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Based in New York, global software company Nuxeo has a singular focus: to be the go-to for companies looking to solve their content, asset and information management challenges.

Via its digital asset management (DAM), enterprise content management (ECM), and case management solutions, Nuxeo aims to eliminate silos by providing all the benefits of full visibility and control of assets, regardless of where they live, with minimal migration requirements.

Uri Kogan, VP of product marketing for Nuxeo, spoke with the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) about the history of Nuxeo, how its DAM and ECM solutions are unique in the industry, and the mistakes media and entertainment companies make when it comes to investments in asset management systems.

MESA: What was the impetus for Nuxeo, how did the company come about and what gap(s) in the market was it looking to fill?

Kogan: Initially, Nuxeo’s founders were content management system (CMS) consultants with expertise in open source software. As we began working with larger enterprises, we increasingly ran into issues related to scalability. Frustrated by the limitations and poor engineering practices of legacy technologies, we started building a modern content platform from the ground-up in 2008.

Since then, we have continually invested in updating it with the latest engineering techniques and tools (in the last few years, for example, Nuxeo added support for Docker, Elasticsearch, MongoDB and others). In fact, unlike legacy systems that have fallen behind due to underinvestment in innovation, we spend proportionally three-times more than our competition on innovation to help enterprises transform data into highly valuable digital assets.

MESA: What makes Nuxeo’s digital asset management services unique, how does it stand out compared to others in the industry?

Kogan: We employ leading-edge technologies that accelerate an organization’s time to market by ensuring immediate adoption of our simple, out-of-the-box application for marketers and business users. We also enable customers to easily deploy in cloud, on premise or hybrid environments and seamlessly connect with other cloud services, provide native workflows and automation delivered through easy-to-use graphical design tools and offer an intuitive design interface that allows users to build complex applications quickly.

Additionally, Nuxeo provides limitless scalability for the largest media and entertainment companies, as well as modern, modular architecture to ensure compatibility with other technologies, enabling users to move beyond departmental DAM with a true digital platform for all information assets. Nuxeo also treats digital assets as the lifeblood of a media company, keeping them safe over a complex lifecycle with its always-on, granular and dynamic permissions that do not slow users down.

MESA: Nuxeo has made a push toward making digital content management more easily manageable on the go. How important is a mobile attitude today when it comes to managing digital assets?

Kogan: More and more work is happening on mobile, and we fully support that with native iOS/Android apps, iOS/Android SDKs that give you the full power of the Nuxeo Platform API and our new WebUI, which is fully responsive for those customers that prefer to build web apps.

The Nuxeo Platform is well positioned as organizations continue to prioritize mobile distribution channels. But mobile needs to work within a larger environment. All channels, mobile apps, content marketing websites, sales and CRM systems, eCommerce, social, marketing automation and campaign systems, etc., need to be designed to work in conjunction with each other.

MESA: In the media and entertainment space, what are some of the biggest mistakes companies make when it comes to enterprise content management, and how can they improve?

Kogan: In the media and entertainment space, investing in expensive, complex and slow legacy DAMs can be a crippling mistake, given the explosion in content volume, shrinking release windows and increasingly complex content creation and delivery ecosystems. Legacy systems provide poor user experiences and incomplete metadata, which tends to slow down the media supply chain and the overall business.

The Nuxeo Platform for Film and TV is cloud-native and built with a fully modern architecture that provides cloud-scale storage and processing efficiency, while leveraging the benefits and innovations of industry leaders including Amazon, Elastic and Google. Nuxeo’s hyperscale architecture enables users to manage assets with complex metadata at speeds and scales that would break legacy systems.

Nuxeo also addresses the four main stages of your media supply chain. First, it accelerates and automates ingestion of assets from production companies and agencies to maximize scale, reduce vendor backlogs, minimize tagging errors and make assets available to the organization more quickly. Second, it empowers users to maximize the value from assets by delivering the right assets to the right people and processes at the right time.

Next, it routes creative jobs with workflows, keeps creatives productive in their native applications and easily finalizes assets for distribution. Finally, it pushes assets to any internal or external party through APIs, making it easy for partners and customers to pull what they need without compromising security and permissions. Furthermore, this is all offered on a foundation of asset lifecycle management, powerful analytics and security.

In addition, many companies forget the importance of automation. Accurately and completely describing content is an important aspect of improving “findability.” That’s why we minimize the need for human tagging with metadata extraction, artificial intelligence based auto tagging and templates that let users focus on the most important fields required. With automatic tagging based on artificial intelligence through Nuxeo Vision, content is easily labelled with keywords that extract text, emotions, landmarks, logos and more.

MESA: What are some of Nuxeo’s favorite use case examples, where companies have made especially good use of Nuxeo’s services?

Kogan: Electronic Arts (EA) is a global leader in digital interactive entertainment, providing popular video games, content and online services for game consoles, PCs and mobile devices. Once EA’s custom-built internal application for secure game build delivery was unable to scale any further, EA turned to Nuxeo to provide its global developer teams with reliable and secure delivery of game builds, EA’s most critical asset. Once deployed, EA had support for an agile development and release model which enabled it to keep up with EA’s fast-moving development activities.

It was also able to accelerate development while reducing time and resource requirements by maximizing application configuration and minimizing the need for custom coding. Our platform enabled EA to build an application to manage video game builds in seven months versus an estimated 12-13 months for a solution developed in-house, accelerating time to deployment by nearly 50 percent.

TBWA is a top-ten ranked global advertising network with over 11,100 employees across 323 offices in 97 countries. TBWA knows firsthand that a successful global campaign requires highly effective collaboration with each client company and dozens of local agencies around the world. Therefore, it selected Nuxeo to provide its client Henkel, a German chemical and consumer goods company, with a new level of process management, operational performance and cost effectiveness, beyond what was possible using its existing homegrown solutions, to ensure key concurrent processes were completed with great care and in a timely fashion. Furthermore, in just three weeks, the team was able to build a new application called GAME (Global Adaptation Management Engine) to more effectively manage its adaptation management processes across its many countries, agencies and partners.

MESA: What’s next for Nuxeo, what innovations in the DAM and ECM space can we look forward to from the company?

Kogan: The promise of DAM and ECM hasn’t been fully realized because legacy systems were too monolithic, too closed and proprietary and grew through acquisition more than investment in innovation. We think the problems remain unsolved and are in fact getting worse — in the media space the number of channels and assets are growing like crazy, storage requirements are going through the roof and the cycle times of the supply chain are getting tighter and tighter.

The only way to keep up with these changes is to better leverage cloud services for compute and storage and AI and Machine Learning to build flexible systems that can adapt as the business changes while also integrating with the rest of the stack to deliver services through flexible micro-services based architectures.

We will continue to invest in leading technology that will help our customers scale, integrate, automate and innovate. Nuxeo has already demonstrated a significant technology lead, with cloud-scale performance, a native NoSQL persistence engine and advanced analytics, and will further these advancements with more NoSQL back-ends, connectors for additional big data analytics solutions and machine learning engines, enhanced mobile and cloud connectivity, and additional integrations common to the markets we serve.

Additionally, the large investment we received last year from Goldman Sachs and Kennett has allowed us to put more focus on solving key issues experienced by a wide range of industries, including speeding up the end to end media supply chain, as well as have an industry focused team in Hollywood and elsewhere. We’re currently working with some of the biggest studios on some of their toughest content management challenges, and can’t wait to share more about that in the future!