Cheryl McKinnon leaves Open Text; joins Nuxeo

Cheryl McKinnon, the former director of Collaborative Content Management at Open Text, whom I've interviewed several times, recently announced she was joining open source ECM vendor Nuxeo as the Chief Marketing Officer. Her first official day was Monday.

Eric Barroca (whom we have interviewed "One on One") says McKinnon's skill set was just what he was looking for. "Cheryl has a broad spectrum of ECM experience and is a superb marketer, strategist, trend spotter and evangelist, which makes her the perfect match for Nuxeo at this point in our growth," Barroca said.

McKinnon said making the move from a company like Open Text to Nuxeo presents some challenges, but she was definitely attracted to the open-source model. She says she really liked the connection between sharing content and a bigger open source ideal of sharing code and ideas for the overall product. She believes it's a logical extension of the social networking tool she had been working on for the previous 18 months at Open Text.

She is new to open source, so she will have to learn about the licensing model and get her head around what it means to be a commercial open source product like Nuxeo, but ultimately many of marketing tasks won't be that different. She says that Nuxeo already has a committed community, on the technical side, around development of the product, but she wants to begin to build out the end-user community more and develop a social network around that. She also hopes to use social networking tools to stretch Nuxeo's marketing dollars--which, as a small open source company, may be less than what she's used to.

Over the coming months, McKinnon will be developing a strategy to get the word out on Nuxeo and raise its profile in the ECM community by performing traditional marketing tasks, such as building her one- to two-year marketing plan and developing a social media strategy.

For more information:
- see the Nuxeo press release

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