Entries Tagged 'Content management' ↓

There is news that EMC has a new partnership with FatWire Software for WCM.  There are a few components to this deal, as we understand it:

• EMC will resell FatWire Content Server in a new package called EMC Web Experience Management by FatWire.
• EMC will have rights to resell the whole FatWire portfolio.
• EMC has made an undisclosed equity investment in FatWire.
• FatWire will resell the EMC DAM product.
• FatWire will develop apps on Documentum xCP.

It’s a substantial partnership and an admission that EMC’s own efforts in WCM weren’t cutting it with customers.  Still, it falls short of the rumored acquisition.  Why?  The two vendors claim a partnership gives EMC access to high-end WCM technology while letting FatWire remain nimble enough to develop products quickly and be more responsive to market needs — the equity investment is meant to help FatWire along these lines.  This makes some sense as acquired WCM often gets lost in a larger ECM vendor.  But with the market consolidation that has already occurred in this sector, EMC is taking on some risk relying on a third-party for its WCM rather than owning it outright.

Apparently it’s a risk EMC is willing to take, which we take to mean that WCM isn’t seen as strategic enough to EMC to do the acquisition.  That’s not all that surprising really.  WCM is as much (if not more) a part of marketing automation these days as it is part of the sorts of ECM apps EMC is invested in.  Buying WCM at this point would mean making some commitment to continued innovation in areas of online marketing (e.g., multivariate testing, web analytics etc.) that don’t relate much to other areas of EMC’s business.  EMC is focusing on its core transactional document management apps and information governance opportunities that tie records management to archiving and e-discovery.  WCM doesn’t really have much to do with any of that.

FatWire’s products will essentially replace EMC’s WCM assets (though EMC hasn’t yet announced specific products or timelines for end-of-life, but that will come) and so this is potentially a boon to FatWire’s sales, insomuch as EMC can sell FatWire’s software.  If this partnership does have a material impact on FatWire’s sales, it could impact its ability to be acquired by another vendor, at least at a valuation it might want.  So this could be a big deal for FatWire, one way or another.

Such a busy three days at Gilbane Boston this year, I hardly had time to even follow the tweet stream from the event.  I was involved in four sessions and best I can do at this point is to recap a few of the key highlights from each.

The open source session I presented with Seth Gottlieb got some good response and was apt I think given the much larger presence of open source at the show overall this year.  Someone told me (but I didn’t confirm) that last year there were two open source booths on the show floor and this year there were six (dotCMS, Hippo, Nuxeo, Magnolia and Plone were the ones I counted – who am I missing?).  Alfresco and Acquia were notably absent I thought, though were both were represented on a couple of panels.

Open source also came up in the panel I moderated on portals, as we had Chris Stavros from LEVEL Studios there and Chris has done a lot of work with the Liferay portal.  We also had Glenn Mannke, Director of Intranet Development at Starwood Hotels and Resorts, talking with us about how they use Oracle Portal and how embedded this is in their overall infrastructure.  Russ Edelman lent his SharePoint perspective as did John Petersen from Sutro Software who has worked with the Vignette (now Open Text) portal for a number of years.  I’ll sum up the key takeaways from this panel as:

• Portals never went away, even though the marketing died down.  They were victims of the hype earlier in the decade.  Glenn in particular emphasized how portals are only becoming more important in his organization as the number of tools and apps they manage proliferate.
• John and Chris likened portals to a new Web OS that delivers application and infrastructure services.
• We spent some time talking about what those services are exactly and the panelists agreed that identity management and SSO are crucial.
• There was also some interesting discussion about client-side vs. server-side portals.  Is an app that can aggregate little windows on a screen a portal?  The panelists gave a resounding “no” to this question, given the lack of infrastructure services noted above.
• And portal standards (e.g., JSR 286) weren’t noted as being particularly important.

I thought portals might also come up on the panel I hosted on social publishing.  This brought WCM vendors together with pure social software plays for a discussion about where these two market sectors are headed.  It was perhaps not quite as heated as I’d hoped, but there was a bit of controversy.  David Carter, CTO from Awareness and Adam Mertz, Product Marketer at Jive, admitted that their systems don’t do WCM and that many customers still need that function (I think particularly for external sites), but that social is important enough to warrant its own layer in the stack.  They argued that WCM systems aren’t architected to support the dynamic nature of social media.  Lars Trieloff from Day Software and Dmitri Tcherevik of FatWire definitely didn’t agree.  Bryan House of Acquia (Drupal) argued that open source does the best job blending the two.

