascinatingly we were acquired by a company called Informatica which really focuses on data management for structured data, unifying structured data sources for the purposes of reporting, analytics, data science. And that’s most recently where I was Chief Product and Technology Officer, helping customers, global organizations, unify their relational data sets, understand the relational data they have, relational complex hierarchical data sets for the purposes of reporting, for the purposes of data science, supporting and making chief data analytics officers, chief analytics officers, chief digital officers successful in realizing their outcomes based on structured data. Along the way, what I would consistently get as feedback is, “you know, Jitesh, I love everything you’re doing to help me unify all my structured data, but 80 to 90 percent of enterprise data is unstructured. What can you do to help me with that?” Never really had a good answer. It’s a very hard problem to solve, but certainly over the last couple of years there’s been an incredible amount of innovation in the space of generative AI, specifically large language models (LLMs) built on a GPT (Generated Pre-Trained) transformer architecture that’s really built for unstructured data. And so that innovation combined with this architecture and combined with GPU technology now enables us to do some very exciting things with 80 to 90 percent of an enterprise’s content unstructured data. Somewhere along the way the opportunity to serve as CEO of Hyland, Hyland being a leader in enterprise content in unstructured data management, came my way and I got so excited about the opportunity. I ran toward this opportunity to help Hyland define this new chapter of innovation led value creation and digital transformation for our customers. That’s my journey of how I got here from hardware engineer to CEO in the space of enterprise content.

Global Security Mag: Can you please tell us more about Hyland and how, in this Generative AI World, Hyland is making the world being a better place in terms of Electronic Content Management, maybe in terms of Cybersecurity, what are the key differentiators from other solutions?

Jitesh S. Ghai: Hyland is over 30 years old, so it’s an organization that has been innovating for several decades. We have 14000 customers globally and our customers entrust us with their most mission-critical enterprise content, their documents, their images, audio, video, for x-rays, endoscopies, colonoscopies, critical patient content, critical financial services content, for banks, for insurers. They have entrusted us to ensure that this critical content is safely stored, versioned, governed, so that only the right people have access to the content they’re supposed to. And through all this process ensure that these organizations are being compliant in the use of their enterprise content. So that we’ve been doing for over three decades. The incredibly exciting opportunities that technology presents to Hyland and to our customers now is in addition to doing all of this, ensuring that their enterprise content is protected, governed, compliant in its use, is delivering incredible operational and analytical value from this content. Until recently, enterprise content is unstructured, so it’s hard for computers to read it, to understand it, historically. But as I mentioned, large language models are uniquely architected to understand unstructured data. We are the custodians of unstructured data, 80 to 90 % of an enterprise’s content, enterprise’s data is unstructured data. We are governing it today and on that foundation of governance, we are now delivering Gen AI capabilities that enable organizations to read the content, Process it, understand it, give it structure, understand what is a bank statement, what is a retirement savings account statement, what is a credit report, understand the content within it, giving it structure where it previously didn’t have structure, and then extracting information from it to give insights. These insights can automate business processes and simplify operations for insurance claims as an example, for loan approvals, for patient onboarding, for patient care. These insights can also deliver analytical value. Analytics has always been run out of a data warehouse. It’s always been run out of some sort of data lake, data warehouse database. But now you can derive analytical insights from content management systems leveraging this technology which is what Hyland is doing. What’s extremely exciting is if you take the benefits of Cloud, you take the capabilities of Gen AI and you apply it to our 14000 customers, the kind of value we can deliver can now automate business processes, drive operational excellence, enable organizations to be more informed with enterprise content and drive analytical insights on how to build new products and services, how to drive operational excellence, and how to develop and build greater enriched customer experiences. So, the possibilities are incredible on this foundation of enterprise content that Hyland is the custodian of all while ensuring that it’s governed, protected, and the organization is compliant in its use. What I’m trying to say is that Hyland is in a unique position in this era of Gen AI because it has all the unstructured mission critical data for an enterprise. And so, it is uniquely equipped to gen AI enabled organizations. Large language models are only as good as the data that you give to them, and the most mission critical data in an enterprise is sitting within Hyland’s technology, across 14000 customers globally.
That’s how we plan to continue to serve our customers and that’s how we’re innovating with what we call the content innovation Cloud. It’s not just about content management, we’re now ushering in an era where organizations can innovate with their content, drive digital transformation, embrace AI, embrace Cloud and deliver incredible exponential outcomes for their organization while ensuring their content is safe, it’s protected, it’s governed and compliant.

Global Security Mag: Can you please, give some key messages to our readers?

Jitesh S. Ghai: I think some of the most important messages are enterprise content is your most strategic asset. Enterprise content is your intellectual property. It’s your brand. It’s your institutional knowledge. It’s a living historical record of your organization. It’s what you build new products and services leveraging enterprise content. It’s your most strategic asset, probably point number one. Enterprise content management systems are no longer simply technology stacks for you to put your enterprise content, version it, and govern it. They are a resource for you to innovate with, and the kinds of innovations that can be realized by leveraging enterprise content and enable you. AI can enable your organization, cloud can enable your organization, intelligently automate business processes, streamline workflows
for loan approvals that would have taken five people, can now be done with one person and some Generative AI and some intelligent document processing as an example. Build very intuitive business experiences on a foundation of unified content, on a foundation of unified processes. So, what I am saying is that Enterprise content is a platform on which organizations should be innovating and delivering incredible outcomes, new products, new customer experiences, new operating models for their organization and for their customers.
And they can do it with confidence while ensuring governance and compliance to many regulations leveraging Hyland’s technologies.
Well, wonderful Valentin, thank you for your time and for your thoughtful questions. We are very excited about all the innovation that Hyland has delivered, will deliver, and looking forward to continuing the conversation.