This is one of those rare posts where I post an article about a change in the executive ranks of a CMS company. However, thanks to Jon Marks and his CMS gurus on Twitter list I've been a Twitter follower of this person. Cheryl McKinnon is moving from Open Text to Nuexo as their Chief Marketing Officer. Nuxeo is one of the leading provider of open source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software and services.
"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," said CEO Eric Barroca. "Nuxeo's open source technology has a deep feature set and rich functionality that rivals far costlier, cumbersome and complex proprietary ECM systems. With 350+ customers, tens of thousand of downloads, nearly 65 percent of sales outside of France, and a strong demand from the North American market, Cheryl will be instrumental in helping Nuxeo evolve into a global force." [Link to source broken]
What's interesting to me is that one of the reasons Cheryl made the move to Nuxeo is because Nuxeo is an open source company. On her blog she writes:
So why Nuxeo, why now? The Open Source angle fascinated me. Could something really be Free? And Good? And have a nice UI? Maybe I really have drunk the Kool-Aid on the concepts of transparency, openness, flatness, simplification. Over the last 18 months I've been living and breathing the world of Enterprise 2.0 and what it means to be 'Social' inside business and strive for collaboration with customers and partners. It just all makes more sense now.
I started to imagine a world where companies could just get on with it. Get ECM tools that meet their needs. Implement on their terms. Stop playing sales-cycle theatre. Ignore the middle men. No more shameful ROI spreadsheet gymnastics pleading for permission to do the right thing.
What Cheryl writes in her blog on the move to Nuxeo just confirms my belief that the economic climate currently is placing more attention on, and favoring, open source solutions. I recently blogged about this a few days ago where I wrote:
But, once again I think these type of events emphasize that those content management systems that get the most attention from us these days are those applications that open up and work with other third party applications.
There is a reason why such topics as CMIS, open source, and API are in the spotlight with folks interested in content management. No one really wants to be stuck with a vendor that doesn't play well with others.
Congratulations to Cheryl McKinnon on her new position at Nuxeo. Congratulations also to open source ECM for getting someone who is likely to make the spotlight on open source ECM even brighter. I wonder who else will be entering that spotlight next?