In general though, I think the panelists agreed that social is becoming part of so many other things (there was some discussion of CRM + social as well).  That still leaves me scratching my head as to the future of the pure social software vendors (I asked if Jive might also get into WCM, but, not surprisingly, didn’t get a direct answer).

SharePoint came up in all of these sessions, as it also did on the analyst panel, not surprisingly as SharePoint has an impact in social, portals, WCM and just about every other aspect of ECM.  Microsoft had a big presence at Gilbane this year, a little surprising to me since Gilbane is generally a pretty WCM-focused show. I had the chance to sit down for about an hour with Ryan Duguid, a Microsoft product manager for ECM in the SharePoint group.  He insisted SharePoint plays in .com-type WCM scenarios and pointed me to this list, which I have seen before.  It’s just doesn’t seem to come up much though in talking with clients and vendors about WCM.  And I don’t see too much in the 2010 release that looks to change that.  Am I missing something?

Overall, a good lively show.  I heard attendance was up and the exhibit hall was full of vendors – there never seems to be a lull in the influx of new vendors to this space.  Lots of interesting conversations about social, open source and online marketing, which all bodes well for a continued vibrant market in 2010.

The annual Gilbane content management event is two weeks away, slated for December 1-3 here in Boston.   I’ve got a full dance card this year and am busily prepping for several sessions:

The Rise of Open Source in Content Management

Open source guru Seth Gottleib and I will present this session on what’s happening with open source content management.  I’m going to take a very market-focused look, updating some of the work I did in a report (sorry, 451 login required) earlier this year on the group of European (or otherwise international) open source players entering the US market.  I’ll also incorporate some preliminary data being gathered and analyzed now by 451’s CAOS (Commercial Adoption of Open Source) team on open source adoption drivers and benefits generally.  Seth will look at how open source affects both software procurement and selling processes and offer lots of good advice for those contemplating or already working with open source content management software.

Are Enterprise Portals Back?

This panel will no doubt take me back to the days (I hate to say 10 years ago) when I was an analyst dedicated wholly to the enterprise portal market.  Is there even any such thing anymore?  The users and consultants on this panel will discuss that, along with the role of portal (and other) standards, SharePoint and open source.  I’m keen to discuss whether or not portal adoption has ever really waned, even though all the marketing buzz around portals surely died down.  Are the drivers today any different than they were ten years ago?  Or does the rise of social software in fact make portals more useful than ever, as an aggregation technology for social content and functions?  Even if present-day social software vendors steer far clear of the portal lingo…

Social Publishing and WCM

On this panel, some senior folks from Acquia, Awareness, Day Software, FatWire Software and Jive Software will debate the intersection, overlap and potential convergence of social software and WCM.  As it features WCM vendors with a social software play, pure social software vendors and Acquia (Drupal probably comes closest to sitting somewhere in between), it is likely to be a lively discussion.  I hope to get the panelists talking about the difference between community sites and community features and how this distinction can affect product selection, particularly for different use cases.  Is there an ongoing play for social software products that can’t address content management needs?  Or is WCM likely to be overtaken by social alternatives (likely a hard sell to this content management audience)?  Is it really about integration?  Will the markets consolidate?  And where does SharePoint fit in all of this?

And finally, I’ll sit in on the annual analyst panel as well.  It will be a busy couple of days but please do drop me a note if you’ll be there.

Most of the information management team are attending the 4th annual 451 client event, which takes place in Boston next week, November 2-3, so I thought I’d let you know what we’re up to.

Four of us are presenting, here’s the dates/times (all ET) and themes:

• Nov 3, 3.30-4.15: Matt Aslett – Open source to the rescue?

Can open source really help enterprises cut costs and ride out the economic storm? What has been the impact of current conditions on open source adoption? How is this being reflected in the business strategies of vendors – both open source specialists and traditional proprietary vendors?

