Category Archives: ez

10 years ago, we were already in the Experience Management business!

3 Replies
The wrong train?

The wrong train?

This is a small rant I was on lately. If you’re not so much into “Content Management”, not sure this will speak to you… you might want to pass. This is of course only my personal opinion, and it is quite not about eZ itself (the company I work for) or about our products, it is more about our small industry, the ‘Content Management’ industry.

I hear some colleagues and friends in our industry, saying things like “eZ changed (again) positioning to move to Experience Management”, I also hear some people saying things like “I can’t stand this people calling WordPress a CMS” (to not only take eZ as an example). I hear some saying, “These guys are in the Portal industry, not in the CMS”. Actually I often hear myself explaining how our company, eZ, is moving from a pure Content Management platform to a more global “Experience Management” platform.

Come on! Truth to be said, this is somehow wrong. Just noise, or sometime may be trying to surf the good waves. Experience is for sure the word of 2013, the word to use and Experience Management the spot to be on! It is THE thing to do – fair enough (just learned from analysts today this might have to be adjusted to DX when speaking about acronyms, stands for Digital Experience… uh, what about when we do print business?).

But honestly this is just about our jargon. Is there really, beyond the words, any big change? I don’t think so, we just try to do things better. I think it seems to be a big change only if you are looking at software and at products from a wrong, short-sided view: the features and only the features.

Yes eZ Publish is in the Experience Management. Yes WordPress is a CMS, and in the Experience Management as well. They both have been for years now. And this stands for many others who jumped from one box to another, whether it is Portal, CMS, e-commerce, Blogging platform, Wiki…

To illustrate my thought I like to make a reference to this article of Harvard Business Review called “Marketing myopia” which introduced the famous question “what business are you really in?”. It uses the example of the railway industry in the US, who lost the transportation battle because it was too narrow-minded, considering itself in the “railway business” instead of being in the “transportation business”. Saying it in an other way, it was focusing on the product and the feature, not on the business objective.

Well, eZ has always been in the “Experience Management” business. So does WordPress. CMS has always come second. Content Management might be a process, it is more than anything a list of features that I don’t want to list here. I remember, I was then not yet working for eZ but using eZ Publish. The folks at eZ were hesitating between different appellations: e-commerce? portal? CMS? … this was because eZ had to give it a name and a position. I am pretty sure the goal was indeed, already, to create a platform for Experience Management!

What changed in between? Well, the ‘Digital Experiences’ our customer need to build have quite significantly evolved. 10 years ago it was still mostly about creating a website for communication and information purposes and simple way for the user to reach it, now it is just much more!

I predict a dark future on the mid-term to the people who are thinking they should stick to ‘Content Management’ feature set and certainly not touch other functional domains… I think they will miss the same train the railway industry missed!

Changing positioning as in the 2 examples that I gave above (eZ and WordPress) should not be seen as a sign of uncertainty, I believe it should more be recognized as a sign of lucidity in which business we are and how it is evolving!

And of course, at eZ, I will keep highlighting our changes to a bigger CXM / DX / UXP platform, but more to explain our vision on how Experience Management has evolved. Why it doesn’t ask for the same things yesterday, today and tomorrow and why we constantly innovate to try to provide these features – whether they are in the CMS box, in the BI box or in any other! Surely focus is required to be successful, but looking at the solutions from one single feature lens is not what I would call the right focus.

Cheers

Another Way to Look at the Consumerization of IT

1 Reply

Image: © Scott Adams, May 28, 2008. Dilbert.
Source: http://dilbert.com

I ran through a lot of content dealing with the topic of consumerization of IT over the last months. A lot of “not that interesting noise” but also some good thoughts!  One of the latest on this good side being a conference keynote at info360, a panel run by Tony Byrne on this topic where Carin Forman, Director, Digital Photo Services, for HBO touched the topic in a way that I liked. Since then, I’ve been paying more attention to the topic, up to finally writing a small post on this blog, mostly because I thought I needed to put my ideas together in one place!

First as an intro, I should say that I have been a big supporter of the idea for a long time, from the day I have been able to use the same computer system at home and work (a Mac if you ask…) this has been a huge step forward in my digital life. Don’t get me wrong, this has little to do with the Mac itself and the same story could happen reversed: the one of a PC fanboy being finally authorized to use a PC in his all-Apple company! But it must be said that Apple has been instrumental in making all this happen on the hardware side, as much as Google has lately on the software side.

