President/Founder of DPCI

As President of DPCI, Joe directs all operations, business development, R&D, partnerships and marketing activities at the company.

Joe enjoys blogging about various trends in content technologies, on project management best practices, and also on his insights into the operations of running the business of DPCI.

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> Integrating K4 and Drupal to Support Multi-channel Workflows

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> The Challenges with ECM With or Without a Down Economy

> Innovations in Digital Asset Management, Circa 2008

September 30, 2009

Commentary on Cheryl McKinnon's Departure from OpenText to join the Nuxeo Management Team

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Just read a blog by Bryan Ruby, the owner and editor of CMS Report, about Cheryl McKinnon, former exec at OpenText, joining Nuxeo as their Chief Marketing Officer. I have been following the Nuxeo story for some time now with great curiosity and a measure of excitement for an attainable open-source future for ECM.

One of the great challenges in the ECM vendor space is the ambitious nature of putting together the entire package of offerings promised in the ECM vision (covered elsewhere by Tony Byrne at CMS Watch in his ECM Maturity Model work, with contrary viewpoints from Kyle McNabb of Forrester as well as resources from Gartner and AIIM. Earlier this year I wrote in an issue of ECM Connection about what I think ECM is comprised of).

Nuxeo is the first 'company' that has had me excited in a long time. What I'm wondering aloud is how they will execute. Will they stay close to the core of ECM with document and records management? Will they follow Alfresco's approach by trying to go broad with the entire ECM suite -- possibly to get mired in the Web Content management space (thus possibly alienating partners in WCM open-source project camps)?

Will they gun for OpenText or EMC/Documentum's market share? Both of those companies have spent billions on developing their product lines as well as on acquiring components of the ECM vision that they may have been missing.

For me, EMC's vision has been most idyllic- the vision of an entire platform for creation, management, collaboration, enrichment, delivery of all content types is quite an exciting one. Yet so expensive and seemingly not quite attainable from a functionality standpoint (ask any Documentum customer about the overall cost of implementation as well as whether the project is complete).

I'll be curious to observe whether Cheryl McKinnon brings with her the lessons of excess, bloat, and overlapping product suites from OpenText to counsel the Nuxeo team to keep product development simple. Or will Nuxeo aspire to take on the titans of ECM and by doing so, possibly make the same mistakes as those behemoths?

I observe that the most successful open-source projects seem to be those that win a vast number of adherents to advance the software. All things being equal, commercial products have a lot more advantages over open-source ones except in one area -- sheer manpower. When I look at what is happening in the Drupal, Joomla! or WordPress camps, with thousands of developers loosely (or in some cases, tightly) organized to advance those projects, I can't imagine how these solutions will not surpass any WCM solution on the market today.

Conversely, any WCM I've seen in the past decade with a single company that heralded the product -- be that an end user organization or a 'commercial distributor' -- and they run into the same kinds of problems that commercial vendors do with regard to resources. And I'll always return to the Krang initiative, which was touted as the panacea to the web content management woes of publishers. Can any of my readers tell me where that open-source product is today? Still around, but languishing.

Nuxeo has an opportunity to emulate the successes of its friends in the WCM space. By following the model of OpenText or ECM, or perhaps even Alfresco, they risk emulating the business models of commercial product companies without the benefits of the extravagant licensing costs.

I'm rooting for ya, Nuxeo!

Posted at 11:06 pm by Joseph Bachana