This post is the first in a two-part series on why the time is now for replacing CMOD. Today’s post will lay out eight reasons why replacing CMOD with a modern content services solution can save companies millions of dollars and eliminate significant technology risks. A follow-up post will share ways to de-risk your CMOD migration.

The release of IBM Content Manager on Demand (CMOD) in the mid 1980’s modernized ECM and made Big Blue a leader in the newly emerging ECM industry.  Today, these systems contain billions of documents in an aging application that is costly to maintain and does not allow for modernization or digital transformation due to its underlying architecture.  Yet many companies are still sinking millions of dollars each year into keeping CMOD running because it is easier to stay the course rather than start down the complex and risky path to migrate large amounts of content into a new system.  

I relate the stickiness of CMOD and other aging legacy ECM systems to that first car we all owned. Mine was a 1985 Honda Civic that was 10 years old when I bought it, but the mileage was low, and the price was right. That first car purchase and legacy ECM systems are alike. They get the job done. Unfortunately, they often cause us to spend too much time and money maintaining the status quo because a new car/system involves capital, research, time, and introduces risks. While these reasons are all valid, they gloss over significant underlying problems. These underlying problems are becoming more apparent across organizations and forcing CIOs and IT departments to evaluate alternatives. 

When evaluating existing legacy ECM platforms, companies should think about the following soft and hard costs:

1. Maintaining CMOD Is Costly – Upgrading CMOD can cost millions of dollars and results in the same dated functionality. Additionally, while these applications are “paid for”, ongoing maintenance costs can range from 25%-33% where systems are, in effect, re-purchased every 3-4 years. Other costs include expensive FTE resources required to support an aging outdated system that requires niche knowledge. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) has driven down the cost of modern solutions as well, making these existing on-premises and server-heavy solutions quite pricey. Customers have reported paying multiple millions of dollars a year in software maintenance costs alone.
2. Limited Resources with Knowledge – Many companies are reluctant to touch their CMOD applications since so little knowledge remains in house. However,the bigger risk is betting on a dwindling pool of outside resources to maintain and upgrade your CMOD application. Most CMOD applications are supported by costly third party consultants that can charge a premium, since new technology firms and younger technologists are not interested in focusing on this aging technology. Relying on a third party with a limited pool of trained resources to support these complex, critical applications should keep CIOs up at night. If something happens, these systems could be down for days.
3. System Cannot Be Upgraded – It is common that companies are not upgrading their CMOD application due to the two reasons above – they are costly and there is limited in-house knowledge.  IT cannot procure a budget because there are no functionality updates or obvious value-adds for business users. As a result, CMOD implementations are often running a few versions behind and on old hardware. Security, stability, and performance are all shaky. The biggest risk to running old software is the introduction of security vulnerabilities that cannot be patched.
4. Not Cloud Ready – While newer versions of these applications can store content in an S3 bucket, they are far from cloud-native and cannot take advantage of all the benefits of running in the cloud. Moving CMOD to the cloud is a costly undertaking and offers limited benefits. Such a large endeavor should modernize the entire stack and provide a cloud-first modular and containerized architecture. This will not happen if doing a lift and shift of CMOD to a cloud-based architecture.
5. Big Data Options Exist – CMOD is not the only big-data game in town. Nuxeo, with its No-SQL cloud-native back end, has many customers storing and managing billions of objects. Significant scalability updates were made in Alfresco 7.2 to support two billion objects. More robust searching in recent OpenText releases was implemented to assist with scalability for that platform. Some clients have chosen to roll their own repository and we have helped these clients implement DynamoDB or Hadoop on NoSQL technology. With Cloud scalability and NoSQL technologies, CMOD is no longer the only option available.
6. More Efficient User Experiences – When working in repositories that contain billions of objects, it is important that the user interface provides a simple and effective way of locating and reporting on the content. Many newer platforms such as Alfresco Content Accelerator offer no and low-code user interfaces that can be configured (not coded) for a specific vertical use-case. Check out the Claims Management and Policy and Procedure Management Accelerators on Alfresco Content Accelerator.
7. Missed Business Opportunities – CMOD applications store data in a proprietary and compressed format, making them difficult to integrate with other lines of business software and provide companies with competitive advantages of AI, business process automation, mobile support and other business opportunities.
8. CMOD Is on Life Support – In 2016 IBM handed off all future CMOD development and support to UNICOM. This is a strong indication that the CMOD business is shrinking and becoming less profitable. Software is handed off to partners to keep the lights on, not innovate or provide a long-term strategic roadmap.

While CMOD has remained relevant because of the niche it provides in storing large amounts of compressed data efficiently, the costs and risks these systems pose are significant and are growing.  Contact Docuvela to learn more or to gather input specific to your needs.  Also watch this blog for future posts on ways to de-risk your migration and other relevant topics.