My other great moments of being part of this consumerization of IT thing have been when I have been able to easily access my company network from the outside (and still securely), when I have been able to use the same mobile device for both uses or more recently when I have been able to use the same ultra-usable and enjoyable web-based office and collaboration suite for personal and professional matters! The same story as millions of others…

It’s  not as simple as using Facebook on the other side of the firewall 

However, in my fields, our fields, Content Management, Information Management, Document Management, etc. I have been a bit annoyed by the way some are pushing the idea. I don’t think it is as simple as using Facebook on the other side of the firewall (which makes me think of this good article from Aaron Shapiro – you’ll need more than Facebook). I don’t think this as much as I was not thinking using the paradigm of blogs for all websites (from e-commerce to corporate communication) was the one solution to rule them all (I remember this being pitched at some Sixapart’s events when blogs were supposedly to take over content management and e-commerce solutions). I don’t think Digital Asset Management is always as simple as the combo iPhoto+iCloud.  I think larger organizations and even smaller businesses have totally different needs and preoccupations than consumers, and, very simply,  that they don’t need the same tools! This doesn’t mean I don’t embrace this idea of consumerization. I am a big believer in it. I think it is the way to go for enterprises if they want to meet efficiency! It is just that I look at the way we build solutions.

What do Facebook, Tweeters, Dropbox, Netflix, Amazon, eBay have in common? They are all, at their very core, Product Companies. They all designed and built a product absolutely tailor-made for their customers, that translate in remarkable experiences. A product that maximizes the user satisfaction, efficiency and productivity! None of them are using standard, off the shelf product! More than that, they are inventing what we call Digital Experience, setting the standards.

That is what enterprises have to replicate when it comes to building their customers’ and employees’ experiences: being a product organization and building wowing experiences for their employees as much as for their customers. (By the way this reminds me of  another good article from Mike Gualtieri – software is not code, it creates experience ) whose first axiom is so true:

‘Software is not code; it creates experience’

And then it is about providing enterprises with the right tool set and solutions to enable them to be themselves: “product” organizations.   This must enable them to focus on the experiences they need to build and not on the code they need to write.  This doesn’t mean nothing comes off the shelf.  There are certainly commodity bricks (after all there are many in the consumer side as well). Focus on the product.  Focus on the experience! That, and only that, will enable users to reach the same level of satisfaction they are having in their personal digital lives.

Every enterprise should be a “Product” Organization!

This is why I like companies I work and worked for. Both Nuxeo and eZ have this strongly in their DNA. They are not boxed solutions.  They are platforms that enable their users to build on top of them, to make their own product, and in the end to create efficient and successful experiences for their users! But, of course, it takes much more than only the technology…

Bye bye eZ, welcome Nuxeo !

3 Replies

Last day of november was also my last day working as an eZ Systems employee.

I have decided to go  another way, mostly based on my personal wishes to look at new challenges and also get closer to my many friends in north america. My position as product manager of eZ was not compatible with both of those wishes and I decided to jump in a new fresh position at a new company.

From today I will work for Nuxeo, in a very similar role as what I used to do at eZ, entitled v.p. Product, but in a context that is significantly different. My focus will be to drive and develop the adoption of Nuxeo’s products on the market and to coordinate and support Nuxeo’s product development and marketing efforts to help making them as succesfull as they can be !

Nuxeo is a very promising and interesting company developing a cutting edge ECM software platform (providing Open Source Document Management solutions, but also Digital Asset Management solutions, Case Management solutions and others), thanks to the vision of Nuxeo’s architects and founders when they designed and developed further the platform. Relying on the Java stack was certainly a good pick from a high level point of view (no offense to the LAMP stack that I also love but that I see as a better match for WCM software / Front End applications). More than that, it is on the low level that they have been extremly smart in making the good choices  in the Java Enterprise jungle ! Relying on technologies like OSGI or CMIS, contributing to a number of interesting innovative projects, introducing new services such as Nuxeo Studio or Market Place which are clearly providing added value to architects and developers on top of the open source software, all things that clearly illustrate that vision.

I am very excited by this change for many reasons: refocusing on the ECM world and exploring new fields here, returning to java,  being part of the development of a company that might be one of the next success stories of the ECM market and finally, being a constant traveller between Paris and the US  and many more !

I am still a newcomer when it comes to the Nuxeo Platform but I will learn fast and hopefully share part of what I learn here as well as what we will do next ! Stay tuned if you’re interested.

Latest eZ Systems moves, looking for a better Open Source development model

Leave a reply

eZ Systems, the company I have been working since end of 2005, has made two significant decisions in the last 6 months. I consider those interesting and worth to look at now, with an eye that has more perspective, distance and less involvement.

I am refering to, on one hand, eZ Systems transferring the eZ Components project to the Apache Foundation (see http://incubator.apache.org/zetacomponents/) and on the other hand introducing eZ Publish Community project simultaneously with a commercial package based on eZ Publish called eZ Publish Enterprise.