• Nov 4, 11.00-11.45: Nick Patience & Kathleen Reidy – E-Discovery to Information Governance: From Reactive, Unavoidable Cost to Proactive Cost-Avoidance.

E-discovery is a market without a lot of discretionary spending – legal events and investigations occur, and require that organizations produce relevant electronic information, no matter the difficulties or costs. This fact has driven lots of vendors from various sectors to the e-discovery (also known as e-disclosure) market: it is driving business in the archiving, enterprise content management and enterprise search markets, as organizations want to figure out how to better prepare for litigation before it occurs.

• Nov 4, 11.45-12.30: Simon Robinson –  Storage Technology Is Thriving in the Economic Downturn

The economy is shrinking, but data is growing. Almost universally, storage vendors claim they can help IT ‘do more with less’ by squeezing more value out of storage assets to meet rampant data growth and stiffer retention criteria. This presentation will examine how three key trends in storage innovation – optimization, unification and the cloud – are helping some storage vendors thrive in this uncertain climate. The session will conclude with a vendor panel discussion.

Henry Baltazar is also attending and we’re all avaiable for 1:1s, though some of our days are getting pretty near to full. Contact your account rep about booking a slot.

If you are a client and you’re not attending then you’re missing out on one of the key beneifts of being a client!

If you’re not a client and you wish to attend, you can do that too, only you’ll have to pay to get in. Either way, you can register here.

Beyond information management all our other themes will be address including cloud (a lot!), security, virtualization, eco-efficient IT and our popular M&A panel, which always comes right before cocktails on day 1.

See you there!

This Thursday I’ll host a short webinar to discuss some of the findings from our recently-published report on the emerging Information Governance market.  This report looks at how archiving, records management and e-discovery technologies are coming together to help organizations get a better handle on internal data for litigation readiness and compliance purposes.

The webinar is free and open to anyone, so please feel free to join if you’re interested in this topic.

During the webinar, I’ll outline some of the trends we uncovered while doing our research for this report, look at the vendor landscape and M&A activity in this area, and briefly discuss some of the technologies that we think will be important in this sector moving forward.

Here’s the info and registration link:

The Rise of Information Governance webinar

Thursday, September 24, 2009

12:00 – 1:00 PM EDT

Register here

Recorded versions of our webcasts are available on our site a short while after the events are over.

Our lengthy report that shares a title with this blog post hit the wire yesterday (a high-level exec overview is available here for all).  I’ve blogged before about our efforts on this.  It has been quite a project, with several months of listening, reading and talking with lots IT managers, attorneys, integrators, consultants and vendors.  Oh and writing — the final doc weighs in at 57 pages…

I noted before that I wasn’t sure “information governance” was a specific or real enough sector to warrant this kind of market analysis.  Aren’t we really just talking about archiving?  Or e-discovery?  Or ECM?  In the end, I found we’re talking about all these things, but what is different is that we’re talking about them all together. How do we ensure consistent retention policy across different stores?  How do we safely pursue more aggressive disposition?  How do we include all that “in-the-wild” content in centrally managed policies?

Is “information governance” really the right tag for this?  I don’t know, but I never came across anything better (I did toy with “information retention management” for awhile).  We  might be calling it something else in a couple of years, but the underlying issues are very real.

From the report intro:

What is information governance? There’s no single answer to that question. At a high level, information governance encompasses the policies and technologies meant to dictate and manage what corporate information is retained, where and for how long, and also how it is retained (e.g., protected, replicated and secured). Information governance spans retention, security and lifecycle management issues. For the purposes of this report, we’re focusing specifically on unstructured (or semi-structured,
like email) information and governance as it relates primarily to litigation readiness.

In the report, we look at why organizations are investigating more holistic information governance practices:

• to be better prepared for litigation
• to ensure compliance
• to reduce risks and costs of unmanaged or inconsistently managed information

Then we go into the market with analysis of:

• the rise of email (and broader) archiving for litigation readiness
• the relationship of the ECM and records management market
• Autonomy and other vendors advocating “in-place” approaches to governance

There are also sections on adoption issues, market consolidation and areas for technology innovation.  And profiles of 15 vendors (each with a SWOT analysis) active in this market.

