Planet Nuxeo

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.

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.

Attended the Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit in Baltimore this week, a conference specifically targeting  information professionals who need to guide their businesses on the whole spectrum of content management - collaboration, information governance, social media, portals and web.

The tough part? Trying to choose between great sessions scheduled in the same time slot.  Solid content by some great presenters....

Here are a few of the highlights:

• Open source ECM is on the upswing.  While it still represents a small percentage of the overall market, numerous sessions called it out as something organizations need to consider as part of their overall decision making process. It's growing in popularity, being asked about more frequently, and analysts are absolutely paying attention to their customer interest.   

• 2012 seems to be targeted as the 'break out' year for cloud content applications.  A session called "Is a Content Appliance in Your Future: Content Management Architectures Evolve to Meet Evolving User Demands" was led by 
Karen Shegda. She had some great stats on the kinds of workplace applications that were early cloud successes - outsourced document capture, e-mail, web conferencing, and instant messaging all have important traction today, but new content apps were anticipated to hit critical mass by 2012: vertical/horizontal applications for specific industries or specialized business processes - example of invoice processing. Was good to see this as 
Nuxeo continues to invest in and build cloud editions of our key applications.

• Attended 2 really compelling sessions by Toby Bell. The first I attended while wearing my "newbie CMO" hat.  Titled "
Web Content Management: Engaging Through Web Channel Strategies, Marketing", was great and sometimes provocative  discussion of how to use a corporate web site/web presence to really drive business.  Took copious notes, as we internally at Nuxeo strive to continue to improve our web site and evolve it into an important source of lead and demand generation.  A work in progress, but one that we are committed to.

• The second Bell session I attended was packed with interesting observations, trends and identification of some potentially subversive and destructive forces at play in the ECM market.  "What's in Store for Enterprise Content Management Beyond 2010?.  Great analysis of the evolution of the space from its definition in 2005 to current state. We appear to be in the midst of early stage transition from ECM as all purpose infrastructure to more pressure from business to find content management platforms upon which to build content applications. By 2012 the "Composite Content Applications" focus will begin dominate the buying decisions.  (Note - CCA is the next evolution of the solution category once called CEVA "Content Enabled Vertical Application").  ECM is a complex technology space - and the session highlighted what made it so complex. The inevitable yin-yang polar pulls of Risk vs. Reward, Fixed vs. Dynamic Content, 'Blue collar" transactional content vs. "professional grade" knowledge creation were all called out as the forces shaping content management applications and use cases. Another external validation of the direction Nuxeo has anticipated and bodes well for our ability to deliver a content app platform to meet evolving market needs.

• Video is the next hot thing.... a fun and highly entertaining session led by 
Whit Andrews
. Honestly? I attended because of the title.  But stayed for the compelling story-telling approach to a really interesting and important area that we see increasingly important to our Nuxeo DAM and Nuxeo EP evolution. "
I Was a Teenage YouTube Star: Strategic, Tactical and Calamitous Futures of Video, Inside and Outside the Enterprise" had some fascinating stats on video adoption - the commoditization of the means of production - phones, pocket video recorders, digital cameras are all easily affordable consumer products that have been used to fuel the explosion of digital recording. Companies not managing it today will quickly find themselves in a storage, ediscovery, corporate memory preservation dilemma if this wildly growing content type isn't thought about soon.

• But no surprise that perhaps the best was saved for last. The final workshop I attended on Thursday morning was co-led by Debra Logan and Carol Rozwell. The session title was “Social Software Meets Information Governance”. My two favourite topics in one place! I came in a bit late, after the room had broken into discussion groups, so tried to hide at the back of the room with some other late stragglers. Glad I did... had a fascinating discussion with someone in a consumer goods company who was struggling to find the right balance for her company's social media needs. IT had shut down access to most social networks, but her business needed to get more proactive in reaching out to their consumers who loved their product. Glad our scenario fueled some discussion and debate on the topic. A big group for a workshop, but feedback seemed overwhelmingly positive and session was valuable...and clearly timely.  

Great to have a chance to speak in person with several analysts, learn about some cool new companies, and get a chance to say 'hi' to some wonderful old ECM-world colleagues.  Until next year! 

I did a presentation in february about CMIS, a ten thousand feet overview on a morning event in Paris. I explained there why this standard is necessary now, what it is about, and why we think at Nuxeo it is a great opportunity for our customers and our partners. Slides can be accessed here.

