Do Labels Matter? Some Thoughts from a Shiny New Marketing Exec
Yesterday more industry buzz about some of the shifts and disruption in
the ranks of the ECM/CMS world – including a couple of comments about
my new role as CMO at Nuxeo.
First some good questions posed by Ron Miller, in an editorial for FierceContentManagement: "Does the Open Source Label Still Matter?"
…and then some thought-provoking comments from Tony Byrne in his Trendwatch blog for CMSWatch, "Software Empires Striking Back".
After
thinking to myself, "Whoa, like, no pressure, eh?" and crawling out
from under the covers, I sat down and really thought about what kind of
shift is going on out there.
- Ron is right – the product
is the product is the product. Peel back the layer of 'brand' and
'voice' and 'label' and ultimately the issue is that business people
are choking on content overload and want things to get better. Good
product has to find the audience who needs it. Good product should not
have any hidden surprises or catches when someone wants to use it. Good
product deserves to be used without the hoops and loops and nightmarish
license negotiation and oh-so-predictable quarterly discounting
charades that is pervasive across most segments of the enterprise
software business. If you like what Nuxeo produces, you just go get it.
Here, in fact: http://www.nuxeo.com/en/downloads . Tell them I sent you..because like Ron says, this is how I'll be judged
- Tony
is right – Better story-telling doth not make for better software. But
good software that doesn't have a good story is a tree falling in the
forest. Nuxeo has invested in an ECM foundation that was built for this
century – not the last one. Yeah, yeah, we scale big for lots of
content and lots of users… but guess what? we scale really lean and
small and skinny too. We've entered the world of mobile, social,
decentralized enterprises. And their needs are new. This is the part
that made me go "hmm" when I started learning about the Nuxeo offering.
And beyond story-telling, I'm heads down figuring out the priorities
for lead gen, analyst relations, product branding, launch checklists,
learning a new WCM application and helping expand the North American team.
So
do does the label "open source" matter? Well, yes, but not for the
usual reasons. Ultimately feature for feature Nuxeo needs to compete on
how good it is, not because it has open source as its development and
licensing model. Companies in the information economy have specific ECM
needs – we have to meet those requirements to do our job.
Where
it *does* matter, however, is the inherent flexibility the open source
model gives, because Nuxeo is committed to innovation. Our own core
development is augmented by partners and customers – it is the living
breathing example of the social marketplace in action. The barriers to
customer engagement and evolving requirements disappear. Cost and time
to market become an advantage as we keep up with the shift in how
content is created and consumed across enterprise.
I really recommend you read some of our CEO's thoughts on why this business model works – here's Eric's blog: http://blogs.nuxeo.com/ebarroca/ or follow him on twitter @ebarroca.
