Nuxeo in Africa

My two last months were under the sign of Africa. I put my RYG Nuxeo’s T-shirt on and start to work. In two months I traveled to west and to east Africa. Two goals: launch Nuxeo Africa in west Africa, and improve relationships with our partners and customers in Madagascar. That means lot of hours spent in the sky and… lot of excitement about Open Source ECM advocacy and business development on Mother Earth.

Trip one - Nuxeo Africa inception in Dakar, Senegal

Nuxeo Africa is our latest subsidiary, its goals are simple : capitalize on our clients in west Africa and develop business in the subregion (Mali, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, etc.). We already work in Senegal with great partners such as OpenSys and Genesys and we may count on the support of our customers like the Government Agency for IT development in Senegal and the Central Bank of West African States.

All the persons I’ve seen during my trip showed a great interest about Nuxeo and its ECM solutions, especially financial companies, banks, TelCo companies and government agencies. Many of them are currently in the process of validating open source ECM as their global ECM platform using Nuxeo’s offer. We give them an brand new sight on the software industry. Once again the focus on added value services (not on license fees) that we allow, is very appreciated.

All the lights are green, the market is there. All the prospects I’ve seen seamed to share the same enthusiasm. Especially at the end of the conference I gave about the interest of open source ECM solution in the african context and the strategy of Nuxeo Africa. Independence, cost reduction, ROI, needs adaptation… different continent, same leitmotiv, same solutions !

All I received in Dakar was interest, good vibes and a real motivation to go further. Trust me I can’t wait to go back there to launch our next project. And, if you wonder… yes, parties are hot around!

Trip two - Civil State deployment and local partnership empowerment in Antananarivo, Madagascar

In two years (I landed there for the first time 2 years ago) Madagascar changed a lot, of course there’re still old european cars (like Renault 4L or Citroen 2CV) used as cabs, zebus and rice based main dishes with exotic names like Romazava or Ravitoto. But… now there are WiFi hotspots almost everywhere in Tana (the short-name for Antananarivo, Madagascar capital) and broadband internet will be there in less than a year. I can not wait this moment, which means that we’ll be able to work more efficiently with our partners and clients.

Since two years we work in Tana with e-Sight, a malagasy IT company, to build the first open source civil state management application for the City of Antananarivo. This project, financed by the AIMF and lead by the City of Antananarivo, is a great step for the government: reliable civil state acts allow reliable ID card distribution, citizenship management, taxing, etc... And all together we turn this project into a success that we can be proud of.

Today, the City of Antananarivo runs Nuxeo État-Civil (since one year) in all of its districts and manages about 6000 civil acts a day. This application is a real success and provide a great experience to the citizens of Antananarivo: Faster delivery of acts Faster search of older acts No loss of data For the government, it means auditable act delivery process, no more fake acts hence less corruption.

Nuxeo ECM Platform is, maybe surprisingly, used there to manage critical data in a very high-availability environment. We have a multi-servers architecture, a PDF renderer engine, an audit engine and an AJAX forms framework. And for Civil State Officers… it simply works well! :-)

Another point of this project was about our ability to transfer technical competence to the local technical teams. After two training sessions, the team of e-Sight is now able to maintain the application and most important make it evolve. This case is the perfect illustration of the interest of using open source solution in Africa : get technical independence, high-level technical skills and low cost deployment.

But this is not the end and we have other opportunities in Madagascar. It’s still confidential but I hope being able to blog about that soon. So... stay tuned!

Africa from Paris

Here, at Nuxeo HQ we’re sure that Africa will become a major player in Open Source development. We feel to act like pioneers. I’m quite sure that in a few years, we’ll be very proud of what we participate to build today.