CMIS overview

The event was about Ez-Publish - Nuxeo integration through a CMIS connector. This integration makes really sense as it allows contributors to easily insert inside an EZ-Publish articles links to documents stored in the collaborative repository (Nuxeo DM). The main interest being that the document doesn't go outside of the repository : no copy, the document IS always up-to-date, and we are sure that only people that has been considered as allowed to read it will access it. A video of the integration can be viewed on our partner's website NXC, who develops and maintains the EZ-CMIS plugin. They are now working on integrating Nuxeo DAM in the same way, to be able to insert pictures stored in Nuxeo DAM in the middle of your article.

Title of my presentation was "CMIS : Overview of a Rapidly Evolving ECM Standard ". Just since that presentation, I could see two new integrations  :

• Drupal (another CMS ), same kind of integration as with EZ, even deeper as it is possible to create content from Drupal into Nuxeo (interest : if you have a to write an article with an attachment, you capitalize the content as the same time as you publish it in your WCM tool).

• Bonita a user-friendly workflow engine. You can watch the video here. Basically, you see how easy it is to configure a workflow with various steps and actions in Nuxeo repository among connection to other sytems during the process designed with Bonita

I also saw the apparition of a lower level php lib for CMIS, and there is the contribution to Apache Chemistry of a python library by Jeff Potts. Let 's stay tune there should be many good suprises in the coming months !

Solutions Linux is the oldest and biggest trade show in France dedicated to the open source ecosystem. It's been happening every year in Paris since 1999 (it was called "Linux Expo", back then).

This year, Solutions Linux is happening at exactly the same time as Documation and OSBC, and we're spread thin between all these exciting events, but some of us will be hanging around Solutions Linux:

• Olivier Grisel will give a presentation on "Large Scale data crunching with Hadoop MapReduce et Clojure" during the conferences' "developer track"

• I will co-chair the same developer track

• I will also take part in a roundtable on how the public and private sectors can work together to develop better software and content for the education system

Want to book an appointement with me during Solutions Linux? Drop me a mail: sf@nuxeo.com.

It's been a busy quarter here at Nuxeo HQ. Right on the heels of two major product announcements - Nuxeo Studio and Nuxeo DAM, we're pleased to publish our events calendar for the next few weeks - a good range of in-person and online events as we continue to ramp up our customer outreach and market education activities.

We have recently brainstormed internally and discussed with some of our customers and ECM analysts the roadmap for our planned improvements of Nuxeo EP.

View more presentations from Nuxeo - Open Source ECM.

In summary:

1. We want to make it easier for “users” (in the largest sense, from end users to Java developers) to use the platform in ways that bring value to their businesses.

2. Short term (Q1 and Q2 2010) technical improvements will include:

   • full CMIS support (icluding all the possible bells and whistles)
   • semantic features (auto-categorization and auto-tagging of content, named entities extraction, images clustering…)
   • better Windows server and desktop integration
   • rules, workflow and reporting

3. We will improve developer experience by implementing extension points hot reload (for shorter compile/deploy/test cycles) and focussing on Nuxeo Studio.

4. We will create new packaged profiles, or “distributions”, of Nuxeo EP + extensions, some as full-fledged applications targetting specific segments of the ECM space, such as Nuxeo RM (for Records Management), Nuxeo SDS (Structured Document Server) or Nuxeo Correspondence, and others as more technical components that can be easily embedded by systems integrators or ISVs in more complex product.

Read the slides for more information, then join the discussion on the community forum, or on the nuxeo-dev developers mailing list if you’d like to get involved with development of new features.

Everyone’s welcome to contribute.

A very busy week of for our development, marketing and web teams here at Nuxeo.  First we announced Nuxeo Studio as part of our enhanced Nuxeo Connect offering and today the 1.0 release of Nuxeo DAM. Nuxeo DAM was opened to a public beta back in December 2009, as part of our participation at the Gilbane Boston Conference.  We've had tremendous reaction to this offering - hundreds of downloads in just 2 months, and we were thrilled to have early adopters work with us on critical features and fixes they needed to move ahead with our General Availability release.

Pleased to finally announce the release of Nuxeo Studio (news release here). Nuxeo Studio is a big step forward - a really cool graphical design tool built specifically to help our customer and partners customize and configure their ECM applications. Details, including a recorded demo, are here.  

Nuxeo Studio is the first of a series of management and monitoring tools that will be made available through our Nuxeo Connect subscription program.

 

Interesting developments in the open source ECM world this week as Alfresco announced a change in their licensing model - now using LGPL.   Eric and I were dashing between customer meetings in Toronto when he read the news via Twitter (instead of navigating on Google Maps… but that's another story…). LGPL, of course, is the license model that Nuxeo has adopted for years.  

As customers, partners and analysts know, it was a very deliberate choice to go LGPL early in our company evolution.  LGPL is, in our perspective, the most business-friendly of the open source licenses for companies that develop software intended to be used as a platform.  It is the right license for Nuxeo, who builds software products that are intended to be a foundation for applications.

