ELUNA 2010: General session part 2

Matti Shem Tov - President and CEO of Ex Libris
Ex Libris Moving Forward

Current state of affairs:
4700 customers, 84 mil in revenue, 77 countries, 39 national libraries, 470 employees, 2050 North American customers in 49 states and 7 Canadian provinces, 118 North American employees

Number of worldwide customers for products:
2293 - Aleph
1868 - SFX
1363 - Voyager
215 Verde
271 bX
275 Primo

Highlights in the past 12 months:
At the product level -
--Well on way with unified resource management (URM) framework
--Launched bX, first and only article recommender service
--Set up Primo Central
At the commercial level -
--Doubled number of Primo customers
--Expanded in Asia Pacific
--Acquired Ex Libris distributors in Italy, Denmark, and Sweden

Roadmap: Building next-generation library services:
--Unified resource discovery and delivery - decoupled front end, single point of search
--Unified resource management - all back office library operations, decoupled from user interface
--Data services
(more about all of these in subsequent posts)

URM development milestones:
--Conceptual design completed by June 2010
--5 software "drops" to development partners from June 2010 to Oct 2011, featuring progress across all tracks - functionality, data conversion, Saas operation (more about these drops in subsequent posts)
--Formal beta testing done as part of initial implementation with development partners in Q4 2011
--General release planned for Q1-Q2 2012

Development partners are Boston College, Princeton University, Catholic University Leuven, Purdue University
Customer focus groups represent 80 institutions worldwide (June/July 2009)
Collaborative partnerships for Australia/New Zealand

Other product news: (more in subsequent posts)
Voyager releases - v.7.2 in Dec 09; v.8 in pipeline for May 2011; v.9
SFX releases - v.4 in July 2010; 4.1; 4.2
Verde releases - ERM functionality will be folded into URM 1 (more in subsequent posts)

Primo Central - an extension of Primo, not a new product
idea is to aggregate data from many information providers to search alongside own catalog and local resources. Huge list of publishers working with to index content; designed to index hundreds of millions of scholarly items. Hosted by Ex Libris in a cloud computing environment; available to all Primo and Metalib customers; general release scheduled for Summer 2010 .

New ways of communicating with customers:
--Ex Libris Learning Center - place for customers to meet training needs; provides access to recorded lessons, course agendas, and course history info (a subscription service with some free content); launched Jan 2010
--YouTube video on Primo Central - "Primo Central plain and simple"
--Twitter feed from Ex Libris
--Carl Grant's blog
--EL Commons wiki and EL Commons CodeShare - customer development of Ex Libris products - 150 code contributions as of April 2010; has undergone a major redesign based on customer input; codeshare contributions are open to all.

Ex Libris is strategically committed to:
--invest heavily in R&D to stay a step ahead
--focus on academic, national, research library markets
--comprehensive product suite
--develop products with customers
--embrace openness as a mindset and a technological paradigm