On the most recent episode of the Nuxeo Content Journey’s podcast, we welcomed Sean Baird, a 20+ year veteran in Enterprise Content Management system. As the new Director of Product Marketing for Nuxeo in the ECM market place, Sean provided us with his thoughts & insights on digital content - specifically what he sees as some best practices now, and considerations for the future.
Here’s a little taste of that conversation:
Alan:
So why Nuxeo? What is it about the Nuxeo approach to content management that attracted your attention?
Sean:
As I look at the spectrum of companies, I see the market divided into maybe three different types of approaches:
- First, there are the traditional market leaders. These companies have been very successful both developing very mature ECM platforms, as well as acquiring a wide range of technologies to supplement their core platform. As a result, they deliver very mature solutions, and a few of these have been doing it for over 10 years.
- Second, there is the first wave of cloud competitors. Some of these are very large, such as Microsoft, which uses its market penetration with Microsoft Office and supplements this technology with SharePoint to provide some basic content management. Their focus in on providing management of Office documents with some additional features, however, not on delivering complex business solutions. File sync-and-share similarly addresses storage of these documents with some useful UIs, but struggles to truly deliver business solutions.
- Nuxeo’s approach really combines the best aspects of these two camps: delivering a rich set of content services, like the legacy market leaders, while taking advantage of the cloud technologies that made SharePoint and FSS companies attractive. Since its cloud-native, it inherits ubiquitous access, scalability, and cost efficiencies, while still maintaining its roots in ‘true’ content services, with key features to support content creation, processes, retention, integration, and business processes. As you can tell, I’m pretty bullish about the opportunity Nuxeo has to help customers bridge the gap between the other two camps.
Alan:
What’s your view on the overall status of the Enterprise Content Management industry at the moment, and where it’s headed?
Sean:
Let’s focus beyond the cloud, although I continue to believe that the cloud-based - cloud-native - systems are the future of content-centric business solutions. The agility they provide organizations is important, and the cost savings are increasingly well understood.
Over the past five years or so, we’ve heard increasingly about the transition from ECM, traditional monolithic platforms, to Content Services, which is made up of more discrete cloud services that can be integrated with and leveraged by other business systems.
For example, rather than building a CRM system on top of an ECM platform, content services enable you to build content awareness directly into the CRM of choice for an organization.
When done right, the value is obvious: end-users get to work directly in their solution of choice, and importantly, do not need to learn new systems to do their work.
I want to again thank Sean for his time, and the engaging and entertaining discussion. You can join us for the full conversation on The Content Journey podcast, now available on your favorite podcast service, and on our Content Podcast page.