The WEM Marketplace: Blueberries and Ricotta As Web CMS products reached maturity, a standard set of features became core for most vendors (i.e. templating, workflows, in-context content preview, integration APIs, scalable architectures, delivery and caching, etc.) Things are different with Web Engagement Management. The industry is still trying to figure out what this WEM thing is [...]

If you haven’t been paying attention, EMC announced a strategic partnership with FatWire today.  I couldn’t be much more pleased.  I’ve been pretty clear that I don’t feel that EMC’s Documentum Web Publisher has the chops to compete in the market and that as long as its release cycle was tied to the Content Server, it never would.

That is no longer a problem.  What does this mean for EMC and FatWire?

• EMC now has a WCM offering! Yes, they are calling is Web Experience Management, which is a better term in many respects than Web Content Management, but the point is that EMC now has a viable story to tell people.  We’ll talk about the “Experience” aspect of it later.
• This is strategic to EMC and they want to succeed. Seems obvious, but they put some money where their mouth is.  EMC is buying a minority equity stake in FatWire.  That means that if FatWire does well, EMC does better.  It also gives an investment boost to FatWire.
• We have WCM Application Separation! FatWire can evolve their offering as fast as they desire in order to keep up with the other vendors in the space.  The joy is that FatWire can develop for the market and not what Gartner thinks an ECM solution should offer.  More, and tighter, integration between the two will make this a potentially strong offering.
• FatWire is selling Documentum Digital Asset Management. This is important because a stronger stream of license revenue for this product-line may mean more investment in the product.  Like many of the Documentum products, it is strong under the hood, but it isn’t the prettiest thing to look at in the showroom.

Lee Dallas has some good thoughts on this announcement, as does Barb Mosher over at CMS Wire.  Lee tackles the philosophical side of this partnership and Barb explains why this could be a win-win for both the companies and their clients.

There is a webinar on February 17th on the partnership.  It should provide some more insight on the marketing side of the solution.

Personally, we’ll know more in a year after we track one critical item, Execution.

EMC Documentum is announcing a new reseller relationship with Fatwire that will fundamentally change the way it competes in the web content management market. For those that are familiar with Documentum’s history in the web content management space this announcement will cause mixed reactions. Many forget that Documentum was actually one of the very first [...]

I’ve regularly covered annual reports, earnings announcements and other financial news about software vendors. These commentaries tend to stir debate and I am frequently asked why I bother to look behind the numbers. Is it really important?

Many vendors, in particular privately-held US-based ones, don’t publicly release audited numbers. Instead they carefully select a few positive numbers to share via a press release. An example of this is seemingly successful CMS-vendor Ektron, which claims to be open and transparent, but will tell you only that their sales grew 38%. If you are willing to sign a non-disclosure agreement, they’ll share more details on profitability, but can a vendor really claim to be transparent when you need to sign a contract to get some fundamental numbers about the financial health of the vendor?

In my view financial numbers and annual reports are a great way to gain insights about a vendor. These are the numbers you should indeed care about:

• Services revenue. A good example of this is FatWire, where your local key account manager might have told you that they are very committed to their partners, when in fact services bring in about 30% of the company’s total revenue.
• New license sales. If this is down, it will tell you that the vendor is having difficulty signing up new customers. This can be a sign that an acquisition is lurking around the corner, which is what happened to Vignette as they got acquired by Open Text.
• Maintenance and support revenue. If this makes up a large part of revenue, it means that the vendor has many customers who keep using the product. If you can get hold of a renewal percentage or average customer lifetime, it will tell you something about how long the customers stay with the product.
• A break-down of revenue by product will tell you which products are really strategic to the vendor. IBM and Google are examples of big vendors, to who far from all products are equally important. This might reveal which products are likely to become discontinued. This happened with Microsoft CMS
• Cash is king. Look at the cashflow to find out whether the vendor might be facing survival problems or is sitting on a pile of cash.

After looking at a few vendors, you’ll discover that the accounting models tend to differ hugely. Some will list licence sales straight away, while others will break it down and only list it partially over a given period. Some might also divide their revenue between a corporate entity and different geographic regions, e.g. CMS vendor Sitecore. Details like this obviously make it difficult to compare the numbers.

