When you are working at a startup, things are often furiously busy and sometimes you don’t have the time – or take the time – to appreciate the little things or how far you’ve come.
Recently, I was reminded that, back in December, Nuxeo was recognized as a “Trend-Setting Product in Data and Information Management for 2018” by the publication, Database Trends and Applications.
And this recognition adds to the list of recent accolades for Nuxeo, such as:
- being distinguished as a “Visionary” by Gartner,
- an “Innovator” by Aragon Research,
- and, most recently, as a “Leader” by Nucleus Research
– all in the last six months.
But, it also got me thinking about what it means to be a “trend setter.” So, I quickly went to the dictionary and came up with this definition, “a person who leads the way in fashion or ideas.” But, I think it’s more than this, or perhaps a combination of these two ideas. I think a trend setter is a person or, in this case, a company that makes ideas fashionable or perhaps mainstream.
Let me give you an example. I recently watched a documentary on HBO about Dr. Dre. Now, a part of this story touches on the founding of Beats, the very successful headphone company that was ultimately sold to Apple in 2014. What was fascinating to me about the success of Beats is that Dr. Dre and his partner, Jimmy Iovine, found a way to make their headphones fashionable. They leveraged their network of musicians, actors, and athletes to make Beats a must-have fashion accessory.
Did they invent the music headphone or even the high-end headphone market? No. Audiophile-quality headphones have been available for years.
Did they revolutionize the market with new technology? No. As a matter of fact, they even outsourced their manufacturing.
Did they produce a significantly higher quality product? No, arguably, there are much higher quality headphones available in the market.
But, are these your boring, everyday Bose headphones? No, no they’re not. They are every bit as wild and wonderful as you want them to be. And this is why these two gentlemen are trend setters or trend makers, if you will. And, this is why Beats sold to Apple for $3.2B.
So, let’s talk about some key trends in Content Services and why Nuxeo – like Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine – is a trend setter.
One Platform: Any Content Type
It seems simple, right? The world is changing.
Video, audio, high resolution images, and other rich media types are becoming increasingly commonplace in all types of businesses. And yet, most enterprise content management system offerings still can only really manage text-based documents and images. Some vendors offer two entirely different products for document management and Digital Asset Management software, hoping you won’t notice.
But, at Nuxeo, we believe that the worlds of DAM and ECM are converging, and that a modern Content Services Platform (CSP) should be able to manage both text and rich media content types. And, our platform features some of the most powerful video-handling capabilities in the industry.
Cloud-Native, Not Cloud-Ready
With the advent of Cloud hosting, many software vendors had to scramble to make their technology “Cloud ready.” Working with VMWare and Docker containers, the legacy ECM players were at least able to make their products look like Cloud offerings.
But, while the competition was getting “ready,” we had already architected the Nuxeo platform to be truly Cloud native. Unlike the competition, Nuxeo leverages best-in-class Cloud services like MongoDB Atlas, Elasticsearch, and AWS EBS and S3 storage. Simply put, Nuxeo is the most modern, most performant, and most efficient Cloud platform in the industry. But, it’s not Cloud only, so you can deploy it anywhere you need to.
API-First Design
I am often asked, “Is there a difference between Content Services Platforms and Enterprise Content Management? Or, is this just a new naming convention that Gartner came up with?” My answer is, “Yes, there is a massive difference.”
ECM was about convincing enterprises to move to an approach consisting of a single-repository with a monolithic architecture and a suite of products built on top. On the other hand, Content Services is about providing access to content, intelligently, from anywhere to anywhere. It’s about providing a service by which any other app or solution can access foundational content, case and claim materials, digital assets and more. Yes, legacy ECM offerings have APIs, but they’re there as an afterthought. They’re there for when you simply can’t do what you want to do with the apps that the vendor has given you.
Nuxeo is different-philosophically different.
We have an API-first design philosophy, which means that everything you can find in any of our apps, you can also find in our API. We’re not here to sell you a bunch of apps, or loosely integrated acquisitions, we’re here to give you a robust, highly performant set of services that you can access any way you want.
MongoDB and NoSQL
Speaking of firsts, Nuxeo was the first (and still the only) Content Services Platform to fully leverage NoSQL databases, like MongoDB. You might ask, “Why is this important? A database is a database, right?” Well, first and foremost, NoSQL databases scale better than, and outperform, their SQL-based counterparts. In fact, in our own benchmarking, MongoDB outperforms SQL-based offerings by a minimum of 15x.
Perhaps equally importantly, NoSQL databases offer unparalleled flexibility. In traditional ECM systems with SQL databases, once you design your data model, you’re basically stuck with it. With Nuxeo and MongoDB, your data model can grow and expand along with the needs of your organization.
Modularity
A lot of vendors talk about having “modular” content services architecture. At Nuxeo, we talk about future proofing. When we first built our platform back in 2008, we built it with the future in mind. We designed our product to be entirely modular. As a result, as newer technologies come along, we can simply “unplug” the old technology and substitute the new – no muss, no fuss and no expensive upgrades or migrations.
Replace Apache Jackrabbit with MongoDB. Done.
Replace Lucene with Elasticsearch. Done.
The result: a more performant, scalable and reliable Content Services Platform and the most modern architecture in the industry. And it will stay that way. That’s what we mean by future proofing.
Google Vision/Amazon Rekognition
Last August, one of our competitors boldly announced that they had integrated their CSP with the Google Vision API for image recognition. The only issue with this is that, about a year earlier, Nuxeo had already introduced Nuxeo Vision, featuring integration with Google Vision. In fact, we had also introduced a productized integration with Rekognition, a similar machine-learning service from Amazon.
As a company that competes in the DAM market, we recognized very early on that tagging images was a manual and labor intensive process, and that many customers struggled to find assets that already existed because they were poorly described. Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies like Vision and Rekognition are just one more example of how we are leveraging new technologies – well before our competitors – to solve real business challenges for our customers.
And We’re Still Setting Trends
By the way, we still have a long way to go on our journey to truly revolutionize Content Services.
In the coming months, you will see us go further with AI, not just as a tool for metadata extraction, but also as a key technology for automating decision-making and personalizing content delivery. You’ll also see us scale to new heights, as we pursue the first 10B-object benchmark in the industry. And, we’ll introduce a new app that will entirely change how digital assets are created and managed.
At the end of the day, there are trend setters, trend spotters and trend followers. At Nuxeo, we are proud to be trend setters and we are very grateful for the recognition from Database Trends & Applications.
Our commitment to you, our customers, is that we will continue to be innovators, trend setters and on the leading edge. We will continue to look for new ways to solve old problems. And, we will continue to invest to make Nuxeo the best Content Services Platform in the industry.
