My colleague, Principal Analyst Bernhard Schaffrik, and I attended Hyland’s Community Live user conference in person, August 27–28, 2025, in Las Vegas. We came away with a sense that Hyland has finally found its groove. There was a sense of excitement, a new focus on innovation, and continued commitment to its key verticals. Hyland, a veteran vendor in the enterprise content management (ECM) market, has expanded its offerings in recent years by adding intelligent document processing (IDP), robotic process automation, and other related technologies to its portfolio.

The day-one keynote by President and CEO Jitesh Ghai outlined his vision for enterprises to be powered by intelligent agents, leveraging their enterprise information including content, process, and integrated enterprise applications. The day-two keynote from new Chief Product Officer Michael Campbell recapped Hyland’s delivery on its 2024–25 roadmap and outlined new product announcements for 2025–26.

Key Announcements

Hyland continues to expand the layers of capabilities it will offer in its Content Innovation Cloud (CIC), originally announced in 2024. Expect new offerings that will be available to Hyland customers regardless of their content repositories (Perceptive, Alfresco, Nuxeo, OnBase — aka PANO) that may be in use, including:

  • Enterprise Context Engine (ECE). Described as a “living record of enterprise activity,” ECE will help customers set a foundation for intelligent agents by overlaying knowledge graphs, enriched metadata, and industry-specific ontologies on their document repositories and established workflows. ECE is intended to understand processes, decisions, and content, including historical activities in audit trails. As described by Ghai, “context is the big unlock” that will help agents mine institutional memory and deliver governed, auditable decision-making.
  • Enterprise Agent Mesh and Agent Builder. Leveraging the Context Engine, the Agent Mesh will be a network of AI agents that can be chained together and work across lines of business. Hyland is using its vertical lens to go deep on common scenarios in healthcare, government, and financial services, among others. An Agent Builder tool (available now) allows power users to create agents using natural language. These agents can be connected and integrated into existing workflows in OnBase, Alfresco, or Nuxeo. Upcoming enhancements for the Agent Builder will include more observability, telemetry, integration with knowledge graphs, and third-party app compatibility.
  • Cloud Content Repository and plans to make it open source. At long last, Hyland has its cloud-native, AI-ready next-generation content platform. Drawing from the best of Nuxeo and Alfresco, this new headless repository is designed for “extreme scale.” The news at Community Live was that Hyland intends to make the code available as open source. This will put the power of a new-generation content platform into the hands of developers and architects and encourage them to build. Hyland, however, has not yet announced the open-source license under which it will be available, so how and where this new repository can be used by developers or ISVs is not yet clear. The source will be made available via the Alfresco Community GitHub.
  • Content Federation Service. While Content Federation Service was announced just before Community Live, ongoing investment in federation services will be key for the success of the overall Content Innovation Cloud strategy. Large enterprises typically have many systems storing content, and these capabilities help organizations tap into the content sitting in third-party systems, such as SharePoint Online. This is not federated search — these services will include secure connections, metadata mapping, and normalization across other ECM systems, as well as enterprise applications (such as CRM). Customers looking to benefit from the content intelligence, IDP, process management, or other CIC services can now do so without having to migrate their content from other platforms.

What It Means For Hyland Customers

Hyland customers across the PANO product lines have a whole world of innovation opportunities opening up to them. Our advice:

  • Take the opportunity to “modernize without migration.” Alfresco Founder John Newton, now at Hyland as chief innovation strategist, used this phrase, and I think it fits well. Hyland is in a strong position to meet customers where they are, and for many, this means that they will still run on-premises. Hyland is not only building more automated upgrade tools for on-prem environments but is making the layers of new services in the Content Innovation Cloud available to these customers. Adding AI, automation, content intelligence, and IDP doesn’t require organizations to migrate to a new platform.
  • Hold Hyland to its promises. Hyland has notably improved its pace of innovation and delivery over the last two years. There has been significant change in the company, however, including an entirely new layer of C-level executives over the last 18 months. Customers must demand that the fundamentals of technical support and professional services for their core investments don’t get lost in the push for AI and agents.

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