Ecm prices

Two major competitors in the lower-cost segment of the CMS marketplace -- Ektron and GlobalScape -- recently started offering hosted versions of their products. This is good news for buyers. The traditional hosted players offer strong services, but at mid-market pricing levels. Ektron's offering is not a service per se -- just a convenient place to park your CMS with bundled product support. GlobalScape runs its version as a traditional ASP service. If you have very simple needs (under 1000 pages, just a handful of contributors) but limited internal technical resources, you could be running a low-cost CMS much faster this way...Ektron's Offering   GlobalScape's Hosted PureCMS

ECM vendor Hummingbird will match some (but not all) of its competitors with the formation of customer advisory board. All vendors have informal mechanisms where customers (especially the biggest ones) can influence product roadmaps. Bigger vendors -- and their customers -- certainly benefit from more formal advisory boards. Like all vendors, Hummingbird will be challenged to align the needs of its smaller and larger customers, on and off the advisory board. But what all customers really want, I think, is to network with other customers and integrators in a more regular way beyond pricey and salesy annual meetings (even when held in nice, warm places). Does your vendor help facilitate a true users' community? More details in the latest CMS Report.

CMS vendor GlobalSCAPE has released version 4 of its PureCMS product. At least in theory this update is supposed to resolve some of the product's workflow and usability shortcomings we identify in The CMS Report. More interestingly, it is further prove of falling price-feature ratios. From a functional standpoint, at the very low end of the marketplace (in this case, $380/seat) you can get real versioning, some workflow, and decent authoring -- even if the templating is a bit funky. We'll wait to see GlobalSCAPE's latest version in real production environments before saying more...

A new Enterprise Content Management (ECM) architecture is beginning to emerge in the wake of numerous vendor acquisitions and expanded R&D. The idea is to provide an underlying server that offers core repository services, then build a set of independent functional products on top (e.g. WCM, DAM, Collaboration, etc.), ideally all unified under one interface layer. FileNET appears to be close to realizing the model, but the newest adherent to this approach is Stellent, who recently announced Version 7. Our usual caveat: this architectural model is new and not suited for many buyers, especially those wanting point solutions. In the long run, it will broaden the gap between high-end and mid-range vendors -- not just in price, but in overall buyer commitment to the vendor. In the meantime, it could help Stellent move out beyond its traditional Intranet hunting grounds...Check out Stellent V.7

ECM vendor Optika and WCM vendor Percussion are dating. The former is a publicly-traded imaging firm that added workflow and DM capabilities, then recently acquired a records management company. In a new partnership agreement with Percussion, the two companies can now cross-sell complementary capabilities to each others' clients. Could it also presage an acquisition? Privately-held Percussion has been courted by others, but has consistently held out for a better match. In the meantime, analysts are urging some of the dowdier ECM vendors to pick up web CMS capabilities. Optika's stock price has risen recently with the rest of the tech sector (after twice falling below NASDAQ's warning threshold of $1.00); if it continues to improve, Optika will be able to offer a better dowry...Read about the partnership at Percussion.com

Many have ignored (and will continue to ignore) the impact SharePoint has had on dramatically changing the ECM solution model. The effects of this will likely be seen for many years to come. Legacy vendors, in a reactive mode and trying to respond to the unexpected disruption SharePoint has had in the ECM business community, are trying to position themselves as a higher-value, yet complementary (but at a higher price, of course) value add to SharePoint's core ECM capabilities. Submitted by Clearview Software

Globalscape, long known for HTML authoring and FTP desktop tools, has just released a new CMS product called "SnapEdit." It's really a server-based alternative to Macromedia's Contribute client; that is, SnapEdit offers a wysiwyg browser editor atop individual HTML files, with some versioning but no workflow. SnapEdit seems to have been cannibalized from another GlobalScape product, PureCMS, but targeted more at the company's traditional webmaster client base. At $100-500 (depending on the number of authors), the price is certainly attractive, and SnapEdit will run in both PHP and ASP environments. With its 3rd CMS product, GlobalScape will need to carefully explain key differences, but competing vendors -- notably Ektron -- face the same challenge. On the whole, we see greater segmentation in the market. That's good for buyers...Read more about SnapEdit

As hardware prices continue to fall and data volumes increase, midsize companies are looking for ECM(enterprise content management) solutions. Industry experts highlight important ECM applicationfeatures. Used with permission from Integrated Solutions magazine

Blink and you would have missed it -- for lost in the all the headlines of Oracle's acquisition of BEA (or which more to say later today), and Sun's acquisition of MySQL -- was a much smaller acquisition by Oracle of Captovation, a document capture software firm in Minneapolis. We have noted in our ECM Suites Report that we believe that Oracle's 2006 acquisition of Stellent was in part driven for their desire for the somewhat neglected Optika technologies, which provide high-end imaging capabilities. The acquisition of Captovation today confirms that, and provides Oracle with a platform (once it is fully integrated tested and released) to compete head to head with EMC and IBM / FileNet for major imaging driven deals (still the ECM deals with the largest price tags). Captovation may not have been the best-known image capture firm around, but its technology is mature, and its Minneapolis locale places them near the old Stellent team

Regulatory compliance, competitive pressures, and falling hardware and software prices are causing SMBs to increase their reliance on technology beyond traditional office solutions such as Microsoft Office and accounting products. In fact, according to the research firm Gartner, SMBs are expected to spend an estimated $400 billion on technology this year as a result of these and other drivers. One technology initiative that is at the top of the list for many SMBs is ECM system implementation. Used with permission from Integrated Solutions magazine

John Shackleton, the CEO of ECM vendor Open Text, today quashed rumors of an impending acquisition by Microsoft, according to the Toronto Star. Personally, I can't see how the customers from either company would gain from such an acquisition. Shackleton did the right thing by setting the matter straight (at least for now), although talking about takeovers can't hurt their stock price, either. Open Text shares, which have taken a bumpy ride this year, finished today up a third of a percentage point.