Charting our Course: Nuxeo’s 2020 Roadmap

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Nuxeo’s Vision for Content Services in 2020 and talked about some of the key trends and evolutions that we’re seeing with our customers and in our market. Now, what I thought I would do is share with you some of the highlights from our 2020 product roadmap, and the work that we’re doing to make our vision of the future of Content Services a reality for our customers.

The first thing to note about our roadmap is that our two roadmap objectives haven’t changed.

Our first objective is to provide the industry’s most modern Content Services Platform (CSP). While this may seem like a simple goal, this is really about continuous innovation and maintaining our position as the industry’s most modern CSP - which makes this first objective a moving target. One of the things I truly love about Nuxeo is that our engineering team constantly experiments with new technologies and exhibits a perpetual curiosity about new advancements and capabilities they can bring to the Nuxeo Platform.

Our second objective is to uniquely combine data and content to help our customers to transform their businesses by quickly developing AI-infused content applications – or what we often describe as smart content apps. Admittedly, this is a bit of a mouthful, but this one sentence really embodies all that is unique about the Nuxeo Platform. We are a content management platform, but we have always maintained a focus on data, as we believe that data is what makes content meaningful and valuable to our customers. We also believe that AI is a critical advancement in how we can enrich our customers’ data, and that machine-learning models that are trained with our customers data and content can deliver new insights and incredible value. And finally, we believe that the true purpose of a platform is to build apps – quickly, easily, and inexpensively – and that these smart content apps will help our customers to transform their businesses.

Mapping our Product Roadmap to Customer Needs

Our 2020 roadmap is ambitious and has more than 30 individual elements. Many of these elements come directly from our customers and embody some of their most important enhancement requests. Other elements from our roadmap reflect investments that we’re making in the future of the Nuxeo Platform and support our long-term product strategy and vision. Below are the six key themes that align to our roadmap objectives:

• Build content apps quickly and easily. We believe platforms have one purpose: to develop apps and services. We’ll deliver an environment that empowers developers to quickly build and iterate applications for even the most complex content use cases.
• Operate the Nuxeo Platform as a SaaS service. Regardless if it’s your cloud or ours, we think cloud first. We’ll make it easy and inexpensive for customers to own and operate the Nuxeo Platform. Upgrades will be seamless and new features immediately available.
• Bring new intelligence to content. We believe that custom AI/ML models bring greater value than generic public services. We’ll enable customers to easily train AI/ML models using their own content and data. We’ll use AI/ML technology to not only enrich content, but also deliver new business insights and analysis.
• Provide consumer-grade user experiences. A compelling user experience is critical to driving rapid user adoption which, in turn, accelerates time to value. We’ll deliver the same consumer-grade experiences in our modules and interfaces as users expect from their favorite personal apps.
• Utilize content anywhere. We embrace the fact that not all content will live in Nuxeo and that not all content will be accessed from Nuxeo. We’ll enable users to easily find and employ content or assets from across the enterprise, regardless of where they are stored or how they are accessed.
• Maintain the technical high ground. We believe that innovation is the hallmark of a modern content platform. We’ll continue to advance our content services architecture, incorporating the latest and most innovative technologies to ensure Nuxeo will scale and perform under even extreme loads.

Roadmap Priorities for 2020

When we look at our product investment, we also typically have some key priorities. These are sets of features and capabilities where we’ll make a larger investment and which we believe are critical to the future of our platform. For 2020, these priorities remain unchanged:

• Low-Code. Nuxeo is already a very intuitive, powerful platform for building content apps. In 2020, we’ll continue to invest in our low-code innovation, with a particular focus on how developers build user interfaces in Nuxeo Studio.
• Artificial Intelligence. Nuxeo Insight was the first fully trainable [AI service in our content management market]/content-services-platform/ai/). In 2020, we will continue to invest in the Nuxeo Insight user experience, providing a simple paradigm for how users interact with our custom machine-learning models.
• Cloud First. As I noted in my last blog post, cloud is a forgone conclusion for our customers. Today, it’s simply a question of where they run Nuxeo - in our cloud infrastructure or their own. In 2020, we’ll continue to invest in making the Nuxeo Platform easier to operate, maintain, and upgrade in the cloud, with our Cloud Content Management system (ours or theirs).

