Since Microsoft announced their ‘Cortex’ product over 6 months ago, the world has been waiting for the official availability of what it is abstractly promising. 
Our clients are asking us because the thought of moving to a cloud service and using something they already get for free is compelling versus paying:
- That annual maintenance to vendors for older content technology.
- That cost to also maintain the other layers of the tech-stack (hardware, operating system, database, etc).
- The labor cost for people to keep ‘the lights on’.
- The concern for business continuity because something mentioned above decides to crash or slow down.
There is overall market belief Microsoft Cortex will bring forward a more complete set of capabilities to fill the gap between what 365 is able to accomplish vs that traditional ECM stack running in the datacenter. Things like:
- Capture – traditional content management is all about how to do high speed ingestion and focus on automation (like OCR and forms extraction) to put content in
- Workflow – rather you call is case management, BPM or something else – that ability to apply that decision tree (probably in Visio) to best route and automate what happens with insurance claims, mortgages, license requests, HR onboarding or all those other high volume, highly repeat efforts.
- Experience/knowledge management – who and what knows what about who and where. As you look in a document and see a reference to a company, to be able to automatically hover over the name and a window pops up to tell you what you need.
But Microsoft has been abstract in explaining exactly what Cortex will bring – but no matter what if they price it right as an add-on to the Office365 E3 or E5 license for all those firms out there. Well let’s just say we feel at InfoDNA this could be a game changer.
The ability to replicate the complex workflows around more transactional content management but include all the other end-to-end ‘bits’ should make the more traditional players like OpenText, IBM, Hyland and others take notice. But also important is how this could really ingest all that other content sitting in network drives our outside in cloud sync-and-share tools like BOX.
Contact InfoDNA to learn more as you look to assess your current state in anticipation or prediction that Project Cortex could be that panacea that will get you using more of your 365 subscription.
