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.

During the past five years, here at Nuxeo, we have built some of the largest e-government projects by providing great ECM solution for french ministries or governmental agencies. Today, CPS is the mainstream ECM Framework in the french administration. This success has naturaly lead lot of industrial companies to consider open source ECM as a suitable alternative. But they still have lot of questions about open source. The licencing model is one of those, but they also want to understand the business model that sustained Open source companies or Open source vendors such as Nuxeo. A big part of my job consists to explain how open source ECM solutions may benefit them. And most of the time, it works :)

When you’re talking with this kind of clients, you’re not talking to early adopters. They got internal processes, quality is the core of their businesses. They don’t have time to try, they want solutions that work and the most important they want solutions that can make them save money.

For them the choice of open source has to be a smart move in a cost oriented strategy motivated by ROI (I had to unleash the “R” word). These words may sound a little too marketingly correct, but believe me when it’s time to kick Documentum’s ass they are big part of the picture.

I’m not talking about revolution here but only how to optimize IT investment in ECM.

Services and only services !

What do we sell to our client ? We don’t sell the software and we don’t sell neither the right to use it. All of that is free. What we’re providing to our client is services to fulfill their needs. In our business model the software is only the very apropriate medium to provide these services.

What determines the cost of an open source project ? The cost is defined exclusively by your needs and how far they are from the framework you are using. Generaly, it’s based on three factors :

• Framework adaptation
• new component development
• Integration in a global system

When you are using an easily extensible and mature framework, as CPS, the service cost is not very different from non open source vendor. But what I’m talking about here is services and only services... This is the only thing you have to pay for : productive work and nothing else (no payable usage right, no lincence cost, etc.).

When you are using a proprietary ECM solution you need to pay licences. The amount of these licences may double the cost of your project because it’s not directly based on what you need but on other criterias like the number of users accessing the application,, the number of servers running and sometimes even the number of processors you need to make it work.

The cost analisys of a project cannot be limited  to the build phase, because after building it you’re supposed to use it. That’s what we call the run period, and that’s when open source application becomes an amazing source of benefits. You don’t have to pay anything to enjoy your application. Even the support services are an option. Your application may become a success and be adopted by lots of your employees to make them work faster and reuse their knowledge efficiently without extra cost.

What I'm saying here isn't about big maths, I’m sure I don’t need to get further... You already got me.

And what about subscription ?

Another alternative offered by open source ECM is that you can use out-of-the-box solutions.

At Nuxeo, we’re implementing several packaged applications like CPS Courrrier or CPS OpenSpace. Feel free to download them and of course to use them. I’m pretty sure you’re going to enjoy them. But that’s not the point of this post.

When you are using an application in an industrial context, you need to be sure that you’re going to get all the support and all the functionnal and technical help you need. I think that an open source vendor has to provide such professional services. So here at Nuxeo, we have already launched training and certification programs and we’re about to unleash our subscription program. I will talk about it as soon as it will be fully operational.

Subscription model provides lots of advantages for companies. It helps them manage the application, test it, upgrade it, resolve the problem they encounter by using it. But most of all, it gives them the insurance that their application will work the way they want to.

Like Eric B. and Rakim said before, you got to follow the leader. Top open source companies like Jboss and Redhat have adopted this business model, it simply works well and provides a great professional open source experience to their client.

And what about a conclusion ?

At Nuxeo we believe that realizing projects allows us to constantly innovate and create client oriented applications and not only secret labs powered ones. By acting on the field, we’re able to know what the market want and how to lead the software evolution. Projects and subscriptions are complementary activities and we have to provide both of them.

Why open source is a smart move for companies looking for professional ECM solution ? Because it’s cost oriented and only depends on your needs and now you can rely on open source software vendor like Nuxeo to get professional services. Moreover, it’s up to you to make the move you judge as the smartest one...