Modernizing Information Systems: Product vs. Platform?

Like many of your peers, you’ve seen volumes of information increase exponentially over the last few years. You’ve probably also seen a dramatic increase in the types and size of that information. On top of that, you understand that trying to manage the sources from where that information is obtained and control the spread of information systems across your enterprise is akin to herding cats.

So, you’re out there metaphorically kicking tires looking for an answer to the problem while at the same time dreading the thought of a large-scale migration.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me

Didn’t you just go down this path not too long ago? Didn’t your last Enterprise Content Management system (ECM) vendor promise you that this would be the last product you would ever need to buy? Didn’t they promise you that this would be the last painful, costly, and time-consuming migration you would ever have to go through? They did! Yet, here you are … again!

With new products comes the need for migrations, and if you haven’t experienced a large-scale migration previously, you owe it to yourself to talk to someone who has. The journey can be brutal.

Part of you is probably saying to yourself:

We don’t have it so bad. Yeah, what I have is expensive; it doesn’t integrate easily; it barely meets the business requirements; it takes forever to modify, and our people can’t find what they’re looking for. But it beats the nightmare of swapping out another large-scale system!

But then there’s the part of you that feels a true a sense of urgency because you see the struggles and inefficiencies resulting from the inability to quickly find and access information residing in various systems within your organization. You see how difficult it is to deliver information-rich customer experiences and to match your competitors’ speed in delivering new products and services. Which brings us to why you’re here today…

First, let me ease your mind concerning migrations. At Nuxeo, we believe that migrations don’t have to be painful, costly, or time-consuming. Our modern 2-step approach of “Connect & Consolidate” significantly eases that journey, delivers a quick ROI, and reduces your TCO, while connecting information across the enterprise in order to provide users with a holistic and personalized view of business information.

What is the difference between a “Product” and a “Platform”?

Well, Nuxeo is a Content Services Platform (CSP), NOT a product. But what does that really mean and why should that distinction be important to you? And further, why are many enterprises in a wide array of industries moving to a platform approach? Here’s the rationale for why you need to consider a move to a platform today regardless of whether or not you believe you have a problem managing your information:

Historically, information systems have been delivered as products, not platforms. That is, they were standalone applications that focused on a single business problem and tried to solve it better than anyone else. All requisite functionality was tightly wrapped and interdependent within a single code base. As a result, there was limited flexibility in terms of connecting to external data sources. Integrating with other business applications was cumbersome at best. Minor modifications required extensive testing of the entire product. And products typically required specialized skill sets to deploy and maintain. To the chagrin of many, that was simply the way products were designed and deployed. But at the end of the day, they gave you some valuable out-of-the-box functionality and did what they were supposed to do.

So, why all the concern? The problem is that as technology has advanced, the shelf life of these products has decreased… dramatically. Yet, application developers rarely discuss planned obsolescence. System plans almost never attach a lifespan to a product. Organizations eschew discussions of how the application they just spent millions of dollars to develop will inevitably have to be rebuilt de novo in 3 to 5 years. So, you traipse along making major upgrades and applying fixes, eventually using bailing wire and chewing gum to MacGyver everything together with each major shift in business requirements, until you finally come to the crushing realization that you just can’t make it work any longer. So, you rip out the old product and replace it with a new one… and you start the clock ticking… again. Except with each iteration, there is less time available on that clock before you have to do it all over again.

It’s a vicious cycle that slows things down, stultifies innovation, and leaves you at a competitive disadvantage. Sadly, the old way of solving business problems simply won’t cut it in this brave new digital world.

Today’s modern organizations are realizing that traditional application development is an albatross that impedes growth and are thus looking to the agility of the platform approach as a superior alternative.

But what is a platform and what does it mean when we say that Nuxeo is a CSP? According to Gartner, a CSP is “a set of services and microservices, embodied either as an integrated product suite or as separate applications that share common API’s and repositories, to exploit diverse content types and to serve multiple constituencies and numerous use cases across an organization.” Still confusing, right?

The Power of the Platform Approach

Think of it this way … where a product has all of its capabilities self-contained, a platform is a framework that allows you to decompose business functionality into a set of granular stand-alone services. Each service is capable of standing on its own merit. Each service performs one function and one function only. You pass it some information, it performs that function, and it returns you some information. Services are then exposed, or combined into larger services, through the use of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that are coalesced into new, modern, and robust applications. Granted, that may be an oversimplification of a platform, but you get the picture.

It’s kind of like LEGO’s, where LEGO Group is the platform, the individual pieces are the services, and the little round thingies that connect them are the API’s. You can build whatever you want. You can combine what you’ve built with what others have built. And when you don’t like one part of what you’ve built, you simply replace that component; no fuss, no muss.

That is the beauty and power of the platform! One platform, endless solutions! You can quickly assemble new business applications using existing services leaving you to focus on only developing net new functionality. Applications can literally be built in days or weeks, not months or years. As services are stand-alone units of work, you no longer need to centralize their development within your organization (as you do when developing or modifying capabilities for a product). The creation of new services can be deployed to units within your organization best suited to build that capability.

Even better, you can leverage public APIs like the over 19,000 available on Programmable Web. So now you can stop wasting time, money, and resources building capabilities that are publically available to you through API’s.

And what if something better comes along down the line? Well, you can simply swap out that specific service with nominal disruption to your business. For example, let’s say that you need to create a service for e-signatures. Well, rather than build that functionality yourself, you can tap into an API from a company like DocuSign. Then, perhaps in 3 years when something radically different and better comes along, you can easily swap out the e-signature service.

In fact, you can even become a platform yourself! Companies are realizing that they can generate revenue by exposing their capabilities through what has become known as the “API-Economy.” When US-based pharmacy giant Walgreens exposed its pharmacy and photo printing to the world through API’s, it saw a 6X increase in revenue for customers who interacted through third-party applications vs. those who only shop at their stores. Today, companies like Ebay and Salesforce.com drive more than half their revenue from their API’s. And Expedia generates a staggering 90% of its revenue from its API’s. With a platform, the opportunities are limited only by the scale of your imagination.

Nuxeo - THE Modern Content Services Platform

Yes, Nuxeo is a CSP and I challenge you to find a vendor in our space who can manage both content and rich media on a more modern, scalable, and robust platform.

As a platform, Nuxeo affords you manifold opportunities to transform your business. We give you the ability to deliver new products in record time and protect you from future uncertainty by allowing the swift interchange of individual services when the next greatest technology comes along. You can leverage countless complimentary services available through a global array of organizations and developers. And what’s more, we empower you to expand your revenue potential by becoming a platform yourself!

So regardless of whether you’re seeking to find legacy modernization solutions, or looking for a way to bring content and data together via a content services architecture that will fundamentally transform your current business models, the Nuxeo platform can transform and future-proof your business from the bottom to the top.