Finally, I would say that the past decade has showed that positive financial numbers by no means guarantee that your favourite vendor will not be acquired or that your favourite product will not be discontinued. 2009 saw quite a few acquisitions, most notably Adobe’s acquisition of  Omniture and Opentext which bought Vignette. I’m sure we will see more in 2010. These might not impact customers in the short-term, but down the road, they always also have significant impact, e.g. with closed regional offices, a new partner strategy or a cut in engineering spending.

How many websites these days are purely content-driven?

It’s hard to justify brochureware sites. How many people do business with you just because your website looks pretty? Organisations want websites that either generate an income or reduce pressure on more costly channels, like call centres. That means transactional web applications, not just web content management.

Yet content management is still required. Whether you’re updating marketing material to support your service offering or changing form labelling and layouts to ensure fewer drop-outs on transactions, the web team still needs to be able to make content changes without having to go through a lengthy development release process.

The simplest way to achieve this is to run two web applications separately, one driven by the content management system and the other by the transactional software, like eCommerce. You get your developers to style the two applications to look the same, run from similar URLs and hope that the web app gives you enough control to alter content that it’s responsible for, such as labels on form fields. This way you can keep system integration to a minimum. There are a couple of significant disadvantages, however. Firstly, if your site needs to change globally — a change to brand or navigation, for example — you have to update both systems. Secondly, you need to design your site in such a way that you keep content and transactions separate, which is very unlikely to lead to a successful user experience.

So what are your other options? You could take content managed through the CMS and embed it in the transactional application. This means that when you have a form field to complete which needs some guidance, that guidance can come from the CMS without the user having to abandon their transaction. But this creates problems of its own. You lose some of the key benefits of the CMS: relationships are harder to maintain between pieces of content and preview becomes nearly impossible.

This is why the transactional application is often embedded in the CMS. FatWire, for example, has just launched its Web Experience Management Framework, which should make this process easier, while Terminal Four also touts its integration with external systems. Yet irrespective of the CMS you use, you’re going to face some integration problems. There’s bound to be an element of custom code, issues with assuring decent performance from both the CMS and the transactional application, and above all design difficulties ensuring that the security of the user’s transaction is maintained by the delivery layer.

Another option is portal technology. In theory, portals enable you to deliver all your web applications in an integrated fashion and what’s more, do so incrementally, adding applications without having to change the core configuration. They’re also usually pretty good at managing sessions and user credentials. Portals bring their own problems however, not least cost of delivery, increased time to develop and un-friendly URLs.

So all four approaches have positives and negatives. There’s a niche in that market somewhere for a vendor. Until someone proves they’ve filled that niche however, you’re unlikely to be able to deliver a great business-driven website using just a web content management system.

Web Experience Management Provider Attributes Growth to Strong Product Delivery, Global Company Expansion, and New Programs

Mineola, NY – October 21, 2009 – FatWire Software, the largest independent Web Experience Management (WEM) provider, today announced that the company realized a 50% increase in license bookings from Q2 2009 to Q3 2009.

In Q3 alone, fourteen new customers joined FatWire including leading organizations across industries such as Amadeus, Bank of Western Australia, and Northwestern Memorial Hospital. In addition, ten existing customers expanded their FatWire implementations, including Elsevier, the Hartford, and PostBank. FatWire further extended its global presence in Q3 with the opening of a new Latin American office located in Brazil. Through this office FatWire will serve new and existing customers including iG and Grupo Santander.     

In the last 12 months FatWire has launched new capabilities across its product suite to enable organizations to create a web presence that will drive marketing, customer, and cost efficiency success.  Recent releases include new versions of its flagship Content Server web content management (WCM) product, the Engage content targeting module, its web content Analytics module, the TeamUp collaboration platform, and the FatWire Content Integration Platform. FatWire also launched a newly enhanced Global Partner Program, as well as a Customer Rescue Program designed to help legacy Vignette and Interwoven customers move to a next-generation web platform.

read more

Carilion Clinic Implements FatWire Content Server and eHealth Accelerator Solution To Better Engage with Patients and to Grow their Patient Base

Mineola, NY – October 6, 2009 – FatWire Software today announced that FatWire Content Server, the leading web content management (WCM) solution, and FatWire eHealth Accelerator were selected by Carilion Clinic to re-launch its corporate website, and deliver a web experience that will engage and inform its constituents.

