Why Content Services is Critical for Digital Business

One of the things that I really like about the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms is that it closely links Content Services and digital business transformation:

The evolving product landscape for content services platforms creates new opportunities for digital business transformation.

At Nuxeo, we believe that content and a modern Content Services Platform (CSP) are critical to digital transformation. We also believe that digital transformation is not a one-time event, but that it is a continuous process. Ultimately, it is about enabling our customers to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage in a rapidly evolving, increasingly digital world where customer expectations constantly change and where new competitive pressures are a seemingly daily occurrence.

Learn more about the digital transformation imperative

Therefore, at Nuxeo, our goal is to enable our customers to rapidly respond to changing market conditions; to evolve entirely new, digital business models; and, to grow their revenues while achieving new business efficiencies and cost savings.

Following are five key benefits a modern Content Services Platform can deliver that are critical for today’s digital businesses:

1. Support New Digital Content Types and Channels

Many people struggle with the word “content.” Perhaps we are now the victims of our own success in over-marketing the terms “content” and “enterprise content management.” As a result, many people view content and content management as a collection of electronic documents and scanned images, perhaps even out-of-use information that is simply stored for compliance or archival purposes. And yet, today’s enterprises spend millions and millions of dollars on “content marketing” strategies, generating an endless stream of new content to better attract and serve customers in our digital world. The simple truth is that “content” in whatever form has never been more vital to the needs of the modern business.

Learn more about how to solve complex content marketing challenges in our whitepaper.

Our customers tell us that new forms of content (like video and photos) play an increasingly important role in customer interactions and in their business processes. And, emerging types (like AR and VR) now loom large on the horizon. It is also important to note that new channels for this content seem to pop up overnight, and today’s hot new app or service can quickly become yesterday’s news. Therefore, modern Content Services Platform bring greater capabilities over a much broader range of content channels and types than traditional Enterprise Content Management system. They have also been architected to address the unique requirements that these new content types bring, including things like transporting extremely large files and automatically rendering new editions of content for different delivery channels. And, unlike legacy ECM solutions that are largely suites of products, modern Content Services Platforms are designed to easily integrate with other platforms and apps, allowing you to deliver content where it is most needed.

2. Deliver a Much More Engaging Customer Experience

In an increasingly digital world, we believe that a superior customer experience is one of the few sources of sustainable competitive advantage. And, as I’ve noted earlier, we believe content plays a critical role in today’s modern enterprises. It also plays a critical role in your customer experience. Today, many customer interactions begin or end with content. And, many organizations struggle to provide a seamless experience around customer content and, perhaps more importantly, to leverage this information across different channels and points of customer engagement.

In some cases, this is the byproduct of “too many systems and no solution.” In other words, many of our customers find they have many different content management systems but have only succeeded in creating silos in their business that disrupt their customer experience and make it difficult for them to maintain a singular view of their customer information.

Think about your environment. Odds are that you have at least one (if not more than one) legacy ECM system. Odds are that you also use Microsoft SharePoint and either OneDrive or another file synch and share solution like Box, Dropbox, or Google Drive. Vital customer content also likely lives in your CRM solution and in your customer support platform.

Content in an inherent part of how you engage with customers and it is scattered across your organization, making it nearly impossible for you to provide a coherent customer experience. The legacy ECM approach was to move all of this information into a single repository, which completely ignores the complexity of your business and the needs of your users. The modern Content Services approach is to connect to these disparate sources of content, giving you a singular view of this information, without the cost and risk of a massive migration.

3. Provide Intelligent Business Onsights

Ultimately, digital transformation is driven by data and analysis. It is data (and analysis) that enables companies to identify new products and services to meet customer demands. It is data that enables customers to discover new business models that will allow them to transform and thrive in a digital economy.

However, one of the key challenges that we see is that up to 80% of all information (according to most studies) is contained in the form of unstructured content. And the issue with unstructured content is that it is unstructured – it doesn’t fit neatly into rows and columns, and it isn’t easy to dissect and analyze. As a result, most enterprises really struggle to understand the value of their information, and to identify vital business intelligence from within the vast amounts of documents and other content they keep.