Some Key Deliverables for 1H’20

Here are some of key roadmap deliverables for the first half of 2020. As you’ll see, I’ve paid particular attention to roadmap elements that align to our key priorities.

So, for low-code, in 1H’20, we will deliver:

• Visual Design Paradigm - Nuxeo’s visual designer will enable developers to “drag and drop” Nuxeo elements to quickly and easily configure new user interfaces for content apps. Nuxeo’s visual designer will eliminate current limitations in Studio Designer, increasing configurability and giving developers complete control of the page design and content.
• Templating for Nuxeo Studio – We’ll provide a comprehensive catalog of templates that can be imported into a Studio Project. We’ll also deliver a simple paradigm for browsing Studio templates and provide notifications when templates have been altered or updated. Additionally, template objects will be able to be imported separately from the templates themselves.

For artificial intelligence, our 1H’20 key deliverables are:

• Wizard-Driven UI for Nuxeo Insight – We’ll deliver a rich set of user interfaces that will enable business users to intelligently and easily select training data sets, train custom machine-learning (ML) models, and subsequently deploy and manage their ML models in production. The Nuxeo Insight UI will provide a wizard-driven experience, walking users step-by-step through the process of training and deploying custom ML models.
• Continuous Learning - For the Nuxeo Insight service, we’ll implement a continuous learning paradigm. As new content and metadata is added to the Nuxeo Platform, we’ll automatically extract and push new training sets to the Nuxeo Insight service to enable self-learning. And, we’ll automatically deploy new versions of the resultant ML model to continuously improve the accuracy of our service.
• Active Learning (“Human-in-the-Loop”) - We’ll develop a set of user interfaces that will incent end users (through gamification and in-system rewards and recognition) to validate machine-generated labels and data produced by the Nuxeo Insight service. And, we’ll incorporate this user validation into a continuous learning paradigm to further enhance the training and accuracy of customers ML models.

And, for cloud-first, our 1H’20 key deliverables are:

• Multi-Billion-Object Benchmarking – We’ll conduct a series of benchmarks to validate the behavior of our platform and Nuxeo’s cloud services at extreme scale. We’ll conduct benchmarks featuring extreme application workloads, large-scale batch conversions, large-scale repository volumes, complex data models and security schemas, as well as many other test parameters. Far beyond a theoretical benchmarking exercise, this effort will feature an actual Nuxeo Cloud deployment and will give our customers practical insights into how to operate our cloud platform at scales of 1 billion, 4 billion and, ultimately, 10 billion objects and beyond.
• Multi-tier Archiving – We’ll add support for cold storage services, such as Amazon Glacier. This will enable customers to apply simple business logic to select and migrate Nuxeo content to lower-cost cloud storage media.

Beyond our roadmap priorities, here’s other key features and capabilities we’ll deliver in 1H’20:

• Out-of-the-box integration to frame.io, a preferred video editing environment for several of our DAM customers.
• UI enhancements for several bulk actions, allowing users to take advantage of our high-performance bulk action framework to ingest large volumes of content, modify metadata across large sets of content, and even perform bulk workflow actions.
• An enhanced interface for retention management, enabling users to easily administer retention policies in Nuxeo and providing a set of dashboards and reports for records managers.

Learn More About Where We’re Headed

As you can see, we’ll be very busy in the first half of 2020, and I hope this post has given you a good feel for where we are headed and how we are continuing to push the innovation envelope with the Nuxeo Platform.

One of the unique aspects of being an open-source company is that we publish our entire roadmap online publicly. So if you’re interested in learning more, you can view our roadmap here. And, if you’d like to give us feedback or help guide our future product strategy, please feel free to interact with us directly via our feedback portal, which is powered by our own instance of ProdPad.