Building a business on a product that replaces and supplements standard features on an already expensive software product doesn't seem like a winning business strategy, however when you actively listen and respond to what prospective customers want, delivering features they actually find useful and use a lean development process with a few superstar developers, you can make it work. That's been the secret for Generis Software. Its CARA user interface product for popular enterprise content management (ECM) platforms directly competes with the native UIs from the likes of EMC (Documentum), IBM, Oracle and even Microsoft. As part of some broader research into the ECM market, I recently had an extensive conversation with the company’s CEO and founder, James Kelleher. Kelleher, whose British accent and prior experience as a document management analyst at GlaxoWellcome (now GlaxoSmithKline) belie his origins, now operates Generis from Princeton, although when I talked with him he was back in the U.K.
Although Generis lists a variety of products on its website, CARA is by far the most important, so I opened by asking Kelleher to describe its goals, strengths and benefits and what differentiates CARA from native ECM front-ends like Documentum Webtop or competing UI add-ons like D2, Vic, et al.
The key to CARA’s development and success is a focus on the ECM user; specifically the tasks they are trying to accomplish, the information they need to find and the overall ease of actually working with an ECM platform versus the backend platform features like revision control, meta data schemas, authentication and data management or data security. Kelleher says the traditional focus for ECM vendors has been on the platform, like the features just listed, but not on how people actually use the platform. Over time, this has made ECM products very hard to use. Characterizing a typical problem, Kelleher quips, “Users can only find this document if you already know where it is.”
CARA is designed to remedy this disconnect between ECM administrators, application developers and users. Thus, CARA emphasizes development of features that make it easy to find information. Kelleher contends that as the ECM market has matured, the backend has become a commodity and what provides differentiation is “what can I do with the product.” In sum, the company’s direction is set by information users and consumers not IT administrators.
Customer-Driven Feature Additions
Kelleher describes CARA as evolving to suit two different audiences: the average office worker and info-savvy power users. For the casual user, Generis strives to make CARA easy to use out of the box while also easily customizable for individual work styles and preferences. However recent releases have added APIs and configuration parameters that allow CARA to be highly customized for heavy users with specific needs, including the ability to integrate with other backend databases. Indeed, Kelleher sees customizability as a key feature of the product’s third major release.
The ability to programmatically supplement and easily integrate CARA with backend systems beyond its ECM base in Documentum, SharePoint and Alfresco, but also systems like SAP, publishing tools like Liquent and ISI (details here) or CRM platforms like Siebel is called the CARA Hub and Kelleher considers it a strategic advantage. He believes that by unifying the user experience and workflow for any number of backend systems, CARA addresses an important pain point for many organizations, namely that they typically use a variety of backend systems, meaning a given business process may require data from several. The problem is, there’s no easy way of integrating the data into a user- and process-centric application or UI. He sees the CARA UI, along with its API and forms builder as that point of integration.
CARA’s Origins: ECM Users Wanted a Better Mousetrap
Kelleher says the genesis of CARA was a specific request from an actual Documentum customer that wanted to customize its ECM system with a better front-end. The result was CARA. Business growth was initially quite slow; just two or three actual buyers for the company’s first 5+ years. However, being so dependent on a few customers inculcated a devotion to working closely with them on new features, product development, testing and real world feedback.
Kelleher says Generis is “fanatical” about listening to customers, citing the importance of its customer advisory board, prominently featured on the company’s website, as a source of new ideas and product enhancements. The goal is to build what buyers want and Kelleher says customers often tell him “you actually listened to what we wanted,” a point the company highlighted in this customer testimonial press release. The upshot of this ECM user- and task-focus is that when customers get the product or an update, Kelleher says they like it.
Selling Strategy, Process and Sales Partners
As a small company, Kelleher characterizes sales as still largely by word of mouth. Essentially he and a single co-worker comprise the entire Generis’ sales team, a role that primarily involves handling inquiries from potential customers that have heard about CARA from existing users. As he describes it, people within different industries with big ECM systems and heavy usage, whether in pharma, government, legal or other regulated industries, know and talk to each other, whether at conferences, user group meetings or online, and regularly share tool recommendations.
