Hyland's new chief spent fourteen years rewiring Informatica for the cloud. Now he's pointing a forty-year-old content giant straight at the agentic AI era - from a low building in Westlake, Ohio.
On a Monday in May 2024, a four-thousand-person enterprise software company in suburban Cleveland announced that the person now running it had never run a public-facing thing called Hyland before. He had, however, spent the last fourteen years inside Informatica turning a stubborn on-prem data company into something investors could pronounce the word cloud over without flinching. That was the brief: do the same trick again, in a different room, with different paper.
Jitesh S. Ghai had been Informatica's Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer. The job included over two thousand people in product, engineering, design, cloud operations, and technology alliances. He left to take the top job at Hyland, the Thoma Bravo-owned content services company best known for OnBase and for being the quiet plumbing inside hospitals, insurers, universities, and government offices that have a lot of paper and a lot of regret about it.
Reading the appointment release, the only line that didn't sound like every other CEO announcement was the one about hardware. He started as an engineer who built things you could drop on your foot. The rest of his career has been a long migration up the stack - from silicon to switches at Cisco, to messaging middleware at Solace and 29West, to data integration at Informatica, to content and AI agents at Hyland. A career that begins in hardware tends to leave a residue. Ghai still talks about platforms the way a hardware engineer talks about a chassis: what slots into it, what loads it, what fails first.
"I'm incredibly excited and honored for this unique opportunity to lead the next chapter for Hyland employees, customers and partners globally."Jitesh S. Ghai, on day one
Informatica's transformation from license-and-renewal data integration to cloud subscription happened on his watch as product chief. Hyland is the same setup with different verbs - content, not data.
Hyland has been a Thoma Bravo portfolio company since 2007. The CEO change is a product-led upgrade, not a turnaround - the kind PE firms make when the next decade looks different from the last.
Within a year, Ghai had Hyland announcing a Context Engine and an "Agent Mesh." The pitch: replace business processes with networks of agents that actually know the documents. Less demo, more deploy.
The Waterloo engineering program in Ontario is famous for sending students out into the world six times during their degree on alternating co-op terms. Ghai graduated with First Class Honours in Electrical Engineering, which is the polite Canadian way of saying he sat near the top of one of the more punishing undergraduate programs in North America. His early work was hands-on hardware - the kind of role where a misread datasheet shows up later as a returned shipment.
From there, the resumé reads like a tour through the architecture of the internet itself. Cisco for networking. Solace and 29West for the messaging middleware that quietly carries trades and telemetry between systems that don't talk to each other otherwise. Each stop was higher up the stack and closer to the customer's checkbook. By the time Informatica hired him in March 2010 as Vice President of Product Management, he had spent a decade learning how enterprise buyers actually behave - which is mostly nothing like how product roadmaps assume they will.
At Informatica he kept getting promoted. Operational data integration. Big data. Internet of Things. Cloud. Each domain landed on his desk roughly in the order the analyst firms decided it mattered. By the time he stepped up to Chief Product Officer he was running engineering, design, cloud operations, and technology alliances. Under that organization, Informatica was named a leader in every one of the five Gartner Magic Quadrants for enterprise cloud data management, picked up Partner of the Year awards from both Microsoft and AWS, and started showing up in the AI conversation as something other than a punchline about ETL.
Fourteen years in one company is unusual for a senior product executive in enterprise software. It either means the chair was too comfortable or the work kept changing fast enough that leaving felt like quitting mid-sentence. Reading his interviews, it's clearly the second. He talks about product as a discipline rather than a department - cross-functional alignment, customer obsession, the kind of language that sounds like a poster but, in his case, came with cloud ARR to back it up.
The Hyland job is a different scale. Hyland is older. It is private. It is in Ohio. Its customers include hospitals that still scan a meaningful percentage of their intake on paper, insurance carriers with claim folders thicker than the policies that produced them, and universities running student records on systems older than the students. The product, OnBase and the broader Hyland portfolio, is the digital version of the filing cabinet that used to fill a basement. That has been a perfectly good business for forty years.
It is also a business AI is about to reshape from the inside. About four-fifths of the world's enterprise data is unstructured - documents, scans, emails, images, recordings. Large language models, agents, and retrieval pipelines all need somewhere to point. Hyland sits on a lot of that somewhere. Ghai's bet, and the one Thoma Bravo is funding, is that the company can move from being the place documents go to die to being the substrate that AI agents read, write against, and act on.
The first visible evidence of that bet showed up in August 2025, when Hyland announced its Context Engine and Agent Mesh architecture. The pitch was specific in a way that AI announcements usually aren't: rather than offering yet another general-purpose agent builder that requires customers to redesign their processes around it, Hyland's mesh slots into the processes already running on its content platform. Ghai's framing in interviews has stayed consistent - AI is only as good as the data underneath it, and the data, especially in healthcare, is overwhelmingly unstructured and overwhelmingly already inside Hyland systems.
He spent most of 2025 on the road making that case. HIMSS, the big healthcare IT show. Talking HealthTech, the podcast circuit's anchor for the same audience. RSNA. Thoma Bravo's AI Summit. He shows up looking the same in every photograph: navy suit, calm face, very little gesturing. He is not a podium thumper. He's the engineer at the front of the room who would rather walk you through the diagram than the slogan.
If there is a tell about who he is as a leader, it is in how he describes the role of product organizations. He talks about cross-functional alignment first, marketing second, sales third. That ordering is unusual for a CEO who came up through product, and it suggests he sees the chief executive job as an extension of the chief product job rather than an escape from it. For a company whose customers have spent the last decade waiting to find out whether enterprise software vendors actually understand AI or are just trying to put a chat window on the same old screens, that is probably the right instinct.
Crain's Cleveland Business named him to its 2024 list of New Faces in New Places - the local paper's polite acknowledgment that the most consequential hire in Cleveland software that year had come from out of state. Whether the next chapter at Hyland goes the way he and Thoma Bravo want will take a few years to read in the numbers. The early signal is in the language: he stopped using the word document and started using the word context. In enterprise software, that swap is the whole game.
His refrain. The follow-up is always the percentage of healthcare data that is still unstructured: about 80%.
Day-one statement. The phrase he keeps reaching for is next chapter - not new direction, not turnaround.
Repeated in early-tenure communications. Telegraphs investment, not stewardship.