Talisman Innovations was formed in 2013 by Alan Douglas (Business Development Director,) Nic Snape (Operations Director) and Steve Brookes (Technical Director). The team have worked together in the application software development and systems integration industry for the last 15 years.
Coming from the Location-based Services sector, where data management (i.e. large datasets, complex processes, and deep integration) is the norm., they have a strong understanding of the importance of good data management, flexible workflows and robust content management system architecture.
Through their experience they understand the bottlenecks that occur as businesses and their markets grow. Talisman helps businesses solve the issues which this growth and rate of change brings through three simple ideas that drive the philosophy of their business:
- Content - Help businesses benefit from the increasing need to manage and exploit content.
- Commerce - Enable businesses to create a seamless customer experience across the organization’s many external channels (a single view of the customer). Crucially this involves departments sharing data, content and insights across the organization
- Growth - From experience, Talisman knows if you get the first two right, the enhanced workflows that follow unlock growth in your business through better customer understanding and engagement.
Fitting Nuxeo Platform Into the Picture
Steve Brookes - Talisman
Talisman came across Nuxeo when they were investigating solutions for a specific project need. Coming from the enterprise systems world, Steve liked it immediately. But even more important, he saw how powerful and flexible the Nuxeo Platform is. Talisman is very agile-based and they were looking for a platform that would adapt, evolve and change instead of one that “molds like putty and sets like concrete”. They wanted something that would evolve with them as a business and as their relationships with customers evolved.
When Talisman starts working with a customer, they maintain the relationship for many years. So while they were looking for a platform that supported their agile model for a specific project, they quickly realized they wanted to get more heavily involved with Nuxeo and use the Nuxeo Platform as the key platform for their business.
Nic said the Nuxeo Content Services Platform fits well into their business. He said to imagine a Venn diagram where you have commercial and e-commerce on the left and document management/case management, and internal content management on the right. Where they cross over you get Digital Asset Management softwares. The Nuxeo Platform overlays on this diagram perfectly.
The Nuxeo Platform complements the type of customers they want to be talking to. Many are digital businesses and have a lot of digital assets, but theyl also have a lot of internal information that they need to be turned into content for internal processes. “Nuxeo fits within our customer business, but also within the commercially facing arm of those customers’ businesses.”
Why the Nuxeo Platform? Nic said they wanted something that had a rich content model at its core which they could use to express complicated relationships. But it was Nuxeo Studio in particular that captured Steve’s attention because they don’t want to write code. Talisman wants to architect solutions and rapidly implement the business benefit. Nic said Steve quickly grasped how to do that using Studio, using its forms for data entry, workflow capability and report generation. They found they could do the things they wanted with the Nuxeo Platform and do them quickly.
For Talisman, using the Nuxeo Platform and Nuxeo Studio seemed like a low risk way of building a solution rather than spending a lot of time capturing detailed requirements needed to write code. They have a motto of “learn from failure fast.” They aim to understand what the customer is trying to do and get to an MVP (minimum viable product) very quickly. And they want to do it collaboratively with the customer. Using the Nuxeo Platform, Talisman believes they can take the customer along with them by involving them in the process and showing results quickly.
The Benefits of Nuxeo Partnership
Nic Snape - Talisman
Talisman became partner only recently. They wanted to be officially recognized because they believe the UK is an untapped market for Nuxeo and they see an opportunity to develop the market together. In addition, Alan said they would be able to have conversations with Nuxeo they couldn’t have if that partnership didn’t exist.
Having been partners with software companies before, they are used to that way of operating. This partnership allows them to show their capabilities and experience - leveraging the Nuxeo brand and resources. Alan said it’s definitely worth the investment.
When Talisman first found Nuxeo in March of this year, they knew what they were looking for. They have been really impressed by what they’ve been able to do themselves with the platform, and also with the Nuxeo team’s ability to clearly demonstrate the power of the platform - it’s not just marketing hype.
Both Alan and Nic said the sales and technical support people have been great to work with and the online resources have been very high quality. They were also greatly impressed by Brendan Coveney (Nuxeo General Manager of Americas and APAC).
Supporting the UK Need for Content-Centric Solutions
One of the keys for winning customers in the UK will be identifying who/how to promote the content management platform for business applications approach. Talisman understands that the person they need to sell to is the CTO (like Steve). Unfortunately, uncovering the technical people is more difficult in the UK. According to Nic, the UK is just naturally suspicious - they don’t like being sold to. In the US, everything is an opportunity to sell, but in the UK they tend to balk against that.
You really have to build a relationship with someone before they will buy from you. The British are also still very suspicious of email and websites, which means Talisman needs to take a more traditional approach to reach customers.
Alan sees this as a great opportunity for Talisman and Nuxeo, they just need to tweak the message for the UK. To them, it’s clear where the Nuxeo Platform fits into the enterprise and it fits with their track record of delivering solutions.
Building the Single View of the Customer
Alan Douglas - Talisman
The single, managed view of “the case”, “the customer” or “the digital asset” is not a new idea, but it is a different challenge today as business and brands use more channels to connect with their customers. This exaggerates data and content management issues and results in a need for better, more insightful workflows that understand the full life-cycle of “the customer” or “the case”.
“There’s an opportunity cost to not creating a seamless experience. However to do the best job we can for our clients, we need to use our understanding of their customers’ behaviors and preferences to service them in a highly personalised way “said Alan.
Brands are not only consuming content and data, but also generating it. The really smart businesses are creating this integrated view (cases and customers) and are using it to drive productivity and growth. There is where Nuxeo enables businesses to innovate and grow quickly.
Talisman is helping their customers join their data production channels, share increased intelligence with those channels, inform back office processes and ultimately maximize and grow their client’s businesses.
That’s where the Nuxeo Platform comes in. Because it’s so adaptive in terms of inputs, content model and outputs, Talisman is able to quickly create the core of a system, and as they work with a customer and understand their model better, extending it within the Nuxeo Platform is very straightforward. Nic said you aren’t required to start from scratch every time. Talisman can adapt the content model quickly as business understanding evolves within their client’s teams.
“Content fits with big data and analysis - content is what the analysis generates - content needs to be managed and used. For this you need a process and a system to manage it. Rather than buying an off the shelf product that doesn’t easily fit, you get this rich Content Services Platform that can be adapted to each customer’s particular business challenges, quickly and iteratively,” concludes Alan.
The end goal for Talisman is to model the business, not change the business model to fit the platform. With the Nuxeo Platform, they can do just that.