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The news of OpenText planning to gobble up Vignette and the recent Interwoven acquisition by Autonomy sees a new chapter for these grandees of content management and I think is further evidence in the shifts that have been occurring in this market around Enterprise Content Management and what organisations really want to do.
I’ve often described ECM as turning your organisation into a filing system, a necessary activity that keeps everything neat, ordered and regulatory compliant. It brings operational efficiencies and it can even help save the planet as you de-dupe and remove all that redundant server room kit.
The functionality and products of an ECM suite are all about that business function of keeping stuff ordered, records management, document management, asset management etc. Over the past 5 years this is the path that both Interwoven and Vignette set themselves strategically on, mainly through acquisition. This was the path to becoming the new SAP or IBM and to becoming the System Integrators friend through alignment with big business change and major IT projects. Documentum, arguably the ECM pioneer was swallowed up by a storage company EMC (which kinda emphasises the point).
In the meantime, specialised Web Content Management vendors had stuck to their knitting, detected the shift toward agile solutions for business users and away from big IT projects. Technically organisations started to go “small IT” to bet their on-line business on Open Source, SaaS, Microsoft and away from the traditional platform of the web (Sun/Oracle).
Many vendors have prospered in a vibrant space that Vignette and Interwoven originally helped shape, driven by new business focused mantras of “ease of use” and “quick time to value” – of engaging the marketer, the communicator or anyone outside IT who has a message to deliver over the web.
These are things that I have always considered as delivering on the promise of content management software – yes you need the IT stuff to work, yes you need governance, but to truly deliver it’s about democratizing the contribution and user adoption. The web site as a business tool.
To put it very simply, you have a divergence of ECM and WCM – but I don’t identify myself with you as a brand because you have a neat and tidy warehouse or you are Sarbanes-Oxley complaint – it’s good to know, but it’s not what I like about you.
The challenge to the marketer is not about simply publishing content, it’s about what our websites are for – the audience – or more specifically the websites role in persuading, encouraging, educating, communicating – engaging the audience to act.
This is a trend that really came through at Internet World this year in London, with vendors and speakers talking engagement (some based solely on a screenshot of Google Analytics).
So, what interests me about the two acquisitions (so far, it’s still early) is that the OpenText path appears to be doggedly ECM (with a bit of social media), whilst Autonomy is talking the language of engaging with the visitor – making the Interwoven acquisition look far more interesting.
Also published on my personal blog.
Good post acquisition comment Ian – made a few points on your personal blog but had some more thoughts…
A lot of commentary around the Open Text acquisition of Vignette focuses on benefit to shareholders and strategic positioning. Whether this will benefit existing or potential Vignette customers in the longer term is clearly debatable and people rightly look at Open Text’s acquisition history with the likes of Ixos, Guass and Reddot.
This I think is why commentators are drawing comparisons to Alterian and the Morello, Immediacy and Pepperio products it has acquired.
If I look at this from a CMS consultant and project implementor perspective then I’m looking to understand how those products have benefited from acquisition and why Alterian Content Manager should be on the next evaluation checklist.
In what ways now for instance are Morello and Immediacy (of which I am obviously familiar) better for creating and managing engaging web experiences than they were before? How and where do the Alterian email marketing and analytics capabilities add more value than alternative integrated solutions would?
I must admit I do find it confusing that Alterian talks about ‘Content Manager’ in the singular http://www.alterian.com/solutions/content_management.aspx when its corporate (Immediacy) and enterprise (Morello) solutions are fundamentally quite different in approaches (page based versus component for example). Is this changing or is this irrelevant in the greater integration picture?
You raise a lot of questions here James and I am not quite sure that a comment here is the right forum for me to address all of them – but I’ll do my best and be happy to have a conversation to flesh it out for you.
Alterian is on a journey of multi-channel customer engagement, of which content is a strategic part – as I refer to in my post.
The first fruits of that has been e-mail integration and we will be shortly announcing exciting products for analysing visitors behaviour and using that actionable insight in the delivery of content as this vision solidifies into product over the coming year.
You saw my pitch at Internet World, that should have given you a fair idea of where we are going. This message has really resonated, the challenge of engagement facing marketers and communicators today. Beside our customers, our partners and analysts seem also to agree.
Our commitment to WCM as a standalone proposition and therefore to the products that support that proposition are vital to that strategy. I think the proof is in the fact that I can look back proudly on the last couple of quarters at all the new folks that have chosen our software, from across our marketplace.
However exciting I may find our future, all of these guys – including the CMS consultants and the projects implementers you refer to – have evaluated our software as it best meets their requirements today.
Thanks for taking the time to reply Ian. I’ve read the information I picked up from your presentation at IW in detail and really love the roadmap and vision both the documents and your presentation describes.
As a web marketer from the outset of the commercial web, these are things I have been striving to achieve in web projects for many years and is one of the main reasons I won’t personally label the Alterian acquisition in the same way other CMS acquisitions have been labelled by analysts over the years.
I think what I’m struggling most with here is the Corporate and Enterprise flavours of Alterian Content Manager and this is the aspect that commentators have drawn an analogy to with Open Text and Vignette. Your answer has the visionary buzzwords but I’m still very unclear on quite what this actually means for the Morello and Immediacy product lines.
I can see where the roadmap and vision for both WCM and the Integrated Marketing Platform fit well with Morello and its underlying architecture. The WCM roadmap describes “centralized asset management, personalization and dynamic rendering across channels to optimize the customer experience”. However, wouldn’t achieving this with Immediacy’s architecture mean Immediacy just becoming Morello. Therefore what’s most unclear is how much of the roadmap and vision will I get as an Immediacy customer and how much requires a much bigger investment in Morello and the integrated marketing platform?
This is not entirely objective feedback as I do understand something about Immediacy and Morello but does represent the sort of questions your presentation, brochures, website and IW stand chats have raised recently.