Posts Tagged ‘ecm’

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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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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Is there room for Nuxeo in the mature and crowded ECM market?

March 15th, 2010

While exchanging with a well-recognized and successful industry expert about our differentiators and the market we are in. Since they popup frequently, I thought it might be interesting to publish the answer.


Bazaar-istanbul

ECM is a mature and crowded market. Is there really room for anything more than a niche player at this late stage in the game?

Hegemonic vendors

At a macro-level, the enterprise content market is composed by 5 hegemonic vendors (OpenText, EMC, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft) and a set of minor ones (~15 notable), after a strong and fast consolidation of this market. Gartner says: 3 top vendors have 52% of the ECM market. The Triad of ECM? ;-)

As many vendors have skipped investment in technology aggregating software from their acquisitions (with the notable exception of Microsoft) much of the current batch of software has been designed 15 years ago and hasn’t evolved much. They have forgotten they are in engineering, not retail. In this world of lean, on-demand, instant-on, the major ECM payers still talk literally in days or weeks to install their software. It’s faster to setup a whole virtual datacenter processing and storing terabytes of data on the Amazon Cloud than setting up a vanilla ECM system!

On top of this technology breakdown, many of these acquisitions have been poorly integrated, to say the least (with a special mention to OpenText on this side). And the pace of the recent consolidation has created a disturbance in the market.

Those two combined dynamics enable new vendors with good technology and the right go-to-market approach to enter the ECM arena, tickle the incumbents and rise, and bring some fresh air and fun to this market.

Perspective shift from customers

We see important shifts in how customers evaluate and choose ECM platforms:

  • More and more Architects are actively involved in the choice of next-generation ECM platforms (not only business users / archive managers) and are putting it at the core of their information system. This sets high expectations in terms of software architecture, integration capabilities or flexibility and technology stack.

  • They need to update systems deployed in the ’00s because incumbent vendors are not supporting those versions anymore => the cost of upgrading is high and they are looking for alternatives. Often we can offer efficient and better replacement for those systems for a fraction of the price of the ongoing maintenance. Let alone the license fees…

  • Given the lack of technical investment and the legacy of major ECM platforms, implementation is complex and expensive => we can do better with today’s technology. Monolithic is no where near the state-of-the-art of software-and Architects care because it directly impacts their ability to make these ECM platforms meet the new business challenges.

Move fast, commoditize legacy, create value with the rest

I really believe that the market maturity combined with the legacy technologies of monolithic players is a key advantage for us: we are disrupting the market by commoditizing the technology (platform) and deriving value from this commoditization.

We target what hurts: the fat and comfortable maintenance stream. We target it with more flexible, up-to-date technology and a company organized to provide superior service for support & maintenance as our customers actually deploy and use our products. That’ll tickle! ;-)

So yes, I’m firmly convinced that there is a room for new players, like us. And timing seems just right for a big one. The market needs to evolve and renew, in the best interest of customers. And they well deserve it, given the challenges of the knowledge era that just starts…

That’s going to be a tough ride. But… feels fun too!

Cheers,

EB.

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Posted in Business, ECM, Marketing, Open Source, Software

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Amazon EC2 graduates: Here Comes The Cloud!

October 28th, 2008

Cloud of Fire Last Friday was an horrible day for the markets, but a big step forward for the IT industry. EC2, The first large-scale on-demand computing cloud, graduates and is now labelled as production-ready, with SLAs.

After bout 2 years of beta testing and improvements, Amazon offers a computing cloud alongside its storage cloud. Being the first of its kind, the cloud will certainly have a great impact on the IT industry as a whole.

Initially, when Amazon launched its WebServices division and its storage service S3, it might have appeared as a weird move from the large retailer. But now, several years later, with EC2 and the myriad of additional services (payment, content delivery, etc.), it makes a whole lot sense. Amazon is clearly positioning itself to build the infrastructure of the Web. This is big business. And they’re several steps ahead the competition, emerging from Google (using a different approach with AppEngine), Microsoft (with their rumored “Cloud OS” named Strata), and maybe the smaller force.com (even if I don’t really believe in its proprietary approach).

It’s a huge opportunity for software vendors and service providers (plus a death threat to many hosting providers that can’t adapt fast enough): access to a high-end technology and infrastructure to deliver new services to customers at a fraction of the capital required before it. Any startup can now rely on a strong and scalable infrastructure to imagine and create new products and services, without worrying about consequent capital investment in hardware and infrastructure. Also, it will be easier to imagine and try ideas, fostering fast innovation cycles in the online business.

OK. And what about ECM in this?

Enterprise Content Management is about managing content, right? And content, especially pictures or videos, require space to be stored, computing power to be processed (think large picture management, video processing, etc.) and bandwidth to be delivered. It requires infrastructure. A lot. Exactly what the cloud revolution is addressing. That’s why I really expect a strong transformation in the ECM market enabled by the cloud-related technologies and the widely available broadband: we are about to be able to deliver to organisations a high level of service at a fraction of the price is currently cost priced. The Cloud enables new players (and I expect our company to play a key role here) to offers innovative services in the ECM market, disrupting existing leaders stuck with their centralized, aging technology.

Imagine your content repository, plugged onto a high performing cloud-based infrastructure (be it Hadoop / HDFS, my team is already working on and we begin to get really interesting results), S3+SimpleDB (I don’t really believe in this option actually) or Google AppEngine (interesting but so closed and proprietary…). It just opens new horizons to content stores, content processing and content management! Horizons that were just dreams before at reasonable prices. It only can make innovation more vibrant in this area. And we’re not the latest on this…

The ECM market, due to its nature, is gonna be one of the most impacted by the cloud in the IT industry. We now have to achieve unlimited storage and near-linear scalability! We’re committed on this!

So, the could is coming and will dramatically the IT landscape. For the best I think. Don’t give up open source and open standards. They’ll be even more important. And you’ll get the most from the Cloud. Just another step. But a big one. Interesting times ahead… :-)

Stay tuned!

EB.

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Posted in Business, ECM

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