Therefore, we believe that it is imperative to give our customers greater insight and intelligence into their content, and we believe technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning will play a critical role in this. We are truly on the cusp of an information revolution in content management: imagine, a content management systems that actually enables you to intelligently manage your content. Again, this is an area where modern Content Services solutions are leading the way. Designed to plug into other cloud services, Content Services Platforms make use of leading machine-learning engines like Google Vision and Amazon Rekognition to enrich unstructured content with structured data. Far beyond OCR or “tagging” images, leading solutions – like the Nuxeo platform – can extract metadata, re-index large volumes of legacy content and even support custom AI models that enable customers to train their solutions on existing data sets to provide much more relevant and valuable data to drive their distinct businesses.

My next blog post will more deeply explore Nuxeo’s unique vision for AI and machine learning. But I will tell you this now - we believe that AI/ML can bring new insights and new automation to your business, allowing you to tap into information locked away in your content in new and exciting ways. We also believe that AI/ML, when paired with a modern CSP, can bring new levels of automation to your business and new intelligence to how information is delivered to your employees and customers. This truly is an amazing time in Content Services.

4. Enable efficiencies and cost savings to fund digital transformation

Technology plays a critical role in digital transformation and in digital business. However, many IT organizations struggle under the burden of their existing technology investments and find that so much of their budget and resources are tied up in simply servicing and maintaining outmoded, legacy systems - which often require specialist skills and high-dollar hardware to support. As a result, many organizations find that the very thing they invested in to support their business objectives – technology – is actually holding them back and that they have difficulty in funding innovation and new business initiatives. This can significantly impede digital transformation efforts and make you less competitive in the digital landscape.

Simply put, modern content platforms represent a significant source of cost savings over legacy technologies which, in turn, can enable the business to invest more of its IT budget in innovation and transformation. We believe that most large enterprises woefully underestimate their investment in (and the cost of) their legacy ECM technologies. Modern offerings, like the Nuxeo Platform, are much more efficient to own and operate than legacy systems, not to mention the new capabilities they bring for digital business. To look beyond the tip of the iceberg and truly understand the hidden costs of your legacy content management systems, use our TCO Calculator and visit our website to better understand how Nuxeo can help you modernize your information management system.

5. Make your organization more agile and responsive to change

Finally, competing in a digital economy is about agility and responsiveness to change. The success of a new product or service is often dependent on time to market. Improvements in customer experiences must be rapid and continuous, or you risk falling behind other established competitors or new, specialist vendors that are seeking to disrupt your market. And, the platforms that underpin your business must be adaptable to new business models and modes of operation.

Unlike legacy ECM systems that are built around a suite of content products, modern Content Services Platforms are designed from the ground up to enable you to rapidly build and quickly iterate new content-centric solutions. A modern CSP is really a low-code environment for agile app development – and you wouldn’t believe the range of solutions that Nuxeo customers have developed on our platform.

The bottom line is that, if your existing ECM system is inflexible or makes it difficult and expensive to deploy new apps and services for your business, you should consider a more modern solution – a Content Services Platform. Remember, change is constant and the pace of play is only accelerating. Don’t let your existing systems hold you back.

The Nuxeo Approach to Content Services

Nuxeo is truly a unique offering in the Content Services market. We released the first version of our open-source platform in 2008. Unburdened by a legacy code base, we have continuously focused on innovation and incorporating the latest technologies. The result is the industry’s most modern content services architecture and a solution that is inherently more flexible, more scalable, and fundamentally better suited to meet the unique needs of enterprise customers looking to transform their businesses. We should note that Content Services is all that we do–we are entirely focused on this market and on ensuring that our platform remains at the forefront of this industry.

We are very pleased to be regarded as a visionary by Gartner for the second year in a row. We hope that you enjoy reading the full report. More importantly, we look forward to working with you to modernize your enterprise and bring digital transformation to your business.