Expect lots more on this topic moving forward.

I want to revisit a few of the relevant questions that came via the webinar I did last week with Bryan House from Acquia on open source social publishing.  We got to some of these on the call, but not all, and some of the more market-level questions seem worthy of sharing.

The webinar focused on both the coming together of social software and WCM, and on open source content management; these questions do too.

Q: Why is open source a disruptive force in the social web CMS space?

I started out my part of the preso talking a little bit about The 451 Group and our focus on disruption and innovation in IT.  I mentioned this includes disruptive technologies, business models or larger market changes.  Open source certainly fits into the disruptive business model category (though, I know, open source is not a business model).   Open source can impact how technology in a particular sector is developed, distributed, procured, priced and supported.  This isn’t new in content management; open source projects like Drupal have been around for quite some time.

But as more vendors are making a go of businesses tied to open source code in content management, the dynamic is changing.  Open source is becoming more of a viable option in content management for even the largest of organizations and that is something that is only going to get more pronounced.   And some of the open source projects (like Drupal and WordPress) seem to do a particularly noteworthy job of tying CMS and social software capabilities (of varying types) together.  An interesting fact, I think, as it shows that when a community drives software development in this area, it combines these two areas together, an indication of what the larger market may want.

Q: Tools like Interwoven or Vignette are often described as more “enterprise-ready” than open source alternatives?  How big is the delta?  How should I evaluate whether particular differences are important?

In general, Interwoven, Vignette et al. have had more of a focus on online marketing capabilities the last couple of years and so have more in the way of content targeting, analytics, multivariate testing and so forth to offer.  But I don’t think this is what people usually mean when they say a CMS is “enterprise ready” — I think that’s more to do with things like LDAP/AD support, migration and upgrade tools, platform/commercial database support and so on.  The reality is that a lot of commercial open source content management vendors do offer these capabilities but often only in an “enterprise” edition of the code that may only be available under a commercial license. The key is just to ensure that a particular distribution meets your requirements under a license that works for your project.

Q: What questions should I ask a vendor to understand how tightly integrated their social software and web content management capabilities are?

There are several models here.  Some vendors have built some social capabilities directly into their WCM products, basically with the idea that most of this as it relates to content sites isn’t too much more than defining a content type (e.g., blog, comment, profile) and its attributes.  Some mostly support plugging in third-party blogs, forums etc.  Others have separate social software modules.  In some cases these have come via acquisitions and others have been built from scratch and so integration levels vary.  Some share a content repository and some don’t.  So there’s quite a bit of variety and, as usual, it’s mostly just important to make sure however a vendor has done it works for your project.  If you just want to add support for comments to an existing content-heavy site, using the integrated features from a WCM vendor probably works fine. If it’s a full-blown, forum-heavy customer support site, more of a stand-alone product (whether from a WCM or social software vendor) might work best.

Q: How will the recent transactions (Vignette & Interwoven) impact this market?

The consolidation at the high end of the market has a number of vendors scrambling to get some advantage.  Competitor FatWire Software has a formal “rescue” program and others are certainly having similar discussions with customers.  Customers looking to migrate or to evaluate a wider field of WCM options may well look at open source, as the broader availability of products from commercial vendors makes this a more viable option.

In the midst of a busy month, working through some really intriguing stuff as part of our upcoming  Special Report on Information Governance, but I’ll also be part of some interesting upcoming events.

On June 17th, I’ll be in NYC taking part in an event being put on by open source CMS provider Squiz, as part of its US launch.   I’ll be presenting on trends in the WCM market with a specific focus on the growth of commercial open source content management.  This ties in somewhat with a report I did earlier in the year (for 451 Group clients), “Open source content management: It’s coming to America.”  This looked mostly at the trend of European open source CMS providers moving to the US market.  Squiz started out in lovely Sydney, Australia but is part of the same trend nonetheless.

Also in the open source realm, on June 18th, I’ll be taking part in a webinar hosted by Acquia, the commercial entity looking to put a commercial support and services for Drupal on the map.  Here we’ll be discussing open source surely but also the increasing overlap between WCM and social software.   This will reprise to some degree the talk I gave on this topic at the AIIM event in Philly earlier this year.

