Mare Nostrum

The Swiss army knife of content

I carry around a Swiss army knife that was one of the best birthday gifts I've ever received. Where countless sweaters have been entombed in the back of my closet, the Swiss army knife's unparalleled usefulness compels me to take it everywhere. It's such an intrinsic part of my daily routine of stuffing things into my pockets as I leave for work that I have to be extra, extra careful to leave it at home before heading to the airport.

Obviously, I need other knives for many daily functions. I don't cut a steak with my Swiss army knife, and I don't fence with it. (Actually, I don't fence at all, but you get the idea.) I do use the Swiss army knife every day for cutting through packaging, opening bottles, loosening screws, prying open containers, or other challenges to a tool-wielding mammal like me.

Our products, the server ones in particular, are a lot like my Swiss army knife. You won't use it for everything, but you'll use it for a lot of things. That's the "basic" in "basic content services." If you want a templated web site, we'll be glad to point you in the direction of many excellent web content management tools that ably perform that task. If you just want a place to put a static HTML document and publish it to someone across the Internet, don't go yet--we can probably help you.

Here's where I have to make a small confession: our customers concoct uses for our products that we never imagined. That's probably no surprise, since that's the nature of product development. The person who designed the first jeep probably never imagined it to be the family car, but that's exactly what SUVs have become. I've hard of customers using the Xythos server for sharing course materials, processing insurance documents, maintaining a library of digital assets, and publishing file-based reports of row-column information from databases. I could list 17 other use cases, off the top of my head, but that would only be a fraction of the many uses to which customers and partners have employed our technology.

There's one key difference between the Swiss army knife and our server: you can't customize the Swiss army knife. Even the incredible Ginsu knife collection didn't let you build a special knife for a particular job, or replace the handle with one that fit your hand perfectly. On the other hand, you can customize our server; not surprisingly, nearly every customer does.

Being the "Swiss army knife of content" is pretty cool. I'd rather build that sort of tool than something that suffers the same fate as those sweaters in the back of my closet.