CMS Watch ECM Suites Feed

Open Text - acquire or be acquired?

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Fri, 4 Jul 2008 03:09:00 -0400

Open Text is back on the acquisition trail. The company announced Thursday that they had bought Spicer for $12m. Spicer is a document/file viewing tool vendor that markets "Imagenation," software that competes against the likes of Snowbound.

It's a logical enough addition to the panoply of content applications within the Open Text portfolio, and appears to have been bought at a bargain price. It's not exactly a game changer, but it does resurrect the question of Open Text's own future.

Acquire to grow and compete, or be acquired -- those are the current options. It seems likely that if Open Text itself does not get bought by HP, SAP, or Microsoft in the near future (the most likely bidders), then they will themselves acquire again, probably on a more ambitious basis. Now that they find themselves competing against giants like EMC, Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft it seems the only route to survive. Most likely in their sights is Interwoven, an acquisition that would bring near complete dominance in the Legal and Services sectors, along with some interesting new technologies in the bargain. I'll predict that one of these options -- big acquisition or get acquired -- is highly likely to occur in the next year.

But is Open Text really able to absorb so many counter-cultures and technology stacks? The firm has swallowed up rivals at a pace only Oracle could match -- but Open Text is not Oracle, and they simply do not have the resources to handle this kind of acquisition rate. Indeed many Open Text customers that we have interviewed for the ECM Suites Report regularly complain about disjointed and uneven support, confusing product roadmaps, and long-term concern about the future direction of the company. At the same time it's fair to also report that Open Text customers generally like the company and don't regret choosing them, but goodwill can only go so far.

With this small acquisition, Open Text has put itself back under the spotlight. The industry is again abuzz with rumors -- some of which may be true some of which may not. This remains a very uncertain time for buyers and partners alike.

ECM buying tips from the experts

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:35:00 -0400

This past week I had the pleasure of keynoting at the DocTrain event in Indianapolis (held at the truly magnificent Union Station venue), and also running a small session on "How to procure Content Technologies." I have been running these small sessions for a long while now and they tend to prove very popular, and though I have been doing this for years, there are always new tricks to be added to the bag.

At the end of this particular session I chatted with the head of a leading US ECM integrator (who wishes for good reason to remain anonymous!) who said he liked the session but would have added two key points.

Never buy at the end of a quarter

Avoid ELA's (Enterprise License Agreements)

And he is quite right -- and anyone who attends these sessions in future will be sure to be reminded of these key lessons.

First, when it gets close to the end of the quarter, vendors sales staff are desperate to boost and close any outstanding deals. Theoretically this puts you the buyer into a strong position. Theoretically you have maximum leverage. But theory is not the same as practice. Just as I would not go into the ring against Mike Tyson, you should likewise recognize that against an experienced account executive from EMC, IBM, Oracle, or any other ECM vendor, you are way out of your league. The great deal you negotiate -- for example the 300 extra seats you got for the price of 150 -- may not seem such a bargain in the long term. When prices drop, the next major upgrade is announced or you simply find them sitting on the shelf racking up maintenance costs. Buy what you need, no more, and stay away from Account Execs when they are trying to close out the quarter.

Likewise my friend makes a very good point about ELA's (particularly popular in large ECM and Archiving deals). These license schemes have been driven in part by the demand of large enterprise who in the past have bought modular licenses and found themselves stiffed when they need yet more modules at every turn. "Oh no madam, you don't have workflow as part of that deal....or frankly anything you need to make that system I bought you operable, you will have to buy more appropriate licenses from me." ELAs seem to make a great deal of sense, since you get everything for a single price.

But they bite in two unexpected ways. One, the ELA almost certainly excludes some vital component that you will only find in the fine print once it's too late. Secondly and potentially more serious: once you have signed an ELA, no matter how big the deal, you are no longer of any interest to the vendor sales team, who have moved on to the next client. I can personally attest to watching a deal worth over $20 Million US get signed -- and watching the account exec leaving the building within 30 minutes, even though they were scheduled to remain for the next two days. Once you have signed an ELA you have lost any and all leverage with the vendor. Think hard about whether you want to be in that situation...

