Quick Take Review: Xythos On Demand Document Management

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) May 14, 2008

Xythos is a provider of on-premise and hosted (SaaS) document management solutions for organizations both large and small. Their hosted product has a somewhat unique history in that is was designed and developed from the very beginning as a web-based service.

The SaaS version of their document management product, launched in December 2006, is the software we've got in our sights today. Xythos on Demand (XOD) is a full featured enterprise document management solution, and true to its name, it is delivered as a hosted service. Join us as we poke around in the binary guts of XOD.

Overview — Xythos on Demand

Xythos on Demand is a software as a service document management solution that supports a number of small, medium and large organizations. It is the mirror image to its sister Xythos Enterprise Document Management, an on premise solution. The only difference between the two is that one is hosted and one is not.

Xythos competes in a tough market. With the likes of Google and Microsoft (with SharePoint as a service) both offering competing solutions of their own, these be sharky waters. If you ask Jim Till, CMO of Xythos, what makes Xythos unique, he would say, “We’ve succeeded playing 'David' to these 'Goliaths' by remaining true to our open standards technology roots – continuing to support mixed data center environments, Mac desktops and any form of app server, database or storage configuration customers want.”

Product Description

The Vendor:	Xythos Software Inc.
The product:	Xythos on Demand
Category:	Enterprise Document Management

Typical Usage Scenario:
Utilized by an organization that needs to centrally manage all documents and provide structured document workflow and collaboration tools for their staff as well as the convenience of offline file synchronization. The product is especially suited to organizations with compliance and security concerns, as XOD provides an intelligent and automated means for managing and tracking documents transported as email attachments.

Company & Product History

Xythos (more news) actually started out as an OEM supplier of portal technology back when all things Dot Com were in boom mode. The crash required them to shift their model. And they decided to sell their document management application to run in an organization’s own data center.

4 years later with 450-500 enterprise organizations and over 4 million licensed users using their document management software, Xythos is a profitable standalone entity.

In 2006, tired of constantly saying no to providing Xythos Document Management as a software as a service solution, Xythos broke down and created Xythos on Demand. For 6 months they stealth marketed the service and in August of 2007 officially released it to the world.

Xythos has 3 core products:

Xythos Enterprise Document Management Suite — on premise solution
Xythos Digital Locker Suite — document management designed specifically for the education market
Xythos on Demand — the SaaS version of the on-premise solution

Xythos on Demand is currently at v2.1. It is updated roughly every three months — this is 4x more often than Xythos’ on premise application update cycle.

Market & Pricing

Xythos’s market is a mixed bucket of government agencies, financial institutions and educational institutions. Their products are used across the world in North America, Asia and parts of Europe.

Pricing for the Xythos on Demand service is relatively straightforward: know how many users who will use it, how much storage you will need, and then take a look at their subscription based pricing:

Partner Network

Xythos does not pretend to do all things well. So when they created Xythos on Demand they did the smartest thing they could — they partnered with companies who did specific things better.

As a result, while Xythos focused on delivering a quality document management solution, they relied on partners like OPSource to host their solution and LES for billing.

Business Model

75-80% of Xythos’s revenue comes from on premise licenses with a 20% renewal year over year. They also provide customization and jumpstart kits with their own professional services team (a small 5-6 employee group).

Xythos Document Management is known for its ability to be easily integrated into other environments including portals from IBM, Oracle and BEA.

Their product is sold through direct market and a mix of partners like Recco, CoFax, Captiva and the web 2.0 company Zimbra.

Client Base

Xythos on Demand has grown substantially since it was generally released. 50% of its market is outside of the US, in the UK and continental Europe.

There are currently hundreds of organizations using Xythos on Demand, the likes of who include: Stadia (Systems integrator for salesforce.com), NCR, Volm Companies, MACH Energy, Astadia Consulting, Symbiotic Projects Limited and Harvard University.

The Competition

Xythos on Demand is compared to other services like Google Docs and SharePoint. Now SharePoint we can understand as it’s considered an “enterprise level” product, particularly in the document management realm. With their new SaaS offering, they may well become a strong competitor to the Xythos on Demand solution.

Xythos believes they have the better solution. This may true as it can support a heterogeneous end-user environment. SharePoint is very much Microsoft based.

As for Google Docs, although you can’t argue it’s a nice on demand tool for productivity — similar, although less robust, as MS Office — we aren’t sure how it could compare to a full-fledged document solution like Xythos.

Product Differentiators

Very few products start out like Xythos Document Management did — as a 100% open standards web-based environment. Xythos was never a client-server solution.

The on demand solution contains all the same features and functionality as the on-premise solution which makes moving to the on premise solution extremely easy.

In addition, companies can be secure in the knowledge that their data is being stored and backed up in an environment that is protected by SunGuard.

Another differentiator is Xythos Drive – a piece of software installed on the desktop that enables a user to work offline and provides an explorer like view of their folders and documents. According to Xythos, 60% of Xythos on Demand users use the Drive exclusively to access content. This is likely because it’s the format they are most use to. It also maintains a local copy – so it may also be a comfort thing.

Key Features and Ratings

Figure: Xythos OnDemand Home page

Product Core Technology

Rating: 4/5

Xythos on Demand is built on an open standards based platform. This includes WebDAV (used for Xythos Drive and Web Folders), J2EE, JSR-170 and Open APIs.