The Future of CMOD

CMOD has come a long way from the days when executives held that storage on Laser Discs were theoretically infinite. Today, CMOD's compression remains best-in-class, saving clients billions of dollars in storage costs.

What Is CMOD Again?

Developed in the mid-1980’s by IBM, Content Manager OnDemand, referred to as CMOD, has stood the test of time as one of the most robust archival systems in the Enterprise Report Management (ERM) market.

 

As a key pillar in the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software market, CMOD has proven itself in areas Fortune 1000 organizations value highly. Namely, reliability, speed, scalability, accessibility, and storage costs.

 

But CMOD was developed in a different time. A time of on-premise mainframe platforms, Laser Discs, printstreams, and expensive disk space. For this reason, many competitors call for its demise or sow seeds of fear, uncertainty, and doubt about its future.

 

Its evolution to include more formats like PDF, HTML, XML, and image formats like JPEG, PNG, and GIF has extended its staying power. As document viewing included more customers and delivery started moving online, CMOD has adapted along with these new demands.

 

And with CMOD innovations like IBM’s Full Text Search, PDF Indexer, and Content Navigator, the future shows CMOD is not going anywhere. It’s merely getting better while not losing its ability to handle past technologies, formats, and systems. In fact, IBM continues to migrate client systems to CMOD off other slower, less efficient competitive platforms.

Core Benefits of CMOD

In a time when high compression and de-duplication efforts in CMOD saved storage space and money, these same benefits now work to enable higher-speed delivery online and to the customer. 

 

CMOD’s evolution from printstream capture to browser-based PDF delivery solved many issues while continuing to enable a bridge from older technologies to newer ones in one platform.

 

Its reliability includes its speed of ingesting data, and its ability to easily scale to petabyte in disk size while delivering to hundreds of thousands of users per day.

 

CMOD’s benefits also include its flexibility through Tivoli Storage Manager to store documents on just about any storage media.

 

CMOD can quickly deliver documents through IBM Content Navigator to staff worldwide, as well as through custom applications in the cloud. These custom applications can use its Java API to integrate front or back end systems to deliver the right document to the right person at the right time.

 

Much of why IBM’s CMOD system stands alone in the ECM market is because it focuses on static content and handles that function extremely well. Static content like reports, customer correspondence, bills, statements, checks, notices, and invoices are all types of content CMOD handles faster and more efficiently than its peers.

Evolution of CMOD

CMOD has come a long way from the days when executives held that storage on Laser Discs were theoretically infinite. Today, CMOD’s compression remains best-in-class, saving clients billions of dollars in storage costs.

 

As many can remember the Y2K fiasco, even tasks as simple as storing date/time information created fear in the early days. Before a built-in date/time format existed in CMOD’s database structure, dates were stored as integers, starting from midnight, January 1st, 1970, UTC. Times were stored in seconds from that same date. This was called the ‘epoch’ date. Needless to say, much has improved, with features like the ability to identify Sensitive Personal Information (SPI) and redact it from the delivered content. How’s that for mitigating risk in the new millennium?

 

While much has changed in how the content is captured, stored, retrieved, and delivered, the core technology has stood the test of time in it’s 20+ years. And with IBM partners innovating on top of it, data mining, workflow, and integration solutions continue to help niche industries maximize their content value.

 

Another thing that has remained constant is the CMOD User’s Group (ODUG). It has been a trusted source of information, educational webinars, and resources for the community. They host an annual ODUG Technical Conference featuring key CMOD developers and architects. These teams listen to customer feedback and iterate through FixPacks and regular enhancements. CMOD development teams highly value this feedback and input from users globally.

 

Outside of these conferences, IBM also offers free CMOD Workshops in various cities, and has done so for years.

 

A simple case study of a recent banking client shows how far CMOD has evolved from its early days:

 

A large bank came to IBM with the goal of creating a single archive that could handle over 10,000 different reports and statements. They estimated their content growth in volume would be 20% per year. They had multiple branches in more than a dozen states. They held billions in assets.

 

Multiple acquisitions over the years had collected a dozen or so archival and reporting systems that were no longer supported. Some had reached capacity and would regularly go down. This was costing the bank severely to maintain. They also had no way to search efficiently across these systems for the documents or data they needed.

 

With CMOD installed and implemented across the organization to thousands of users, the bank was able to consolidate systems, come up to date with their capabilities, and allow customers to view their banking statements online from one system. Staff also moved from PC-based search and retrieval to browser-based cloud access as well.

What’s New With CMOD

New features are regularly added to CMOD, alongside new innovations by its IBM partners, such as DAS, a Gold-certified IBM partner. 

 

New data encryption and hashing models for security, as well as active-active redundancy, are available. Data storage can also be extended to support Amazon S3, Hadoop HDFS, Openstack Swift Object Store, Azure Cloud, and IBM Cloud Object Storage. 

 

CMOD has also included external encryption key management, and ODWEK REST API support in the release of CMOD 10.5 in 2020 for Multiple platforms, including z/OS.

 

The IBM Content Navigator (“ICN”) puts everything CMOD can offer right in the web browser for any authorized user to access.

 

The CMOD Full Text Search opens new possibilities to search inside PDFs and image documents to unlock potential value never accessed by previous systems.

 

The CMOD Enhanced Retention Management solution allows for placing documents on hold, which suspends their expiration until the hold is lifted.

 

The CMOD Report Distribution can send reports or bundles of reports to users via email.

 

The CMOD PDF Indexer can de-duplicate, compress, index, and save terabytes of space in already efficient systems. 

 

With new PDF load streamlining and optimizing, clients can experience faster indexing and loading, which can slow down customer interactions and cause poor customer satisfaction.

 

One challenge many CMOD users have is including inserts alongside the regular documents delivered. The ability to automatically present all these various sized and sourced inserts into one PDF document to the end customer is a huge time and cost saver to the organizations that implement it. The paper mail savings alone on those who opt-out is a great opportunity, while still maintaining any regulatory inserts and important information.

CMOD End of Service Dates

The real key to any effective CMOD implementation is its regular assessment and update schedule, enhancement, and maintenance. The potential to extract the maximum amount of value out of the data your organization is sitting on today rests in this planning.

 

The significant speed improvements, access improvements, security improvements, and cost saving improvements, add up to a high priority project in most any organization. 

 

Contact us at DAS today to find out about your particular CMOD system and whether you are due for an assessment, upgrade, enhancement, or maybe just recommendations on options to upgrade or patch any insufficiencies.

 

The DAS team has also migrated a number of CMOD on-premise customers to the Cloud and has utilities developed that ensure for a cost-effective and seamless migration.

About DAS

For three decades, DAS has built its business on first listening to its client’s unique needs and challenges. Without a strong relationship-based consulting approach, DAS would not be able to continually return award-winning, best-in-class solutions to the world’s most respected organizations.

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