Then of course there is the Enterprise 2.0 show here in Boston, June 23-25.  I have limited time at the conference this year unfortunately (my information governance work beckons), but if you’ll be there drop me a line.

As something of a follow-up to the special report we did last fall on the market for eDiscovery tools and technologies, we’ve begun work on a similar report meant to look more deeply at that first process phase in the EDRM — Information Management.

Information management sounds like a nice manageable topic, doesn’t it?

We’re looking specifically at the market for technologies meant to help organizations manage unstructured info (often ad-hoc, like email and unmanaged docs) more effectively so that eDiscovery won’t be such a firedrill if and when it occurs.

eDiscovery isn’t the only reason to get a better handle on this ad-hoc, unstructured info — there are compliance-related reasons in some cases and the costs and risks associated with storing lots of stuff for long periods of time when it should have been culled or deleted.  Conversely, not retaining information or at least having a documented retention and disposition plan is also risky.

As we’ve noted before, some are calling this “information governance.”  So is this a report on the information governance market?  Is there such a thing?

Here are some of the things we’re learning so far with our research:

• There’s no question that governance is a hot issue with many organizations.  Getting a better handle on email is the biggest pain point.  Check out this recent AIIM survey for some interesting data on this.
• Better preparedness for eDiscovery is the biggest driver, followed by the complexity of compliance, the need to reduce costs, and security concerns (security-related governance is really a separate market and not one we’re looking at here).
• One of the fundamental questions seems to come down to whether organizations want to take an archive-based approach to governance or one that is tied to an ECM platform.
• Since email is the big problem, email archives are a big part of the solution for many companies.
• Email archives are expanding to handle more diverse content types with more sophisticated retention, classification, legal holds and eDisco tools.
• The disconnect with this approach seems to be when emails or other content actually are records and need to be managed as such.  How data moves from one system (e.g., archive to records management system) or is managed in-place in an archive by an RM system seems to be mostly an unexplored issue for most organizatins at this point.
• Because of this, ECM vendors paint archive-only vendors as “point tools.”  ECM vendors see governance as an ECM problem and come at with platforms that generally include both archiving and records management.  But the archives from ECM vendors are generally newer or not traditionally as competitive in pure archiving scenarios.

All of the above makes for quite an interesting, if difficult to label, market.  We’re not really writing a report on the ECM market, since the archives are so critical to handling email especially, the major problem area, and most of the leading email archiving vendors are not full ECM vendors.  But there is definitely an ECM and records management component to this so we’re not just profiling the email archiving market.  In fact, we’re trying to only profile those vendors that can manage multiple content types and, ideally, do so across repositories.

Which I think leaves us talking about the information governance market.  This concerns me a little bit, as I worry that “information governance” is a vague tag and not really an identifiable sector.  But I see no other easy way to describe the intersection of vendors and technologies we see coming at this problem from different areas of strength.

I’d love any comments on what others think about this – is information governance a market?

Open Text discussed its acquisition of Vignette on its earnings call this afternoon.  The stated rationale is:

• Add last remaining major ECM play to Open Text’s portfolio.
• Access to Vignette’s customer base, improve service and support (i.e., try to stabilize maintenance revenue).
• Cross-sell opportunities.

My thoughts:

• None of the above is particularly compelling.
• Open Text loves a bargain and apparently this one was too good to pass up.  Backing Vignette’s cash and short-term investments out of the deal, Open Text only paid 1x Vignette’s trailing twelve-month revenue.
• Open Text will maintain Vignette much as it has Hummingbird – keep the products mostly separate, try to hold onto the maintenance stream, cut Vignette’s costs.
• I don’t buy into product or technology-based reasons for Open Text wanting to own Vignette.  There’s tons of overlap.
• There will undoubtedly be some Vignette vs. RedDot struggles at Open Text over which is the WCM line of choice.  Interesting since WCM is only a sideline for Open Text in the big ECM picture anyway.
• A bargain can still bring headaches and there will be WCM competitors lining up to benefit from uncertainty (not that many WCM players seem to spend much competitive energies worrying about Vignette these days).

Our full deal analysis is available for 451 clients.