Delivering an Easy Migration for Enterprise Content Management
Just this past month, Xillio, a content migration and integration specialist announced their brand new 
creation of a migration business unit with partner Discover Technologies.
Founded in 2009, Discover Technologies is a US-based technology services and information solution specializing in IT consulting, enterprise search, advanced content indexing and accessibility/usability solutions for government agencies, commercial enterprises and Fortune 500 companies. Their services help clients address management challenges such as unstructured data, compliance, migration, storage optimization, security and risk assessment.
To summarize the announcement:
“Powered by Xillio’s content migration solution, Discover Technologies has built a content migration unit to deliver easy on-site ECM content migrations for US government institutions and commercial enterprises. Discover Technologies helps these organizations with the transition from legacy ECM systems to modern ECM systems without losing documents or metadata and by adding value.”
Let’s turn our attention below where you can read my captivating interview with Rikkert Engels, CEO and Founder of Xillio to hear more about the exciting new announcement and what it means to Xillio.
Exclusive Interview with Xillio CEO
What was the driving force for Xillio and Discover Technologies coming together?
“There are two ways to perform a content migration for our customers. First is our Migration-as-a-Service (MaaS) approach. This means the customers outsource the complete migration project and we take care of the whole project. This is relatively difficult for projects at government agencies. Second way is that customers buy our tooling and do the migration themselves. This is possible but many customers lack the knowledge to do this. They prefer a specialized and local party to do this. Xillio doesn’t have local staff in the US and doesn’t have the short-term ambition to build one. To be able to meet the demand, we have been searching for partners. In the recent years, we have learned that many consulting firms are interested in partnering with us, but content migrations require specific knowledge. We have been looking for partners that want to commit to do many migrations so that they can deliver consistency and quality. Discover Technologies commits to this.”
In the press release it states: “Discover Technologies helps these organizations with the transition from legacy ECM systems to modern ECM systems without losing documents or metadata and by adding value.” Can you tell us a little bit about how the ECM content migration works with Xillio and some of its key benefits?
“Xillio is unique in its offering because we use a different approach. We have a history as a supplier of migration services and built a migration tooling for ourselves. The problem with most migration is handling the technical complexity and managing the communication with the customer. Most tools combine this in one tool, but in our tool this is separated. We built a migration tool for developers without UI but one that is very flexible. Communication with the customer goes through Excel, which is easy to understand. If you combine this in one tool and you want to be able to offer all migrations functionalities, the tool becomes too complex and the end-user/developer doesn’t understand it anymore.
Besides that, we use our unified content model for migrations. We put this between the source and target system and use our standardized connectors to export data from the source to this content model, transform it and finally import (load) the data into the target. This makes it easy to migrate from multiple sources to one target. This unified content model acts as an abstraction layer which makes it possible to work on Extraction, Transformation and Load separately from each other. During a migration things can change. And you need to minimize the impact of these changes. Thanks to this abstraction layer, we can minimize the impact of changes.
Lastly, our solution is extremely scalable. We can support migrations that have over a petabyte of documents."
It also states in the press release “Content migrations are known to be complex. It concerns large volume content, multiple departments, legacy systems and mapping of content between one system and the new.” What are some other challenges that this migration with Discover Technologies addresses for Xillio users?
“I was once invited by a government agency in Washington to explain how we can help with their migration project, but I was not allowed into the building. We met at the local Marriott Hotel. If we are not allowed to go into the building, how can we do a migration?! It’s a security and staffing issue. Discover Technologies has the local network and credentials and has no work permit questions.
Second, a large content migration is typically served by a technical specialist and a business specialist. That is our preferred setup in The Netherlands. And with Discover Technology we have the same set-up as they provide both technology and business analysts."
In your opinion, what are some of the major factors that companies should be considering when planning a content migration?
“We have seen examples of companies planning massive migration projects in which it takes over a year to decide and act. And in that year often half the budget has been burned. In our view, some migrations are simply too complex for an organization to handle. When more than 10 departments or content management systems are involved, we suggest you use our integration solution. Sometimes the new solution you choose, isn’t the solution for everything. It might be better to integrate your legacy systems with this new solution and phase it out in a later stage. If you choose that scenario, your functional, technical and business requirements and organizational complexity reduces significantly.”
Xillio Offers Free File Share Analysis Software
Since we here at CMS-Connected haven’t covered Xillio in quite some time, I decided to see what else they have been up to this past year.
Back in April of 2018, Xillio announced that they now offer a free file share analysis software for content migration projects.
The file share is a free downloadable software that comes with a range of standardized analyses that map network drives and pinpoints files with unknown extensions, very substantial files, potential duplicates or files that have not been opened for a long time.
In their press release Xillio states “The software can be deployed by information specialists to prepare for a migration project or for a content clean-up so as to limit the number of files to be migrated to what is manageable without having recourse to expensive consultants.”
“The free download of the file share software is an opportunity to scan the content stored on network drives. The results are summarized in a CSV report. Organizations have the option at no cost to them to upload the content inventory to Xillio for a more detailed, graphics-rich report with deeper insights into duplicates, large files and so on.”
Click here to download the free file share analysis software directly from Xillio.
Ending Notes
Back in May 2017, Xillio was named a “Cool Vendor in Content Services 2017” by Gartner, Inc for their technology integration between content services platforms and a wide variety of existing content repositories.
It’s no doubt that the ECM market is in full swing. According to Grand View Research, The global enterprise content management market size was valued at USD 25.92 billion in 2016 alone. My colleague Venus Tamturk also covered a very interesting story on the ECM market in her previous post by consolidating predictions from the thought-leadership of some ECM industry experts.
Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Founder and Principal Analyst of Deep Analysis also mentioned in a recent blog post "over the past few years, things have begun to change, and the fundamentals of how an optimal ECM system might work in the future are being reimagined.”
Forrester also predicted the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) to be a global market worth $8 billion in 2017 and predicts that the market will reach $9 billion in 2018. Will this be proven to stay true?
Gabriella Pirrone
Gabriella is the Digital Marketing Assistant for CMSC Media. She brings a wealth of knowledge from not only a CMS perspective but also content, SEO and eCommerce. She enjoys everything social media and staying ontop of the latest trends in the digital marketing world.