Nuxeo's New CRO Fred Monjazeb on the Future of ECM
Nuxeo, a New York and Paris, France-based open source enterprise content management (ECM) developer, has announced record-breaking business results in Q3 which includes an increase in new license bookings by 287 percent. Additionally, according to the vendor, new license bookings have increased by 88 percent year-to-date and the company’s net renewal rate is more than 120 percent. Not only did the company grow financially, Nuxeo also expanded geographically with new office locations in London (United Kingdom), Irvine (CA), Washington, D.C., Madrid (Spain) and Frankfurt (Germany) joining existing offices in Paris (France), Lisbon (Portugal), Los Gatos (CA) and a new, expanded location in New York (NY).
Besides all these favorable occurrences happening within the organizations, there is one change in executive leadership that drew our attention the most - Nuxeo appointed Fred Monjazeb as a new CRO. He marks the second new executive to join the team following a departure from EMC’s Enterprise Content Division, Chris McLaughlin Nuxeo’s current CMO being the first. To hear why he chose Nuxeo, what his focus will be in his brand new role and what trends he predicts for the future of the ECM space, our media reporter Laura Myers spoke to Fred Monjazeb:
During the interview, Monjazeb, who is a 30-year industry veteran, pointed out that one of the many reasons why he joined Nuxeo is their platform ticked off all the checkmarks in terms of features that his customers have asked him for; being cloud-native, being a configuration platform rather than a coding platform, scalability and offering modular solutions to name a few. There was also the impact of his former co-worker Chris McLaughlin’s accolades about the organization.
The departure of Fred Monjazeb has marked the fourth top executive resignation in EMC ECD after former CTO Jeroen van Rotterdam left to join Citrix as SVP of Technology, former President Rohit Ghai left to join Dell Technologies’ RSA subsidiary, and Christopher McLaughlin the former CMO of EMC ECD left to become the new CMO of Nuxeo. With this in mind, at the beginning of this month, I interviewed Alan Pelz-Sharpe, founder and principal analyst at Deep Analysis, to talk about if moving off of Documentum, as some of the ECM specialists have suggested lately, would be a wise decision for customers or conversely, would it be a premature decision as big acquisitions take a long time to digest? While we were discussing the future of Documentum, I couldn’t help but ask him what this board shakeup means for Documentum customers. He said that after an acquisition, this kind of change is expected but he warned that what would be more worrying is if scores of folks leave from the core engineering and R&D teams but he doesn’t believe that has happened. Well, when we inquired with Monjazeb for his inside scoop he said: “That's a question better answered by OpenText who took over by EMC but these 4 executives are not the only people who left as most of the top level if not all of them are gone at EMC.”
During the conversation, he brought up a very good point about where legacy vendors such as OpenText Documentum and IBM FileNet are lagging behind which is building a more modern and nimble platform, and he thinks Nuxeo plugs that hole. I agree that Nuxeo has been aiming at disrupting traditional ECM vendors through advancing its technical innovation. Especially, since the cloud-native content services provider received a $20 million investment from Goldman Sachs in September 2016, it has been utilizing the investment to set the pace for innovation with the new products that address increasing content and digital asset management challenges, particularly in terms of the complexity, volume, and diversity of digital content and its delivery channels. To that end, in July of this year, Nuxeo announced the release of Web UI built on a modern JavaScript stack (Polymer) that leverages Web Components to provide a responsive, configurable and extensible user interface that delivers a compelling new user experience (UX). According to the company’s claim, the Web UI is fully customizable and able to cater to the specific needs of an organization, whether their priorities are digital asset management, enterprise content management or case management.
In general, changes in the boardroom bring a breath of fresh air to organizations. Therefore, we inquired on what his areas of focus would be within his role that he feels Nuxeo customers are facing. He mentioned about three core areas in particular; financial services, public sector, and digital assets management (DAM) solutions. It didn’t come as a surprise as Nuxeo has been targeting financial services, technology, and public-sector organizations, as well as consumer products, retail, manufacturing, entertainment, and media that require DAM.
To take advantage of his expansive knowledge of the ECM space, we also asked him where he thinks we will see the most innovation in the coming months. “I see expediting system deployment and getting a value faster being the key areas for clients. Cloud and package-based solutions will be the way I think the market will go in next three to five years,” Monjazeb said.
My POV
If we look at Nuxeo’s recent product releases and technology partnerships, it is safe to say that the vendor has been aiming to mitigate the cost, pain, and risk of content migrations typically associated with ECM implementations. Good news, all those efforts are paying off because the vendor has been enjoying the industry recognition from industry analysts such as Gartner, Forrester and Aragon Research with speed of its implementation. Gartner, for instance, cited that “over 60% of respondents said the implementation took less than six months; over half of these said it took less than three months” in its MQ for Content Services Platforms (CSP).
The aggressive growth the vendor accomplished in Q3 is also a good indicator demonstrating that Nuxeo’s efforts of being a disruptor in the EMC space are coming to fruition. What I really like about Nuxeo’s product strategy is that the vendor leverages advanced metadata modeling to ensure that knowledge and caseworkers only see the information they need, facilitating efficient, informed decisions.
Due to the steep competition fueled by ever-increasing expectations of today’s modern consumers, more and more midmarket organizations are finding themselves in a situation where they have to keep up with very large enterprise companies. As a result, this situation drives technology buyers to find systems with an ability to deliver enterprise-quality features at a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and faster time-to-market (TTM). With this in mind, Nuxeo has also been leveraging its cloud-native ECM architecture to provide improved scalability and performance at a much lower TCO for midsize-to-large enterprises especially. Therefore, it will be interesting to watch what’s next for Nuxeo with the new additions to its leaderboard as the vendor is still maturing in the market.
Venus Tamturk
Venus is the Media Reporter for CMS-Connected, with one of her tasks to write thorough articles by creating the most up-to-date and engaging content using B2B digital marketing. She enjoys increasing brand equity and conversion through the strategic use of social media channels and integrated media marketing plans.
Laura Myers
A digital business, marketing and social media enthusiast, Laura thrives on asking unique, insightful questions to ignite conversation. At an event or remotely, she enjoys any opportunity to connect with like-minded people in the industry.