OpenText Names IBM Veteran Ayman Antoun As New CEO

Antoun, who most recently served as president of IBM Americas, takes the reins at OpenText in April with plans to accelerate the vendor’s growth within information management, security and AI.

OpenText said Thursday it has hired former IBM executive Ayman Antoun to serve as its new CEO starting in April, amid a major growth push at the vendor focused around AI-related information management and security.

Antoun, who most recently served as president of IBM Americas, will become CEO of OpenText effective April 20. He will succeed James McGourlay, who has been serving as interim CEO since the ouster of longtime OpenText chief executive Mark Barrenechea in August 2025.

In a news release, the Waterloo, Ontario-based company pointed to Antoun’s three decades of IT industry experience, which included serving as IBM Americas president from 2020 to 2023. The Americas business, which is IBM’s largest, saw massive advancements across areas including cloud, infrastructure and cybersecurity under Antoun’s leadership, OpenText said.

Antoun had previously spent almost the entirety of his career at IBM, initially joining the tech giant in 1988, according to his LinkedIn profile. He had just one stint at a different company, as a senior vice president at Bell from 2013 to 2015, before rejoining IBM in 2016.

‘Foundation’ For Agentic

In a comment included in the news release, Antoun said that OpenText brings major differentiators in information management and security at a time when data is increasingly seen as pivotal for AI adoption.

OpenText’s products are the “foundation for training agentic AI,” and the company offers “a competitive advantage as trusted data is now essential to how economies, nations and businesses operate around the world,” he said in the news release statement.

Top priorities as CEO will include accelerating the vendor’s growth going forward, Antoun said in the statement.

During his tenure at IBM, Antoun had won praise from solution provider executives for his direct involvement in the rollout of a new account engagement model, which elevated the role of partners in driving cloud consumption.

The appointment of Antoun as OpenText CEO follows the vendor’s unveiling of a series of new AI-related products in November that aim to give the company a higher profile in the fast-growing AI space, leveraging the vendor’s decades of experience in the data business.

The new products, which include the OpenText AI Data Platform, show the vendor is investing heavily into becoming a major provider of relevant AI- and data-related capabilities to its partners and customers, said Savinay Berry, chief product officer and CTO at OpenText, in a briefing with media in November.

The debut of the new products “reintroduces OpenText to our customers to the world as a data and AI company,” Berry said.

Channel Push

OpenText has also been aggressively working to expand its efforts with solution and service provider partners, with a major emphasis on MSPs, following the hire of Kaseya veteran Mike DePalma as vice president of business development in March 2025.

Among other differentiators, OpenText’s “open ecosystem” approach—which includes hundreds of native integrations with third-party tools—is a crucial advantage for the vendor and its partners, DePalma told CRN in an interview last year.

The overriding goal at OpenText is “to be the easiest vendor for any MSP to work with,” he said.