LGPL strives for balance - carefully protecting the source by requiring publication of any modifications to it - but gives a liberal use policy ensuring that it can be mixed with proprietary code without risk.  Our ECM foundation offering - Nuxeo EP - encourages a plug-in friendly platform, architected to be extensible and allowing a very wide range of horizontal and vertical applications to be built with it.  LGPL is an ideal license for software providers who envision ECM as a platform deserving widespread adoption.

An LGPL license approach combined with a company focus on generating revenue from maintenance and value-added tools & services might actually offer better market adoption potential and growth opportunities. (This model was pioneered by JBoss and was the model Nuxeo chose to adopt and refine).  The split-personality approach of GPL community edition vs commercially packaged supported offerings ("Commercial Open Source") can be a limitation when looking to innovate and extend core offerings with integrations and partner applications.

Collaborating with customers and partners, as well as building lasting technology alliances, are also simplified under LGPL. Customers help us stay innovative and respond quickly to new feature demands.  A great example was the contribution of the code to support OpenSocial by a key customer for our Nuxeo DM 5.3 release in October. Bringing social software application integration into our Nuxeo ECM offering keeps us current with increasing adoption of tools to support Enterprise 2.0 initiatives, and gives customers the assurance that the features they need stay open and available.  Partners and application builders can sell and package their value-added components in a way that makes sense for their business model - which might be quite different than ours.  And that's cool - the domain expertise we're cultivating in Life Sciences, Education, Construction/Engineering, Public Sector…. these Galaxy partners know their markets and can price and package accordingly.  Partners can make informed decisions about how to go to market with their content applications - they don't need Nuxeo to dictate a sales model.

So, "Welcome to the LGPL Tribe, Alfresco".  As the two front runners in open source ECM, we are both seeing adoption success at exponential rates, strengthening a business model and license approach that clearly works.  As more enterprises recognize that they are living in the knowledge-economy, viewing ECM as a platform for their content assets will become a mainstream view.   We're offering a way to do this by mitigating the risk and unknowns often perceived in models such as GPL.

But ultimately, it is *just* a license model.  An ECM platform needs to stand up to the full scrutiny of the technical architects and application builders who will deploy it.  And that's where we'll see the differentiation.  With large new customer deployments each month, a product roadmap driven by customer community needs, and our desire to stay ahead of the curve on ECM architecture, we all agree: 2010 is going to be a great year for Nuxeo.

Thanks to lots of progress in Apache Chemistry, to which Nuxeo is contributing, and through updated Nuxeo Chemistry bindings, the support for CMIS in Nuxeo is getting quite good.

For more practical info on using CMIS in Nuxeo, including download links, see http://doc.nuxeo.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/CMIS.

Note that our demo server at http://cmis.demo.nuxeo.org/ has been updated as well.

Below are most of the new features available since the last release.

Better search

Fulltext search with CONTAINS() has been implemented so that you can do queries like:

SELECT cmis:name FROM cmis:document WHERE CONTAINS('foobar')

(The full scope of the fulltext search syntax, with ORing of words and negation, is not there yet.)

You can now also use the IN_TREE() and IN_FOLDER() predicates.

The SQL keywords are now case-insensitive as the spec requires, and complex boolean functions have been fixed.

More CRUD

A number of fundamental features form the CMIS domain model are now complete: object move, folder tree, folder descendants, delete, delete descendants.

Miscellaneous

Other fixes have been done: the types are served according to the latest 1.0CD06 draft, a number of fixes to make more CMIS clients happy have been included.

CMIS Shell

Finally, keep in mind that there is now an easy way to test a CMIS repository using a command line client. See the CMIS Shell blog post from Stéfane for more.

We’ve been working recently on a CMIS command-line client, called “cmissh”, based on the Apache Chemistry client code.

We have decided to donate the code to the Apache Chemistry project, as there are no dependencies on Nuxeo code in it.

cmissh can be used interactively (with a nice autocompletion console) to explore and run CRUD operations on a CMIS server, or as a testing tool. We’ve included, for instance, a test script in the distribution, called ‘testscript’, that can be run against the Nuxeo demo server and will fail on errors. I’ve also been able to use cmissh against the Chemistry test server.

If you are busy, you can download a binary distribution (built just before the migration to Apache) from here:

http://www.nuxeo.org/static/cmis/cmissh-20100115.zip

(or look for a later build here: http://www.nuxeo.org/static/cmis/).

and test it against our public CMIS demo server (available here: http://cmis.demo.nuxeo.org/) using the “testscript” script included in the distribution.