The surge in business partnerships over the past 6–12 months represents the next phase in Generis’ sales strategy. According to Kelleher, the partnerships are an effort to expand the market, particularly into specific industries like pharma and government. He sees these partnerships as mutually beneficial since partners generate software sales leads and CARA sales provide them with consulting and implementation support that Generis doesn't do. New CARA-derived business is important to these partners since Kelleher says their traditional work with the major platform companies (and here we're talking about the aforementioned software giants like EMC, Oracle, IBM, et. al.) has been eroding as these IT powerhouses emphasize IT services to boost revenue. Kelleher believes the niche consulting companies of the type Generis partners with see themselves as getting squeezed out of their traditional business and are looking to new outlets for their own products and services, whether as a defensive measure or hedge against incursion from the big platform vendors.
For Generis, its new partners provide important industry and vertical market expertise, contacts and implementation services; things like pre-sales consulting and requirements definition along with post-sales implementation that Generis doesn’t offer. Kelleher says its work with TAKE Solutions is one of its most active relationships and a good example of the symbiotic relationship between Generis and its partners.
Generis’ Software Development Secret: One Superstar Is Better Than An Department of Mediocrities
It’s unusual, if not unique, for a company like Generis to seemingly put itself in head-to-head competition with software behemoths like EMC and Oracle, so I asked Kelleher how such a small organization manages to build compelling software that augments and possibly displaces products from these giant firms. He contends that it’s not particularly hard since upon close examination, these big software companies don’t have that many “key” software personnel, what are sometimes called hero developers. While the big firms may have a thousand people doing software, “there aren’t a thousand genius developers,” says Kelleher.
Instead, Kelleher’s strategy is to selectively hire what he calls “fantastic people.” Being a small company, he gets feedback about and directly observes what everyone is doing and appears to be vigilant about pruning those developers that don’t measure up and nurturing those that do.
I asked about the use of contract labor and while Kelleher admitted Generis has occasionally had to employ outside developers for short-term needs when in-house employees don’t have the requisite skills, he cites development of CARA’s mobile apps as an example, although “we don’t like to make a habit of it.” Even these are subjected to scrutiny. Kelleher says his roots in the life sciences (presumably his Glaxo experience) have instilled the value of auditing all software vendors. Thus, he says Generis follows ISO 12207 and is itself audited by customers several times a year.
Strategic Positioning: CARA Provides ECM Platform Portability
Since CARA can provide a consistent UI and programmable interface to multiple backend ECM systems, I asked Kelleher whether he uses the strategy of system portability and lock-in mitigation, namely the ability for CARA to act as a transparent bridge between an existing ECM platform like Documentum and a cheaper alternative like Alfresco, as a selling point. He says about half of Generis’ customers mention the ability to swap out backends, presumably Documentum in most cases, as important, however he doesn’t know how important this factor is in their evaluation and buying process. However, he doesn’t see backend lock-in hedging as a primary selling point with most. Kelleher says most ECM users have spent too much time, effort and licensing money building their platform and don’t want the pain required to rip and replace backends. Instead, he thinks CARA is seen as a way of getting more value from the platform they already have.
Kelleher does say that the ability to swap out backend ECM modules is important to some, calling CARA a “Trojan Horse approach” for those customers. He admits this might be trading one form of lock-in (the backend) for another (the UI), but says this is mitigated by the fact that CARA is extensible through an open API and built using WebKit, so customers or competitors are free to mimic, replace and/or augment the interface. Indeed, he mentions one customer evaluating CARA against the native EMC interface saying a big selling point was how easy it is for either the customer or Generis to add new features (recall, the tight feedback loop between customers and developers).
So what started as a simple customer request to make notorious byzantine ECM systems easy for normal people to use could end up being a strategic IT asset allowing organizations to replace expensive, bloated backends with cheaper, leaner, even open source alternatives without jeopardizing access to critical business information and business processes. If so, Kelleher may soon be on the hunt for many more "fantastic people" to handle the growth.
