Last week, I joined our American team to attend Hyland SKO, where we were invited as partners. It was an outstanding kickoff: a very motivating keynote and, unsurprisingly, a strong emphasis on AI, enterprise context engineering, and agent meshes—continuing the direction that had already been outlined at CommunityLIVE last August. I could engage with tons of people, better explaining the value of ARender on top of Hyland ECMs, and even showcase the new AI native capabilities of ARender, augmented with Uxopian AI.
What struck me most and talked to my heart was the importance given to transparency in the messaging. As a partner, I found this to be a very strong signal. Throughout the sessions, transparency came up repeatedly as a core value for Hyland and was nicely illustrated. Clear offerings, co-selling approaches, open roadmaps, readable structuring of strategic goals, positioning, target markets—there was even sharing of key figures, along with some refreshingly honest discussions about market challenges and impediments.
Let’s put Hyland aside for a moment and reflect more broadly on the notion of transparency. One might think transparency simply means publishing a roadmap at minimum, or open-sourcing software at best.
In reality, it goes much further than that. I would argue that before being transparent with others, a company must first be transparent with itself, in regard to the strategy it adopts. That means having a clear and tangible corporate strategy, a well-defined marketing positioning, and a coherent go-to-market motion. Without those three elements, any attempt at transparency falls flat: what you share is neither clear nor truly understandable.
Transparency is also about operational excellence. How easy is it to extract and share a relevant subset of your pipeline with a partner? How long does it take to get an NDA signed? How costly is it, internally, to disclose open-source dependencies, known CVEs, quality gates, security reviews, or audit results? If all of this is too complex, you will have hard time achieving transparency, not because you don't want, but because your not properly tooled and processed.
Finally, transparency extends to the day-to-day experience of working with the software. Is the documentation easy to access? As an engineer, do I have clear sequence diagrams for critical parts of the system? Can I access the source code to attach a debugger and understand what is really happening when something does not work as expected?
Transparency matters and transparency is hard!
At Uxopian Software, we are also deliberately working to make progress on transparency, knowing that it is not a one-off initiative, but a continuous discipline that shapes how we think, build, and collaborate