Oracle's new plan to save you money

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:53:00 -0400

There's something vaguely Orwellian, at times, about the language that turns up in quarterly and annual reports (the kind U.S. public corporations are required to file with the Security and Exchange Commission). Remember the classic slogans from Orwell's 1984? War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

Perhaps we should now add, "Higher prices mean lower cost of ownership."

I'm reading a well-known software company's quarterly report dated April 1, 2008, wherein the following rather noble-sounding statements are made:

"We have focused on lowering the total cost of ownership of our software products by improving integration, decreasing installation times, lowering administration costs and improving the ease of use. Reducing the total cost of ownership of our products provides our customers with a higher return on their investment, which we believe will create more demand and provide us with a competitive advantage."

This comes from a company that many consider to be a master of extortionate pricing. And indeed, what makes the foregoing passage so Orwellian is that the company recently increased its prices across-the-board by an average of 15 percent. I'm talking, of course, about Oracle.

Prior to last week, Universal Content Management 10gR3 sold for $100K (plus $22K per year for maintenance and support). The same software is now $115K (plus $25,300/yr for maintenance and support). Note how the higher license engine pulls a bigger support caboose.

Oracle's BPEL Process Manager product was $50K before the price increase. It is now $60K.

The Event Driven Architecture Suite has gone from $60K to $70K.

Fusion Middleware adaptors that were $30K are now $34.5.

In fairness, many (perhaps most) of the products on Oracle's price list have acquired new features over the past year, and so one could argue that the price increases merely translate to "you get what you pay for."

On the other hand, software is an extraordinarily competitive business. Enterprise customers have ever-higher expectations as to feature richness, quality, and adherence to industry standards. In fact, some people (i.e., users of open-source software) expect to pay nothing for the bits and bytes, and only a modest amount for support.

Oracle isn't going in the pay-just-for-support direction, of course. New software licenses account for a third of Oracle's business. It intends to grow that side of the business, organically as well as through acquisitions -- including acquisitions of direct competitors. And guess who gets to foot the bill?

But don't worry. Remember, your total cost of ownership is going down. Well, at least it was going down, until your vendor recaptured the savings with higher license fees...

More ECM acquisitions for Oracle

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 11:00:00 -0400

Oracle keeps moving down ECM trail with two new acquisitions to add to their growing portfolio. Both Skywire and AdminServer are specialist vendors who have developed niche offerings for the Insurance and general Financial Services sectors. Oracle have already seen some success in Insurance, but the acquired technology -- and just as importantly the domain expertise -- gives Oracle a bit more heft against EMC and IBM.

Of the two acquisitions, the Skywire one is the more interesting. Skywire provides multichannel, component-level publishing software. Though currently selling mainly into the Insurance sector, under Oracle's ownership this could expand into the much broader CCM marketplace.

As with any acquisition, the devil is in the detail. Oracle appears to have bought a couple of strong offerings, but integrating such small niche firms into the huge mass of Oracle is will be a challenge, as will porting the software into the UCM and Fusion stack. As always it will take some time before things settle and we really see how this will all work in practice, and as always you can rest assure we will continue to evaluate the progress in detail in our ECM Suites Report.

Adobe and Alfresco

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 08:37:00 -0400

It's been a while since there was a big product announcement in the ECM world, but today's announcement by Adobe that they will be embedding Alfresco into their LiveCycle Enterprise Suite will doubtless garner a few headlines. Alfresco, the UK-based open source ECM company, has certainly done a great job of marketing themselves since their launch a couple of years back, stealing some limelight from more established and much bigger vendors such as Interwoven, Vignette, and Open Text.

The question we have to ask is whether this announcement is another marketing triumph, or whether it suggests something more substantial.

First off is the fact that it is a real OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) deal, and the technology will actually get embedded into the Adobe offering, so it is more than simply a paper partnership.

