Nuxeo has announced that it has contributed the core of its content management platform to the Eclipse Foundation.

The Nuxeo Core is now known (within the Eclipse Foundation) as the Eclipse Enterprise Content Repository. The newly formed project lives under the umbrella Eclipse Runtime project at the Foundation.

Eric Barroca, CEO of Nuxeo, said that the Eclipse Enterprise Content Repository includes a number of features that make it easier to deal with large sets of documents. “It offers a wide range of services: content model definition (content types), mix-ins (dynamic schemas), storage abstraction, query, flexible access control, native de-duplication, format conversion, CMIS bindings…” he said.

“And all of this is bundled as a set of OSGi bundles and highly optimized and tuned to scale well for large volumes (hundreds of million of objects in a single repository), but also run lean, making it easy to embed in existing apps, small or large.”

Barroca said Nuxeo decided to release the core of its platform as an open-source project because “[Nuxeo] needed to encourage innovation around this technology. It’s something we would like to see evolve. It’s going to be interesting to see how people join and evolve the project. Now it’s really ready to get more traction and contribution.”

Another reason for the release under Eclipse, said Barroca, is the changing face of enterprise content management. He said the growth of Microsoft SharePoint and the success of the CMIS standard are pushing enterprises to demand more from their content repositories. As a result, he said, it’s time for open innovation around such a system.