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Nuxeo Core moves in at Eclipse

February 9th, 2011

As you might have seen in the news today, we decided to contribute a big chunk of our code base — our content repository, Nuxeo Core — to the Eclipse Foundation as a new project under the Eclipse RT umbrella: Eclipse Enterprise Content Repository. It’s a big step for Nuxeo, we’ve been preparing this for a few months already.

After 4 years of active development, Nuxeo Core is one of the most advanced content repositories on the market — if not the most advanced. It offers a wide range of services: content model definition (content types), mixins (dynamic schemas), storage abstraction, query, flexible access control, native de-duplication, format conversion, CMIS bindings and much more! And all of this is bundled as a set of OSGi bundles and highly optimized and tuned to scale well for large volumes (hundreds of million of objects in a single repository), but also run lean, making it easy to embed in existing apps, small or large.

Code-wise, it’s a large piece of software, yet very modular – designed around services and extension points, like the Eclipse architecture pattern. For those who like counting lines, we’re somewhere around 100K SLOC of Java code, in ~20 components, refined over the years.

Technically, it’s packaged and architected as a set OSGi bundles running on various Java container like Equinox, Virgo, Tomcat, JBoss (thanks to Nuxeo Runtime awesomeness) and integrated with the PDE for development. Everything is extensible through extension points. Really nice software!

Why Contribute? Why at Eclipse?

You might wonder why the move. After all, the software is already open source (LGPL) and follows a fully open development model.

We’ve got one main driver: innovation.

Nuxeo Core is a powerful content repository – it’s very extensible and versatile and can be used for a wide range of applications. By setting it free, we’d like to encourage the community to join and innovate in a vendor-neutral environment. We think Nuxeo Core (soon-to-be Eclipse ECR) has the potential to change the market in the same way Eclipse IDE did for the IDE market. It can ignite innovation in the content management space. We don’t know how it will morph, but we’re eager to watch it.

Eclipse has broad reach and a large developer community, trusted and respected by most thanks to the framework and process in place. We think it’s the right home for our little Core to grow big! ;-)

Why Now?

The content management space is changing and commoditization is setting in, led by SharePoint, vendor consolidation and more recently the <CMIS standard>.

We believe that the differentiation lies in the services we provide to our customers, not in low-level software components. That’s why we have developed offerings like Nuxeo Studio, Nuxeo Marketplace and the whole Nuxeo Connect package – a subscription offering for maintenance, support, and customization of content management applications.  From this perspective, it makes no sense to keep low-level components such as a the content repository and all related low-level services for one vendor only. And besides that, content repository technology is not yet well understood in the industry. This technology is a good fit for a surprisingly wide range of software projects, and it could be a great help for many developers and architects if knowledge about content repository technology was more widespread.

We’ve been thinking about contributing the Core for some time, but were waiting for the right moment. A convergence of milestones makes this the right time:

  1. The software has had time to mature. It is proven, robust, and deployed in thousands of shops around the world.

  2. We have the bandwidth to do the work required to contribute the code and ignite the project.

  3. CMIS is taking off, OSGi is hot – and the Core is compliant with both.

We believe it’s time to put more emphasis on content repositories as a technology. I believe that it’s great software and could be part of the developer toolbox, alongside traditional ORM. And for this aspect, credit should go to Apache Jackrabbit from our friends at Day. They have paved the way, even if we have a different take on how a repository should work. And we think for many use cases the Nuxeo Core approach is a better approach, especially when your content is not inherently hierarchical, which is usually the case for document management, enterprise content management, case management and digital asset management.

So here we are – Nuxeo Core is going to Eclipse, and we hope it’s the start of a long story that will make a real difference and impact the market in a very positive way.

What’s a Content Repository? Why should you care?

Nuxeo Core is a Content Repository and that might not be clear for you. :-) So here is my own definition.  A Content Repository, in the content management world, is the database where the content is stored. It basically gives you a high-level API and a set of services to easily store, query, retrieve and process content objects in a way that makes it easy to manipulate and match your domain model.

In this case, content is pretty much anything that: has a data schema (fixed or dynamic), needs access control, can live in a hierarchy, can be versioned, and can be rendered. That’s all.

Why use a content repository? Because if you start from scratch using a pure ORM or bare SQL when building an application to interact with business content, there is a very good chance that you’re going to rewrite the features we’ve developed, refined and optimized over last few years. And that’s the whole point of a content repository – it enables you to model, manage and interact with this content. That’s why you should care and use it! ;-)

You might have noticed that I haven’t mentioned “files”. That’s intentional, because that’s not the key part of the software. Of course, you can add BLOBs to any content object and we manage them well, doing low-level de-duplication and transactional integration. But a content repository is NOT just a file system. It’s much more than that. If you’re just looking to manage files, use a file system. If you’re looking to manage content, that can include files, then a content repository is the way to go! And we think Nuxeo Core is pretty powerful for this purpose.