Here is a sample session:

SFs-macbook% cmissh
CMIS Shell by Nuxeo (www.nuxeo.com). Type 'help' for help.
|:> help
Usage: help [command]

To get help of a specific command, type 'help name_of_command'.

List of available commands:

cat - Read the stream of the target document to the console
cd - Change working item
connect [open] - Open a new session
disconnect [close] - Close current session
dump [tree] - Dump a subtree
exit [bye|quit] - Exit
get [getstream] - Downloads the stream of the target document
help - Help
id - Identity of the specified entry
lcd - Change local working directory
lls [ll] - List local directory content
lpopd - Pop local directory stack
lpushd - Push local directory stack
lpwd - Print local working directory
ls - List entries in working directory
match - Fails if last command result doesn't match the pattern
mkdir - Create a folder given its name
mkfile [mkdoc] - Create a document of the given name
popd - Pop directory stack
propget - Print the value of the given property on the current context object
props - (Obsolete) Print the value of all the properties of the current context object
propset - Set the value of a property on the current context object
pushd - Push directory stack
put - Uploads the stream of the target document
pwd - Print working directory
rm [del] - Removes an object of the given name
setstream - Set the given file content as a stream on the current context object

|> connect http://Administrator:Administrator@cmis.demo.nuxeo.org/nuxeo/site/cmis/repository

|> ls
default

|> cd default

|cmis.demo.nuxeo.org:default> ls
default-domain

|cmis.demo.nuxeo.org:default> cd default-domain

|cmis.demo.nuxeo.org:default-domain> ls
workspaces
sections
templates

|cmis.demo.nuxeo.org:default-domain> cd workspaces

|cmis.demo.nuxeo.org:workspaces> ls
demo-workspace

|cmis.demo.nuxeo.org:workspaces> cd demo-workspace

|cmis.demo.nuxeo.org:demo-workspace> ls
pictures

|cmis.demo.nuxeo.org:demo-workspace> cd pictures

|cmis.demo.nuxeo.org:pictures> ls
pony-jpg
dog-jpg
cat-jpg

|cmis.demo.nuxeo.org:pictures> put /Users/fermigier/Pictures/sf-square.jpg 

|cmis.demo.nuxeo.org:pictures> ls
pony-jpg
dog-jpg
cat-jpg
sf-squared.jpg

|cmis.demo.nuxeo.org:pictures> propget sf-square.jpg
cmis:baseTypeId = cmis:document
cmis:changeToken = [null]
cmis:checkinComment = [null]
cmis:contentStreamFileName = sf-square.jpg
cmis:contentStreamId = [null]
cmis:contentStreamLength = [null]
cmis:contentStreamMimeType = [null]
cmis:createdBy = Administrator
cmis:creationDate = GregorianCalendar(2010-01-21T16:14:05.000+01:00)
cmis:isLatestMajorVersion = false
cmis:isLatestVersion = true
cmis:isMajorVersion = false
cmis:isVersionSeriesCheckedOut = false
cmis:lastModificationDate = GregorianCalendar(2010-01-21T16:14:05.000+01:00)
cmis:lastModifiedBy = Administrator
cmis:name = sf-square.jpg
cmis:objectId = 01e009cc-11fd-4f84-a710-5af9cc12a97c
cmis:objectTypeId = File
cmis:versionLabel = [null]
cmis:versionSeriesCheckedOutBy = [null]
cmis:versionSeriesCheckedOutId = [null]
cmis:versionSeriesId = 01e009cc-11fd-4f84-a710-5af9cc12a97c
dc:contributors = [Ljava.lang.String;@555c07d8
dc:coverage = [null]
dc:description = [null]
dc:expired = [null]
dc:format = [null]
dc:issued = [null]
dc:language = [null]
dc:rights = [null]
dc:source = [null]
dc:subjects = [null]
dc:title = sf-square.jpg
dc:valid = [null]
filename = [null]
icon = /icons/file.gif
icon-expanded = [null]
major_version = 1
minor_version = 0
size = [null]
uid = [null]

|cmis.demo.nuxeo.org:pictures> get sf-square.jpg
Object stream saved to local file: ./sf-square.jpg

|cmis.demo.nuxeo.org:pictures> lls
sf-square.jpg

|cmis.demo.nuxeo.org:pictures> id
Object 0a37ffea-fd65-4e78-b3bc-074168dd99f9 of type PictureBook

|cmis.demo.nuxeo.org:pictures> quit
Bye

Many of you are heard over the last day that the Nuxeo management team has changed the date of our first annual User Conference - Nuxeo World. 

The announcement is here on our web page: http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/news/nuxeo-world-moves-to-november  (Français ici: http://www.nuxeo.com/fr/societe/actualites/nuxeo-world-decale-novembre)