WCM products

Open Text said it’s a done deal. The planned acquisition of all of the issued and outstanding shares of Vignette (worth approximately US$ 321 million) has been completed late yesterday following a shareholders’ meeting where the voting and approval took place.While Vignette is busy nostalgizing, Open Text says it’s working on the strategic aspects of what may come next. Let’s not forget that Open Text already has a WCM-centric group called Open Text Web Solutions. Offering an even broader range of (quite similar) products is going to take some brain activity. Then again, this would not be the first quilting exercise for Open Text.

Alterian, announced it has completed the first stage of integration between the Web Content Management products – Immediacy and Morello – that it acquired as part of Mediasurface less than two months ago, and the Alterian Integrated Marketing Platform. The company also announced the first contract for the integrated solution from Reading Room, an award winning International digital agency and experienced Immediacy user. Dynamic Messenger, Alterian's highly rated Email Marketing application, is now integrated with and able to utilize digital content stored within both Immediacy and Morello to execute email marketing campaigns. The resulting offering, branded as Alterian Engage, reduces duplication of content across multiple systems in the marketing department, simplifies the workflow process required to deliver email campaigns and significantly reduces the time taken from initial marketing idea to campaign execution.

It's still branded "Workplace," but the new version 6.0 of IBM's "WWCM" is even more tightly linked to WebSphere Portal. That's actually a Good Thing for licensees who have made a strong commitment to IBM's portal product: content managers can now set personalization configs and edit content in-context without switching back and forth between interfaces. But as CMS Report buyers know, IBM does not seem to have invested as much R&D in WWCM as some pure-play CMS competitors, and the product's usability still strikes us as a bit lagging. IBM and its customers face some strategic choices here after the FileNet acquisition, but I suspect that for Big Blue, WWCM will remain a keeper.

Web content management (WCM) allows companies to maintain brand consistency on the Web while launching Web-based marketing and products at speed. Keeping control of your brand globally is a tricky business. Large international companies often grow organically and haphazardly via acquisition and merger, across countries and continents. Submitted by Tridion

The best place to find them is on the bulletin boards run by an independent consultant, Pete Raleigh, an indie consultant for IBM Workplace Web Content Management (WWCM) projects. Raleigh started the forum after failing to find anything equivalent on IBM.com. Big Blue followed up with its own support forum about 6 months later, but Raleigh's site remains more popular, perhaps because of its firm independence. I've previously blogged about a similar, unofficial site for FileNet developers. Communities want to form around products. As you investigate the marketplace yourself, give added weight to products where you can connect easily with peers.

Longtime OpenMarket integrator Granitar has just released a series of Plumtree portal gadgets for the Content Server WCM product now owned by divine. Always nice for a software vendor when your partners do some heavy lifting, eh? The question is: will divine -- which carries a very large professional services practice -- reciprocate by keeping OpenMarket's integrator channel intact?...See the Granitar press release

On its website, CMS vendor RedDot (now an Open Text subsidiary) points out that 3 years ago we lauded their CMS product for its localization and authoring capabilities. Well, we learn over time as we talk to more customers. And products change over time -- or rather don't always change with the times. So it is with RedDot CMS, whose European customers tell us that its localization capabilities are aging, and its globalization facilities surprisingly underdeveloped. It will be interesting to see whether RedDot can make needed usability improvements over the next year while it tries to reconcile codebases with Open Text's other WCM and ECM tools, and still upgrade its back-end to .NET. You can find more details in The CMS Report.

OK, you know about WCM and ECM, and perhaps LCM ("Learning Content Management"). Now PCM "Product Content Management" -- sometimes given the unfortunate acronym "PMS") is becoming hot. It turns out that to properly sell online across multiple channels you need to do more than store and publish tables of SKUs. Real e-commerce requires reams of supporting documents, images, dynamic pricing,and more. Naturally, all that stuff must be properly managed. Perhaps you've already heard of Saqqara and Enigma. Canadian vendor Mediagrif is also gaining traction in this space...Visit Mediagrif

The acquisition was perhaps predictable, since the two companies have had a partnership for 3 years now. But neither company invested terribly much in working together and the two product sets don't closely interoperate, so to that extent the timing is a bit of a surprise. I think RedDot got a good deal: €44M in cash for a revenue stream of €15M (in 2004). For Hummingbird's part, the company needed to add a WCM solution to its product offerings, and RedDot has a growing profile, especially in North America. Prospective customers of either solution (Hummingbird's heavyweight DM and RM vs. RedDot's mid-market WCM and DM) should not expect major changes. However, existing RedDot customers should be prepared for the more aggressive upselling and maintenance negotiations that come with working with a public company.

IBM's recent announcement that it was finally integrating it's "Content Manager" application (an established collection of mostly DM and imaging tools) with its WebSphere portal offering prompted some observers to claim that Big Blue was finally staking a claim in the Web Content Management space. We don't think so -- at least not yet. The integration (actually planned for later this Autumn) really just puts a newer, Web face on Content Manager, something its competitors have had for some time. We believe IBM will continue to play the field with WCM partnerships designed to push IBM's core DB and Appserver products, well into 2003...Read the IBM Announcement

Today's illiquid IT marketplace helps foster a kind of winner-take-all momemtum. Consider Documentum. The company's balance sheet, earnings, and stock price have all held up well because of the company's diverse product line and its (unintentional) tardiness in riding the dotcom-inflated WCM bubble. After acquiring Syndication and DAM technologies on the cheap over the past year, now Documentum is making a bigger KM play with its acquisition of eRoom Technologies. We think it was prudent to digest its earlier acquisitions and roll out a new version (V.5) of its suite before this particular meal. Nevertheless, it can be an increasingly difficult challenge to truly get all these different tools to work together underneath the covers. Just ask divine...Read about the eRoom acquisition