Interested? Come on in – it’s open!

This technology is already fully open, so don’t hesitate to come by, say hi and start hacking if you like:

It’s going to be an interesting journey,

EB.

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Posted in ECM, Nuxeo, Open Source, Software

Quick Wrap on Nuxeo World 2010

December 2nd, 2010

About 1 week ago we held the first edition of Nuxeo World, our international conference. More than 140 participants from 8 different countries got together at the charming Théatre des Variétés, a century-old theater in the heart of the city. Regardless of some quirks inherent to any “debut”, we got a tremendous feedback from participants and I’m really pleased by this.

Plus we got a great professional stage and a beautiful room! A “Steve Jobs moment” for each presenter guaranteed. ;-) Will definitely reuse the venue, and there is room for a lot more attendees next year.

I was pleased to see our customers and partners engage with our tech teams. Our developers loved it (even if some were a bit skeptical at first). I’m sure the exchange will continue after the event and ignite new innovations. I know our dev teams have already planned some customer visits to better plan the work ahead and synch with external contributors. Yes, work happens outside the company when practicing open source! I love when our developers directly engage with our customers’ teams. I hoped it would happen and pleased it did. No doubts it will inspire more innovation over the months ahead.

I’ve also been positively impressed by the level of talks from all presenters, especially since few of us are used to present on a stage half the size of a basketball field.

We got great content to expose many aspect of our company and offering a unique insight about what we’ve done, how we do things, what’s keeping us busy and what’s next. I highly recommend to check out the slide decks and react on the content. We talked about the roadmap for 2011, (stunning) performances, agile, mobility, market trends, digital assets, case management, more OSGi, semantic technologies, CMIS, Nuxeo Studio, and much more…

I’m very grateful to our customers and partners that took the time to come and show their achievements, I know it’s an important time investment and we value it highly. Damien Metzler from Leroy Merlin presented an impressive deployment of a large scale collaborative content portal for its 25000+ employees in 100+ stores. Plus, Damien talked how his team became the largest external contributor to the platform’s code base. Before that, Thomas Choppy from our partner Smile presented an innovative collaborative portal for students of France’s most famous business school. I’m really fond of these stories, where motivated teams innovate and make a difference in their organization. And it’s also two examples where collaboration drives better business.

I was honored to open the event with the keynote speech. Hope I was up to the task. We are growing and getting market share everyday serving more and more customers. We’re here to make a different in the market. Focusing on creating more and more powerful technology to let our our customer innovate managing their content, unleashing collaboration, creating a better work environment.

I’m including the video of the talk here

as well as the slide deck if you don’t have the time to listen. ;-)

So, the event was a success and will have a positive impact on our business and our community. I believe we’ve stayed clear of the usual self-congratulating BS and tried to remain transparent and open at all times (yes, the roadmap started with what we’ve achieved and what we’ve missed, apparently it’s not a common vendor practice to do this honest appraisal…).

If you’d like to know more, check out:

I’m looking forward to the 2011 edition. We might double it with a US-based event to make it easier for our North and South American friends.

I hope to see you there next year!

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Posted in ECM, Software, Web/Tech

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Sneak Preview: Nuxeo Marketplace & Nuxeo Admin Center

August 19th, 2010

I’m very excited and proud to present the new big thing for the ECM market! We’ve been working on this plan for the last few months and now it’s ready for our community to preview. We believe it can change things in the content management market and drive a whole new innovation stream from developers!

We are releasing, as preview, Nuxeo Marketplace & the Nuxeo Admin Center. As part of our Nuxeo Connect subscription program, the Marketplace is a new way to distribute plug-ins and apps on our ECM platform and packaged products. The Admin Center is a new administration console, featuring a great software update dashboard to install and manage upgrades, patches and new features, streamlining the management of a Nuxeo application.

Nuxeo Marketplace provides a completely new experience to install new features (packages) and customization/configurations in a Nuxeo application. Leveraging our platform’s architecture and extension model, the Marketplace offers a way to package those plugins and distribute them easily to enhance our products (Nuxeo EP, Nuxeo DM, Nuxeo DAM, or Nuxeo Case Management Framework).

The key point? It is not just another app marketplace! Most app markets today require a complete download, install, test cycle. We’ve made this easy for Nuxeo customers. We have focused on the experience, integrating it throughout the Nuxeo Connect services, allowing installation of new apps or plug-ins directly from your application.