Carilion selected eHealth Accelerator and FatWire Content Server to present visitors with the most up to date healthcare information and research. Developed by FatWire partner Element 115, a leading IT solutions provider focused on healthcare, eHealth Accelerator makes it easy to add healthcare information and other advanced features to sites managed by Content Server. This combined solution offers a media-rich resource center that gives consumers online access to patient and visitor information, a physician finder, clinical services, a health information library, health newsletters, and more.

Complete Story

There are many views on the future of content management, but what of the present tense? I wanted to highlight a few trends that we’re seeing from WCM software vendors.

Social WCM
Of course the web is social, but WCM has traditionally made quite clear distinctions between authoritative content that’s created and approved by authenticated users, and content that’s produced by non-authoritative sources, i.e. external users. This distinction has been somewhat blurred by people recently and vendors have had to respond to blogging software like WordPress that makes it far easier to add comments and user profiles. Many WCM vendors who previously didn’t provide social features now tout their software as web 2.0 ready and this is a signficant area of product development. Moreover, if you look at the ECM sector, vendors are focussing heavily on use of these social features to improve internal business processes, aka Enterprise 2.0.

Web campaign management
Your website is a marketing channel: understanding your market and its responsiveness to campaigns is increasingly important. Many WCM vendors are heavily promoting the campaign management side of their products and developing improved campaign reporting features. The aquisition of Mediasurface by Alterian and the inclusion of content management as part of an “integrated marketing platform” is a good indication of where one branch of the industry is heading. FatWire is also developing marketing products as part of what it calls its Web Experience Management Suite.

Content quality
If you’re going to use the web to market heavily and you have a lot of content, you need to ensure that your website meets the standards you have set your organisation. There are a number of tools on the market that help editorial teams assure that quality (such as those from Vamosa and SiteImprove). We’re also seeing vendors like SDL Tridion adding these modules to their core product offering. Assuring the quality of your web content should be a key aspect of WCM and these features are particularly welcome for distributed authoring teams.

Clearly, these three trends represent a far from exhaustive list, but they do go some way to illustrate how suppliers are positioning themselves in the WCM market. Hopefully this will give clients some degree of differentiation and an awareness of possibilities that web content management can offer them now.

If you want to know more about trends in the industry, take a look at this list of feeds.

I went into a restaurant
Lookin’ for the cook
I told them I was the editor
Of a famous etiquette book
- BOB DYLAN’S 115TH DREAM

So, Web Content Management has progressed from a Gartner MarketScope in 2008 to a Magic Quadrant in 2009. I’m normally quite a fan of Gartner, and was fortunate enough to hear Mick MacComascaigh (the lead WCM Analyst)  give a great presentation at a recent event. We even had a nice chat about WCM Maturity Models afterward. However, I’ve got to say that it’s quite difficult not to treat this research as a giant advert for Oracle. To start, here it is:

Gartner Magic Quadrant for WCM Aug 2009

Who Is It For?

I think the introduction to the research is interesting. It starts by listing who would benefit from it:

This Magic Quadrant will help CIOs, and business and IT leaders that are analyzing their Web strategies to assess whether they have the right WCM offering to support them.

This seems to list everyone except the people that are actually going to use the thing and, as a result, seems to place very little weight on the things I care most about: usability for the editors and a warm fuzzy feeling for the developers. The report is far more concerned about market share, geographical penetration and long term company prospects. History shows us that a typical WCM implementation have an average lifespan of only three years. Is this because the buyers aren’t thinking about long term CIO/Business/IT issues? Or is it because the world changes fast and we shouldn’t worry our pretty little heads too much about things too far in the future?

CMS Watch had something to say about the report, mainly around the fact that it is too high level and strategic, and tends to ignore the “nitty gritty” details that can be so important. CMS Wire also talk about it here but they seem more happy with the whole thing.

As an aside, I also don’t necessarily think that a large stable company always leads to a large stable product. Just look at all the recent acquisition activity. The road map for some of the big boys is far from clear and some well established products might start to fester due to lack of R&D investment.

