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Business & Open Source - The Nuxeo Way

Delivering value to customers, partners, and community with open source

Nuxeo, as a company, wants to offer a new experience for enterprise software customers, a very different one from the usual software sales cycle. Easy, transparent and flexible. We want to remove the hassle that is too common in traditional ECM deals.

Eric Barroca, CEO

As a company we want to align the value that we create for our customers with the money that we make. We benefit when customers deploy, use and extend our products. Beyond the product, we deliver a complete and integrated experience from the design, to the build phase to the deployment to the last user. We are a services company, leveraging great products and powerful technology, to deliver value for our customers, our partners and the ECM community.

Fully open and collaborative development model

All the code produced by Nuxeo and used in our platforms and products is open source under the LGPL license. The development is fully open through the nuxeo-dev mailing list and our source repositories (hg.nuxeo.org). The compiled software artifacts (plug-ins, java jar files) are available in our Maven repository. Developers from any organization can create applications themselves, or even build packaged products such as Nuxeo DM by simply taking Nuxeo EP and dropping the DM plug-ins into it (or creating an assembly file to do that). The same process allows an organization to build a customized flavor of Nuxeo DM, by adding plug-ins for extended functionality.

We welcome contributions from the community, and have major active contributors — customers and users — that have commit rights to our repositories. (Commit rights are only given after a careful review and selection process). All of the software code and the associated tools (to build, integrate, test, etc.) are available. We encourage sharing and cooperation to stimulate innovation.

This vibrant community is enabled by our openness and the strength of the technology. We drive the process and enable collaboration, but ultimately this process creates great value thanks to the community and the collaboration it contributes.. But that is not what make our software platform great. What makes it great, even compared to proprietary software? It is the most advanced, flexible and comprehensive ECM platform. The open source development model we use makes it just more compelling.

Open Source is neither an ideology, nor a myth. It's just a very powerful development model and legal framework. And it's how a lot of great software is created today.

Business model: maintenance and support as subscription

Nuxeo is a commercial entity with a mission to be profitable for our shareholders, just like our proprietary competitors. The difference is that we don’t derive our revenue from license fees. We derive revenue from maintenance & support sold as subscriptions through the Nuxeo Connect offering. Customers subscribing to Nuxeo Connect are assured of service level agreements for problem resolution, certified patches & fixes according to our maintenance policy, value-added design, configuration, monitoring and management tools, as well as product updates in accordance with our product lifecycle policy. We sell value added packaged services as subscriptions. Just like RedHat has created a great and competitive business model for operating systems and Java middleware, we have created one for ECM.
Nuxeo Connect is the core of the program delivering maintenance assurances and commitments for Nuxeo ECM products on a per-application basis. A clear pricing model allows organizations of all sizes to scale their Nuxeo Connect experience as content applications expand. Base grants access to:

  • Software maintenance: patches for older versions will be back-ported and made available as binary patches only to support customers. Non-Connect users will need to compile patches themselves
  • Approved installable packages: pre-built software packages for a range of application servers and deployment scenarii (as single-machine, repository clustering, app server clustering, stateful/stateless deployments, etc.).

Alongside Nuxeo Connect - Base, a set a premium services is available. This list keeps growing and can be enabled by the subscription manager depending on requirements and the criticality of the applications:

  • Unlimited support for development teams and operation teams with service level agreements ensuring response times to meet customer needs
  • Nuxeo Studio - the online visual configuration and customization for the Nuxeo ECM offerings, to quickly design and build application leveraging the power of our technology for ECM, Nuxeo EP
  • Nuxeo Professional Services (training, consulting, deployment packages)

This is how we align our revenue with the value we create for our customer: by adding value to each phase of the project, and selling it as a subscription.

An easy, sustainable business model for enterprise software

Nuxeo believes that simplicity and clarity is the key to customer communication and support. We have chosen not to portray mixed messages. We do not position our open source ECM offering as a free demo and then offer a separate proprietary version when the customer demands production quality software. Our business model is clear: customers pay for packaging, maintenance, support, the vendor commitment to the offering and access to experienced professional services. We derive our revenue and value from customers meeting their content management goals and objectives.
Developers and systems integrators have access to a business-friendly open source model: full access to the source code, allowing customizations/integration of our software to help them meet their customer needs. Customers are assured of reduced costs and risks in an ECM investment. Our model assures future-proofing of the product lifecycle. If Nuxeo, the company, were acquired by an outside party that shuts down operations, the market would continue to exist and the ecosystem would be fully equipped to support the offering, provide on-going maintenance and make sure the software evolves and thrives. This is an important consideration for customers in the ever-consolidating ECM marketplace.
Nuxeo has a recurrent revenue-based business model that allows us to grow and generate profit. This proven stability and strength provides assurance to our community:

  • Customers / Users get good service
     
    • Nuxeo is structured to deliver great post-sale value.
    • We must deliver high quality service to our customers in order to continue growing and renew our recurring revenue. The company is completely organized around providing great support and maintenance.
    • We are not structured to require the overhead needed to support the license-sale model of large proprietary vendors.
  • Partners / Integrators get great and extensible software
     
    • With a clear offering and value proposition, enabling them to offer innovative content applications and solutions to their customers
    • With a clear licensing scheme - LGPL - partners can create vertical applications on top of our platform and choose the business model that meets their needs. We have eliminated the risk of developing an application subject to implications of the GPL license. No surprises, no catch, no dual-licensing model.
    • To benefit from the maintenance and the partner program, solution providers and integrators subscribe to the Nuxeo Galaxy partner program that brings them a complete set of benefits.