We are delivering a completely integrated environment for our customers to browse, install and try new features, download Nuxeo Studio templates, etc. Installing new features and deploying a customization literally takes seconds and doesn’t even require a restart in most cases! THAT is innovation in ECM when most of our competing friends still take weeks to install and test new features… let alone create the customization… ;-)

More than just a new product, more than another new service, it’s the logical fusion of our products and services to make your job easier.

Want to join the preview and help shape the direction of Nuxeo Marketplace? Watch the sneak peak video and try it by yourself!

Key benefits

For developers, a way better to serve your users:

  • browse and install new features from the Marketplace into your Nuxeo product
  • easily upgrade your product and related add-ons
  • easily install software patches delivered by Nuxeo’s support team

For partners and contributors:

  • create apps, features, add-ons for Nuxeo’s product and access our install base (application builders decide – free or priced as you wish)
  • easily distribute updates and collect revenue from what you’re doing

For system integrators and developers:

  • benefit from a completely unified experience, plus support and customization with Nuxeo Studio
  • quickly deploy your Studio-based customization

How does this work?

The Nuxeo Admin Center lets you link your product with your Nuxeo Connect subscription (if you don’t have one, you can start a 30-day trial ). Once your application is registered, the Update Center is activated.

The Update Center manages packages: it can notify, download, install, upgrade and remove them. The Update Center communicates available updates (and patches) for installed software, fetching and delivering Nuxeo Studio-based apps/customization and installing packages from the Marketplace.

On the Nuxeo Connect side, Nuxeo Marketplace hosts the package repository and offers a central place to browse available packages via the web-based gallery of apps and plug-ins.

Want to create new packages?

Creating new packages is very easy when you have done plug-ins for a Nuxeo application. You just need to bundle them with an install script and the resources to create a new package suitable for the Marketplace.

How to help? Want to know more?

Timeline?

The Nuxeo Marketplace and Admin Center are available today for members of our community, contributors, partners and customers for preview, testing, improvement and package creation. Nuxeo Connect customers can benefit from this update system now, receiving bug fixes and patches from our support team for Nuxeo DM 5.3.2.

The general availability release of the Nuxeo Marketplace will be done for Nuxeo DM 5.4, at the end of September. We expect to have many packages available by that time and directly available with this version.

Let’s get started!

EB.

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Posted in Business, ECM, Software

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Can Day Software Propel Adobe Towards a More Open Business Strategy?

July 30th, 2010

As most involved in the broad content management market, I’ve seen the news of the week: Adobe acquires Day Software, the hot WCM vendor.

I have known and respected Day for a while: they deliver neat technology, have a clean business model and contribute significantly to open source. Plus, I appreciate the people I know from there.

Waking up on Wednesday and seeing the news starting to pour in my tweet stream was a big surprise. I thought about it a bit over the breakfast. My take: great for them, I know some people in the industry are going to hate it, but won’t be change much for Nuxeo and for the open source projects Day’s people are leading. So sent some congrats, a dinner invite, and went on my day waiting for the analysis and industry reaction overview from our great CMO later in the day. Which, in turn, confirmed my take. All good, move on. :-)

I’ve been asked a few time about my opinion and gave it. Until the last time when I thought “but what if Adobe doesn’t follow the Day way?”. Because many people have talked about Adobe closing more of Day’s technology and I don’t buy it. Developers working on the open source project are well respected, they will continue to work on those projects be it for Adobe or for an other company. So that wouldn't be a problem.

The question that started puzzling me is: What if Adobe goes onto a more open way? First reaction: That would be huge!

Imagine, for a second, that Adobe open source the whole CQ5 product. You have:

  • CQ5, great WCM software considered as one of the best in its category (the best?), available as open source

  • Day’s team, a team that knows how to ignite and lead communities

  • Adobe’s marketing war machine to let the world know

You get a winning product, with the capacity to transform the WCM market. By commoditizing this technology, Adobe would hit hard its competition in the WCM market. Despite the fact that it would unify some of the opens source WCM crowd, EMC/Fatwire, Autonomy/Interwoven, OpenText/RedDot/Vignette/Obtree and friends would be under heavy attack.

Adobe could concentrate on monetizing global service offerings: Omniture, Livecycle, end-to-end workflows for medias, acrobat.com on steroids, more online services, etc. Commoditizing the core WCM technology would keep the competition busy and let them make money where they hardly have any meaningful competition, innovate more with new services spanning and leveraging the wide reach of their offerings. We also would see an ecosystem thrive on CQ5, providing the ignition — for free — Adobe needs to enter the market. Kinda the Google way, after all.

