HITS

Nuxeo: Content Services Platform Done Differently

The last year has been a great one for Nuxeo and its cloud-native Content Services Platform. Along with growing faster than any of its competitors and its market, the New York-based company earned several industry accolades, and once again found itself on best-of lists for places of employment.

Uri Kogan, VP of product marketing for Nuxeo, spoke with the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA), about current data challenges in the content services market, the importance of employing NoSQL options for metadata with ECM and DAM solutions, and how AI is becoming a crucial piece of the content enrichment puzzle.

MESA: In 2018, Nuxeo grew faster than both any of your competitors, and the content platform services market itself. What do you most attribute to this growth?

Kogan: We attribute our growth to a taking smarter, more nimble approach toward solving customer challenges around content and data.

Today’s companies face a landscape where more and more data and content is produced and collected, with no end in sight to the growth. To maximize value from their content and create it as efficiently as possible, they need a solution that is modern and highly-scalable, with an open approach to content services.

Because it’s architected from the ground up to leverage the cloud and artificial intelligence, Nuxeo delivers a modern, more integrated, automated, and intelligent alternative for content and data management than many of the legacy providers in the market.

Global enterprises have unique, complex content management needs, and they shouldn’t have to fit themselves into a box and adapt themselves to their software — we believe the software should adapt itself to their business, nowhere more so than media and entertainment, where content doesn’t just power the business, it IS the business. The uniqueness of that approach has probably been the real key to our success.

MESA: How is Nuxeo’s Content Services Platform tackling changes in enterprise content management and digital asset management for media and entertainment firms?

Kogan: We’ve worked with some of the biggest global Hollywood studios and video game publishers. As everyone knows, the industry is in the midst of enormous changes to consumer behavior and recent, very well-funded tech company entrants. Content publishers with legacy systems that restrict their operational choices to traditional business models aren’t going to survive for long. What we see in our customers is an urgent drive to modernize content systems to support much more dynamic business models.

The Nuxeo Platform is agnostic to any type or size of content you want to manage, where you store it, and the metadata model or models you apply to it. That means you can manage it all together, across the whole content supply chain. By delivering end-to-end content management, our customers gain the capacity to more easily adapt or experiment with new business models. For instance, at one major studio, we’re helping license and monetize 100 years of content, using AI that can be trained by business users to enrich content and return better search results.

Efficiency gains from digitization and modernization are real: at another major studio, we made it easy to use the stock footage archive as a resource for current productions, generating six-figure savings and accelerated production every time it’s used.

MESA: Why was it important for Nuxeo to employ NoSQL options when it came to tackling metadata with the company’s ECM and DAM solutions?

Kogan: NoSQL is one of several core architectural decisions we’ve made to keep the Nuxeo Platform as modern as possible. A NoSQL backend is the architectural underpinning that makes our metadata model extremely flexible and scalable up to billions of assets — without impacting performance for end users using applications.

NoSQL is one of the core architectural decisions we made that are part of our core philosophy: keep the Nuxeo Platform as modern as possible, so that our customers can take advantage of the latest technology and future-proof their modernization efforts. By underpinning our architecture with a NoSQL backend, we’ve created a platform capable of scaling to billions of assets without impacting performance for end users. We’ve also created flexible metadata models that can quickly be adapted to represent the unique and complicated objects that businesses run on today — from campaigns and talent records to product information and user profiles.

MESA: LTS 2019 has been available for a few months now … what has the response been from Nuxeo Platform users thus far, what features have really stood out?

Kogan: We’ve seen a great response to LTS 2019 — many of our existing customers have already upgraded (or are in the process of upgrading) so they can take advantage of the latest features and functionality to the low-code Nuxeo Platform. In terms of what has stood out to the Nuxeo community, I think the most talked about enhancement is the ability for Nuxeo customers to easily leverage their own data sets to create, train, and deploy custom AI models.

Business-specific metadata is the foundation of effective search, workflow, and other value-creation activities in content-centric business applications. The challenge has always been the manual effort and investment required to properly and accurately identify content and link it to related materials. Existing content enrichment AI services address this challenge in one of two ways. Some services are easy to deploy and provide generic metadata not based on a business-specific content. Others allow custom model development, but require scarce data science expertise to use.

Nuxeo Insight Cloud is the first content enrichment AI service designed for business users that enterprises can train with their own data, and as a result, leverage AI models that are inherently more accurate and relevant. It automatically generates (meta)data values to enrich content, drive workflows, and increase intelligence about information.

Furthermore, we’re moving to a more SaaS oriented approach that puts new functionality into our customer’s production environments very quickly, shortening the feedback and enhancement cycle. Our customers are really excited about it!

MESA: Nuxeo continues to land on lists of best places to work. What do you attribute this consistency to?

Kogan: Two words: our people. Our employees are our secret weapon — they’re how we separate ourselves in delivering value to our customers and out-innovating our competition. Our teams have a passion for learning, strong ethical values, and unique personalities. We’re energized by ideas, collaboration, and results.

As an international company with offices in six countries around the globe, our culture is a mix of many different nationalities and backgrounds. We believe these differences strengthen us and represent an integral part of what makes us unique. We come to work each day ready to innovate, collaborate, and draw upon each other’s strengths.

This is why we’ve received so much recognition as a really great place to work.

MESA: The Content Services Platform market continues to boom. How will Nuxeo keep its edge, and anticipate what’s next?

Kogan: Our strategy is to establish Nuxeo as the premier provider of the industry’s most modern and intelligent Content Services Platform. We also intend to build, along with our partners, a number of discrete applications on top of our platform to enable us to better target key industries and customer use cases. We ultimately believe this will add value to our customers by delivering more rapid time to value and to our own organization as we validate the merits of our products in helping customers to build apps of their own.

Nuxeo is heavily investing in the digital asset management, content management, and case management markets by assembling a talented team of experienced leaders and industry experts across our sales, marketing, product, engineering and services functions. These talented and experienced hires are intended to help guide the future of our products and our organization and to help us achieve our aggressive growth objectives. We are designing for scale and for the long-term success of this organization.