Gartner vs Forrester

So, how much to the two big analyst firms agree? Let’s have a look at the Forrester Wave from a couple of months ago:

The Forrester Wave™: Web Content Management For External Sites Q2 2009

So they do agree on a most things. Both have Autonomy/Interwoven and SDL Tridion in the Leader area. Fatwire, Open Text (pre-Vignette acquisition) and Day are all up there. Microsoft is struggling on both, although Forrester prefer their strategy while Gartner prefer their current offering. IBM, Vignette and EMC are also put into the same ballpark.

Gartner covers a few more vendors. The three smaller .NET vendors (Ektron, SiteCore and EPiServer) all make the grade. I’d have expected to see the EPiServer dot in almost the same place as SiteCore as, in my experience, the two always come extremely close in all evaluations I’ve seen. I’d have put them both ahead of Ektron, but maybe that’s just me. I guess EPiServer are only just starting their US invasion which might have penalised them a bit.

The two reports also agree on not including Open Source vendors for various reasons. Quite a few people in the blogosphere are upset about this. The cynical amongst you might think that this is because Open Source vendors don’t pay analysts as much to include them on reports, but this couldn’t possibly be anything to do with it.

But What About Oracle?

Aaah, yes. The anomaly. Oracle UCM nee Stellent comes first in the Gartner report while a distant tie sixth in the Forrester one. Oracle is going mental about this on Twitter and any other advertising channels it can find. The research cites Oracle’s strengths as the ability to integrate with other Oracle products, including their CRM system. I’m not a fan of these so-called “tighter integrations” which are diametrically opposed to my view of loosely-coupled separation of concerns. Sounds like Gartner want Oracle UCM to become a monolith which reaches far beyond the boundaries of what I’d define as Web Content Management. Interestingly, Gartner’s three leaders are all vendors more traditionally associated with ECM. Price doesn’t seem to be a factor at all in the quadrant.

For the very observant among you, note that all the URLs to Gartner’s public “sponsored” research contain /oracle/, not just this one. So I wouldn’t get hung up on that – I presume it’s the platform they use? [UPDATE: See the comment about this below]

Niche Players: Good News and Bad News

Here’s the good news. Gartner advises that maybe a Niche Player is good for you:

Gartner advises organizations against simply selecting vendors that appear in the Leaders quadrant. All selections should be buyer-specific, and vendors from the Challengers, Niche Players or Visionaries quadrants could be better matches for your business goals and solution requirements.

Here’s the bad news. I can’t for the life of me figure out why anyone would want to look at a Niche player according to Gartner’s metrics. They have no ability to execute, and no complete vision. Sound like a bunch of losers. In fact, in my view it’s probably better not to be on this MQ at all than to be a niche player. You’ll save yourself a bunch of money, and a bunch of bad publicity. Nstein tweeted happily about being included on the quadrant for the first time. On the other hand, I’d be furious if I was an established vendor like Alterian and got stuck in the bottom right. So, a question to all you vendors – would you rather be on this as a Niche Player, or not on it at all?

Note that in the MarketScope from 2008, both IBM and MediaSurface (Alterian) were “Cautions”. IBM have progressed safely into the Challenger zone while I’m not sure exactly what they’ve done in the last 12 months to get there. And poor Alterian seem like the victims here, being penalised primarily, it seems, for having more than one WCMS product. Now while this can be confusing, they certainly aren’t the only vendor in this position.

I’ve decided I certainly prefer the research that doesn’t rank the vendors and serve as self-fulfilling marketing for the vendors that do well. The strengths/weaknesses listed are really high level and vague, so you need to take a leap of faith. This kind of advertorial isn’t for me, I’m afraid. Maybe if Gartner published the complex calculations (and they are complex) that go on behind the scenes I’d trust it more.

So Why Trust Me?

Well, I’m Head of Development for the company that came first in the most recent Forrester Wave™: European Interactive Agencies — Web Design Capabilities. What more proof do you need?

Arthur Weasley: This is very, very peculiar. It seems as if your hearing is to be in front of the entire Wizengamot.
Harry Potter: I don’t understand. What has the Ministry of Magic got against me?

Forrester recently named Fatwire a Leader in their WCM for external Sites Quadrant. And the folks at Fatwire have already called two of their fellow-quads (for the lack of a better term), Interwoven and Vignette as legacy WCM products! Incidentally, Interwoven sits nicely in the Leader quadrant in the same report and was also named the fastest growing [...]