Ripcord’s new Vice President of Product Management, Jason Likins, brings over 20 years of content experience to the role, and his excitement is evident in the way he speaks of his new employer.

Likins was most recently at OpenText, where he worked for 14 years, but has repositioned himself at a company that brims with opportunity.

Ripcord separates itself with technologies for Robotics, Recognition, and Repository, all under one roof . . . the robots are very distinctive, and no one else has this concept of robotics to assist in extracting value from content. We can learn a lot from it . . . we can start leveraging the intelligence that we get out of content and hook that into data-driven processes for automation, analytics, and integration with primary business applications. Ripcord is taking the lead as it looks to shed a light on the dark data challenges in the content management world.

Background in Software

Likins got his start in computer software in the early ‘90s at Micro Focus, formerly known as NetManage and NetSoft. From there Likins moved to New Dimension Software, which would become BMC Software, where he worked with system and performance management as Product Manager for the company. He then assumed the same position at Quest Software and says it was here that his experience in content grew exponentially.

Likins managed a product line for Quest called Vista Plus, which did report and output management, and it would eventually be sold to OpenText. Likins would begin working at OpenText shortly after, and there he saw the company go through rapid and tremendous growth and acquisition. At the time of the Vista Plus sale the Canadian software company was worth between $100 and $150 million, and now OpenText is valued at around $3 billion in revenue.

At OpenText Likins helped define OpenText strategies and visions around enterprise content management – he got his start as Director of Business Operations and would rise to become VP of Report & Output Management for the business unit, before he was promoted to VP of Product Management.

While at OpenText Likins watched as the markets shifted from monolithic on-premises application for content management to content service components in the cloud, and this nicely mirrored his move to Ripcord.

Working at Ripcord

Transitioning to his position as Ripcord VP of Product Management in early December, Likins is enthusiastic about all the opportunities for content enrichment.

This includes enrichment of both paper and digital content, files that Likins refers to as being part of a data “landfill” for companies.

“Right now, most content is generated and put into what we would call a digital landfill. It’s just a place where users are dumping their files and records into a central repository without any profiling or structure to that content. If there’s no enrichment and categorization of that content before it goes in, it’s not very usable or valuable. In fact, it can become a risk to the organization and leads to repository ROT (redundant, obsolete and trivial content),” Likins said.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies have caught up to market initiatives for digital transformation. These shifts have enabled Ripcord to provide auto-classification and categorization, as well as determine rank, relevance, and related links to other content so that it’s enriched and can act as a “force-multiplier” to drive data driven business processes like automation, analytic insights, and integration with third-party products.

“Ripcord is focusing its enrichment structure on one that will fit with any industry,” Likins continues, “as well as utilizing cloud-native services. There’s currently a transition going on in the industry towards mircoservices, and Ripcord’s cloud-first philosophy allows us to build a top content enrichment solution from the ground up.”

“Each vertical industry has their own language and taxonomy when classifying content. We’re not going to be all things to all people for each industry, so we will partner in those areas to help define the taxonomy and can parse through the content and extract high confidence structured and enriched metadata that shines a light on your dark data and avoids the pitfalls of digital landfills.”

It’s clear Likins is primed and ready to keep Ripcord at the forefront of enriching content as companies look to gain a competitive edge in their digital transformation journeys.

Likins will be sharing more on the vision he and his team have for Ripcord in coming months, so keep an eye on the blog for more insights!