One on One with Eric Barroca of Nuxeo

Eric Barroca is the CEO at open source content management vendor Nuxeo [1]. He has been involved with designing and developing content management systems for more than 10 years. As CEO for Nuxeo he has overseen the organization as it grew from just five employees to 40 employees. We asked Barroca about how he runs his business on an open source model, open source licensing terms and where his company fits in the enterprise content management landscape.

FCM: Where do you see Nuxeo fitting in the ECM market?

EB: At the "platform" level, we are positioning Nuxeo EP for mid- to high-end ECM projects and solutions, typically at the level of the major proprietary offerings such as EMC's D6 and LiveLink's OpenText. Our platform easily supports any comparison with those proprietary offerings, and can deliver high-end ECM solutions to our customers for a fraction of the price.

On the product-level, our Document Management/Collaboration package (coming by default with EP's standard distribution), primarily competes with EMC's eRoom coupled with D6, OpenText's Livelink, and Interwoven's WorkSite; similarly on the mid-end we compete with Alfresco and Sharepoint.

Nuxeo's inherent design is completely built around services and components, inspired in a sense by the Eclipse platform. It has been built with the vision that ECM is more than an aggregation of products/needs, but really a global approach toward information and content management. Nuxeo EP is a set of services and components in the space of content and information management (from discussion forum to large-scale image processing). You can then assemble these to create a "business solution." This is what we do with our packages (Document Management, DAM, Correspondence Management, etc.).

FCM: As an open source company, what is your business model?

EB: We are an open source shop, where open source means "open development and distribution model," not "you can only view our sources." No game here: Non-viral license, open development, one unique code base and only one version. And that version is Enterprise-ready, not a demo.

We make revenue from multi-year subscriptions contracts (about 70 percent of our sales) and professional services. What you pay for with the subscription is not a usage right. It's development/operational support and a set of packaged services we are delivering for development teams, on one side, and operations teams, on the other. Simple and clear.

Then our professional service division is focused on enablement. It's typically targeted at system integrators, development teams and integration teams. We help them get the architecture right, coach the team and enable them to deliver the project faster, on time and on budget. Mixed with a support contract, it is a very powerful combination.

FCM: How open are companies to using open source content management software? Do you find that IT is open and the CIO is less open or how does it generally play out?

EB: Our offering fits well in their strategy: They get the benefit of open source and get the support of a "real" software vendor.

Given that our licensing model (non-viral), is now pretty well accepted, we're seeing more and more very large organizations calling us. Especially in the last three to four months, even traditional open source skeptics are interested; this is a budget-shrinking environment for IT.

Some customers are contributing back some components (big ones) and following our contribution and QA processes, because they have an interest in their changes being supported and integrated into the main software.

The issue we're facing more is small vendor vs. big vendor. But it's not directly linked with OSS. And I believe OSS helps a lot here [2].

FCM: I get a lot of comments about licenses whenever I publish an article on open source software. What license model do you use and do you get a lot of questions about this from enterprise IT departments?

EB: We use non-viral licenses only. Our software is available under the LGPL which allows you to use our components to build software, without fear. It's clear, explained and controlled. No tricks, one simple model, no dual-licensing (Note: I don't think dual-licensing is bad in itself, it's just not the way we chose).

Moreover, we have a strict policy when integrating external components into the platform. We deliver insurance for our customer that the licensing and the IP is clean and controlled.

And we can easily explain what is the impact of our licensing which is pretty well accepted. Moreover, many more lawyers are now more versed in open source licensing, thus know the LGPL, and hence contract negotiation are easier.

FCM: Do you think being an open source vendor brings you advantages or disadvantages from a sales and marketing standpoint?

EB: Of course. From a sales perspective, it shorten the sales cycle, allowing sponsors in the organization to try/test/study your software. You often get the contact when the customer is ready to hear your story.

From a marketing point of view, it's more related to the ease of packaging and our open distribution model. As the software is freely available, people can easily benchmark/try it and select it when it matches their needs. You might achieve this with online downloadable proprietary software (Atlassian is very good at this), but open source makes it more natural.

So what open source does on the sales/marketing side is this: It allows you to scale fast with a very efficient go-to-market cost model, if you play fair and leverage the OSS distribution model. Hence, you reduce your production costs, and drastically reduce your marketing/sales costs. In the end, open source allows you to deliver less expensive software to your customers, and they benefit from your savings. No magic, here.