Does that reflect a good move to a succesfull Open Source  development model ? I think so. Of course it is far from enough to achieve that goal, and certainly not enough also to shape a succesfull business model; many other steps are on the road to success ! But I still think those two moves are going in the good direction. I’ll try to give some hints on this here.

First I would like to highlight the fact that I speak here of a succesfull “development model” and not of a succesfull “business model”. The two things are significantly different, though extremely closely related. In the last months, many folks from the Open Source community, including execs from Red Hat, analysts from 451 or other emerging vendors like Nuxeo have insisted on this important thought: You should consider Open Source as a development model and not a business model if you want it to deliver value. I truely believe this is the right angle to look at the Open Source phenomenon: a powerful and unequaled development model for software.

The first  decision I mentionned is about transfering eZ Components to a new project hosted by the Apache Software Foundation (and including a renaming in Zeta Components).  The move was definitelly the one to do in my opinion and was an important one. Since the beginning, the eZ Components project was thought as a low level PHP library that would help in building the next generation of eZ Publish software but that would also spread in the whole PHP community with the goal to turn it in a very succesful high quality PHP library/framework widely used on the market, providing eZ Publish with top quality low level components that are also adopted by a wide range of developers and that contribute in making eZ a very good choice when it comes to extandability ! In my opinion, It definitelly make more sens for that to develop this project as an external, independant and community driven one (that would then not suffer from eZ’s unforeseen events) than in an in-house project where eZ as a company would control all the resources and own all the intellectual property. I  even think now it was a mistake to start in-house, and from the beginning this project chould have been an external one, but this is not a major mistake at all and the project can catch up on that one, I am sure.

So yes, with some more distance and perspective, I welcome the Zeta Components considering it is the best choice for eZ Systems to try to leverage its initial investment and collaborate with this project to participate in a shared open source development effort.

Another interesting side topic raised here is about joining an existing foundation such as the Apache Foundation (the other choice would have been for instance to make a more independant project). I strongly believe that in that specific case of the Zeta Components, an existing foundation makes a lot of sens. In the past, the Apache Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation or the Mozilla foundation have all demonstrated they were bringing a lot of value and capable to bridge community driven open source projects with business. I see here a strong potential fit ! Zeta Components, by definition, could benefit to many other business, not competing with eZ, and joining forces can only be done in joining an existing organisation such as the one mentionned

The second decision I touched is the introduction of the eZ Publish community project on the side of the eZ Publish Enterprise package. In short, eZ Publish Community project is trying to engage the whole community, enabling and easing contribution to the develoment of the core of eZ Publish itself (and not anymore only on extensions). In less than a year the eZ Publish community has been restarted. There is now again a very good momentum. The community, while being very professional, is growing and developing significantly with high number of members, stronger activity and very significant number of downloads and installations for a commercial open source software. A governance project is baking. The work here of Nicolas Pastorino and the core community team has clearly demonstrated it is worth engaging the community on product development and activating ways of contribution to eZ Publish ! Well managed, this should provide eZ Systems and all the eZ Ecosystem with a significantly increased engineering capacity, for the best of all the ecosystem members.

Combining those two decisions shows a mixed way to deal with Open Source development, that can be hard to understand. On one side, eZ tries to leverage a strong and large existing independant open source software organisation and on the other, to develop its own community with its own tools and infrastructure instead of rallying to an existing organization. Is this the good approach ? Isn’it a contradiction ? Should eZ think about  contributing the whole eZ Publish community project to an existing open source software foundation such as the ASF ? I am still sometime wondering about that last idea, but clearly, eZ Publish being the core CMS sofware, and Zeta Components being only a low level infrastructure component, the 2 different choices are making a lot of sens: on one side we have a development effort that can not be shared with competing projects, on the other, a huge interest to mutualize and share the development effort with other users.

Interested in the topic of Open Source product development (btw on that topic, I can only recommend that blog post of Ian Skerrett on successful open development communitiesy), I really think eZ might have here a really nice combined approach that might deliver all its promises if well implemented ! I wish the best of luck to the eZ ecosystem, the eZ Publish community and the Zeta components projects in pursuing in those directions, I strongly hope they will demonstrate this mixed approach can be valuable.

But of course, this is a very little part of the endeavour, and thinking those two decisions are enough to reach a successful Open Source development model would be a huge mistake. The main and most difficult tasks will be in smartly coordinating a community effort and an internal engineering effort, in implementing the right marketing approach to the community projects, both of them, and developing at the same time a sales and marketing effort on the commercial side of the business that doesn’t contradict but leverage the value of the community effort. I again think it is all here about perception, packaging and delivering value on top of Open Source software.

To be continued !