It All Begins with a Vision…

visionary[1]
adjective | vi·sion·ary
having or marked by foresight and imagination

Gartner recently published their 2017 Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms and we are very pleased to have been recognized as a “visionary” in this year’s report.

As a first-time participant in a Gartner Magic Quadrant, this is a tremendous achievement for Nuxeo and is a testament not just to our product strategy and future direction, but also the fantastic work that the team here at Nuxeo has done over the past several years to build a world-class product and Content Services Platform

In the following blog posting, I wanted to take a moment to comment on the Gartner Magic Quadrant and also share a bit more detail with you about our vision for the future of Enterprise Content Management.

Content Services and Enterprise Content Management

I thought I would begin with some quick comments about the report itself. In 2016, Gartner presaged the shift from Enterprise Content Management to Content Services Platforms in its magic quadrant and in several subsequent reports.

In this year’s report, they state, “Content services platforms are the next stage of enterprise content management, representing a shift from self-contained systems and repositories to open services.”

This is perhaps the most dramatic shift we have seen in the Enterprise Content Management market in many years. This is much more than a change in naming conventions. It is our belief that Gartner recognizes that how people need to work with content has fundamentally changed over the last ten years, particularly with the advent of mobile platforms, the increasing importance of new content types (e.g. video), the proliferation of SaaS business and productivity apps, and increasing importance of the Cloud. The implication of this is that the underlying technologies that organizations use to manage content also have to change.

Principally, you don’t go to bed at night as an ECM suite and wake up the next morning as a content services platform. And this is why there have been some dramatic shifts in the Magic Quadrant this year.

Let’s also look at Gartner’s definition of a content services platform, “A content services platform is a set of services and microservices, embodied either as an integrated product suite or as separate applications that share common APIs and repositories, to exploit diverse content types and to serve multiple constituencies and numerous use cases across an organization.” And, “A CSP has the flexibility to support existing and emerging content use cases. It has its own repository but should also be able to integrate external repositories through connectors, APIs or packaged integrations. Today, many CSPs can be deployed on-premises, in the cloud or in hybrid architectures.”

What do we see here? First, a content services platform begins with a set of services and a powerful, flexible API. It supports new content types, not just traditional documents and scanned images. It can be readily deployed to address diverse use cases across the enterprises. It should easily integrate with external content sources. And, it should be easy to deploy, either on-premises or in the Cloud.

You don’t get here by accident. At Nuxeo, we have long held a vision of a Cloud-native content services architecture and an API-first design paradigm. We also foresaw the importance of new content types, like video, and can even address digital asset management system use cases with our platform. And, we foresaw the need for connectivity to diverse content sources as well as common business and productivity apps.

In short, at Nuxeo, we purposefully set out to build a modern content services platform, not another Enterprise Content Management system suite.

Exciting Times Ahead…

Speaking of modern CSP, the Gartner Magic Quadrant also includes some predictions, “By 2020, 15% of enterprises will have dropped their traditional ECM provider in favor of a provider that offers consumer-like content services.”

We are witnessing this trend firsthand and this prediction may even prove to be conservative. Many current ECM customers are frustrated by the lack of innovation that they have seen from traditional vendors. Further, they are alarmed by rising costs of maintenance and by continued consolidation in the market. As a result, we are seeing a lot of customers who are looking for new options for content services, either to address new use cases in their organization, or to replace their existing systems.

I would add that IT organizations are also beginning to think differently about how they provide content services to the business, exploring new models that provide greater flexibility for the constituencies they serve. But, the Content Services market is much more than a replacement market, “The variety and volume of content continue to grow. So does its importance: increasingly, IT and business leaders use content to complement or even drive digital business processes.” We believe this is an incredibly exciting time in the market.

Content – of all types – has never been more important and is vital to helping customers compete in a digital world. New business models, new processes, and new content types demand new tools. This creates a tremendous opportunity for new vendors – like Nuxeo – who have a different vision for the future and have built fundamentally different architectures to achieve this vision.

Last quarter, we announced record results and our growth speaks for itself. Customers are looking for new solutions and, increasingly, are recognizing that Nuxeo offers something different. More importantly, as visionaries, we are keeping our eyes on the horizon and will continue to innovate, bringing new apps, new features and new capabilities before our customers even know they need them.

We will soon provide some more insights about our strengths, weaknesses & and the advanced vision behind our solution. Stay tuned!