Actually the more I think to this and after having read Adobe’s plan for Day, I think it’s the best way to achieve it. If they truly want to create a platform for customer engagement management, this is the way. This is how the industry builds big platform nowadays, by open source software.

All this for a mere $240M and -$50M in revenue addition. That would be the slam dunk that Laurence Hart doesn’t see coming! :-)

Am I crazy enough to think that Adobe will execute this? No. And I haven't thought all this thoroughly. But that would be really fun to watch! :-)

Onto some real work now,

EB.

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Posted in ECM, Open Source, Software

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What makes Nuxeo ECM different and worthy of interest? (No, it’s not “open source”)

March 18th, 2010

Note: this post follows the previous one about the ECM market and I advise you to read it to better understand the context of this one.


What differentiates you from the other enterprise content management offerings?


Standout-from-the-crowdI get this question regularly, and too often the expected answer is “open source”. While playing a role, I wouldn’t say that open source is what makes us different. Open source is in our DNA, but that’s not the key for our customers, nor the biggest change we’re aiming to bring to the market.

What makes us different? Our technology, the ECM platform.

This is by far our main market advantage and what we have to bring to the market: Nuxeo Enterprise Platform (EP), our ECM platform. We’ve built superior technology, leveraging an up-to-date Java stack, design pattern and modularity. This is hands down the main reason that we win deals today with enterprise architects and technology-savvy business sponsors.

The value proposition here is simple and compelling — We dramatically reduce the time and the cost of building on top of the ECM platform when compared to LiveLink or Documentum. This is why we won major deals with Jeppesen — a Boeing Company, Orange, BBC, EllisDon, Cengage Learning, Overstock.com, and many more.

We don’t try to hide from architects, we bring them back to the center of the game and give them the tools to answer challenges of the 21st century. To fully bring competitive advantage and deliver the value it promises, technology is important. We believe software is an engineering discipline, at the service of the business.

Of course, open source is deep in our DNA and brings a lot of value, ease and insurance to our customers. But from a decision-making standpoint, it plays a role but isn’t usually a key factor. The same is true for cost. Yes it is important but clearly only satisfying the functional and technical requirements are paramount. Ironically, price regularly plays against us: such as when our competitor friends have the financial resources to buy deals from us when money is key. Hence the best case for us to win is when what we offer is not achievable by the incumbents.

We offer a better ECM platform, enabling a new generation of content applications

On the platform side, our mission is to commoditize the market for “ECM platforms” with standards, widely known technology and great infrastructure. We made a strategic bet 3 years ago on a stack of technology and infrastructure that is now mainstream. So we have a great ECM platform, leveraging open standards and a well-known technology stack, highly modular and flexible. It runs on a wide range of hardware (from embedded devices in planes to large farms with terabytes of data) and serves very diverse needs (from mission-critical editorial systems for press agencies to a highly secure case management system for a nuclear agency or a mobile document repository for an offshore welding engineer.)

The net result of all this is that our platform is the most flexible and modular on the market and is widely recognized as such. This has become a great market advantage for us with the rise of content applications (CEVA/CCA: Content Enabled Vertical Applications / Composite Content Applications – as Gartner puts it and discussed at its recent Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit).

Content Apps represent a steady move in the ECM market where buyers want to buy vertical solutions, solving actual business problems. They don’t want to pour money into generic technology anymore. We are seeing a new category of ISVs, packaging business knowledge into software to create and sell those content applications (ex: construction project management, clinical facts management for biotech and life sciences, software for control and command centers, etc.). Content apps are a logical evolution of the ECM market toward more vertical, business-ready solutions. And we believe we offer a great development and composition model for the next generation of content apps.

As such, I believe Nuxeo is well-positioned to benefit from this evolution given that:

  • Open source software has shown superior ability to commoditize markets, recycling big vendors’ license revenue into a new stream of value. We participate actively in this commoditization, deriving revenue for us and offering better value for the customers.
  • Our platform’s flexibility and feature scope combined with the open source aspect of the software ease the life of content app architects and developers. The development model the platform offers is widely recognized and praised. We believe we can enable a new way of building content apps. Easier, cleaner, faster.
  • Our business model derives value from applications built on top of Nuxeo EP (thanks to the subscription-based business model we have created).

That’s why we’re here. To offer and evangelize an ECM platform and the associated content apps, responding to the new needs of businesses in this era of information explosion.

I hope this also bring some clarification and will entice people to look beyond the “open source” label. Because there’s a lot more to discover and that could really help your business!

Cheers,

EB.

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Posted in ECM, Marketing, Open Source, Software

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