But let's think about what the Adobe offering is and why we do not currently evaluate it in our ECM Suites Report. Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite is a product set built upon the acquisition of Acellio in 2002 (better known as "Jetform"). Though the user interface and underlying codebase may have changed a bit, the principle of this product remains the same: automating simple, usually forms-based, processes. The product excels as a point solution particularly in Government, where a form needs to be issued to the public, and the capture and subsequent business process needs to be automated quickly.

In theory the Alfresco repository adds some true ECM capabilities at the back end of the Adobe product set. Also the Alfresco solution will add some "Web 2.0" capabilities to Adobe, as Alfresco supports Adobe Flex. So in theory, the LiveCycle solution could be extended to build more complex applications rather than basic forms routing.

On a corporate note the OEM deal is intriguing, since of course Alfresco is a minnow compared to Adobe, and there are close connections between the executive teams. For example the Senior Vice President of this particular Adobe Business unit is none other than Rob Tarkoff, a close friend and ex-Documentum colleague of Alfresco CTO John Newton. Could Adobe be planning to acquire Alfresco? Who knows? But if the OEM is successful, an acquisition might appeal to both firms, if less so to Alfresco's current customer base.

In short then, it's an intriguing announcement, and we will be looking at demonstrations of the technology in practice later today as well as testing it out more thoroughly over the coming months. Like us, you should treat this new product arrangement with real caution until it has been thoroughly tested by customers. That is not a a slight against either firm, but an announcement is just that and no more. Time is always the true test.

Oracle erases criticism from their wiki

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Mon, 2 Jun 2008 19:31:00 -0400

It might come as little surprise that Oracle is very actively moderating their Oracle wiki, but a recent blog entry reminded me just how important culture is to wiki adoption.

The story is, a Denmark-based Oracle partner had posted something "not unambiguously positive about Oracle WebCenter" and was "immediately flamed by an Oracle product manager, and any trace of negativity edited out."

Of course, wiki owners always have a choice about how strongly they want to moderate, and that choice naturally will affect the culture of participation. Oracle clearly decided in favor of strong moderation. The Rules of Conduct on the wiki say nothing about excising mentions of product weaknesses, but WebCenter is certainly a hot topic at the moment with customers waiting for roadmap details after the BEA acquisition.

So, official wikis present a dilemma for vendors. Clearly Oracle made the edits in order to keep damaging material out of competitors' hands. Other vendors, like Microsoft, also limit who can post to their public wikis based on an application process. That's their prerogative. But as a customer, you should understand the rules of engagement are rather different than, say, Wikipedia, and evaluate the content accordingly.

(Thanks to Sten Vesterli from Oracle partner Scott/Tiger for the heads up.)

CMS Watch Competition Winner

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Mon, 2 Jun 2008 09:45:00 -0400

You may remember a while back we launched our little competition to come up with a new name for our vendor positioning chart. We had some great (and varied) responses from all over the world. And it took quite an internal debate to decide on the eventual winner, but decide we did. And the winner is...Laurence Hart who offered us the name "Cross Check." Laurence, a bottle of champagne is yours.

Over the next month we will continue working with our designer to revamp the chart, and of course to rename it -- so look out for the Cross Check in all our report updates this year.

ECM equals GED in Brazil

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Mon, 2 Jun 2008 08:49:00 -0400

It's easy to forget just how big the world is -- but when you fly to Brazil as I did this past week, you can get some idea: nine hours from Miami to Rio, and five of those over Brazil. Brazil is one of the world's largest countries and one of its fastest-growing economies. Yet it's one we tend to simply associate with the Amazonian rainforest, and the equally beautiful Amazonians who decorate the beaches in Rio. The other side of Brazil of course is poverty, and even a brief walk around town will show you that in all its sad misery. As outsiders the poverty and conversely the vast landscape and oceanside glamour are typically all we see of Brazil.

Yet Brazil is a vibrant and growing nation, that has much to teach us, and just at the moment not that much to learn from us, particularly when it comes to ECM and Content Management. Or more correctly, GED (Gerenciamento Eletronico de Documentos) as ECM is called in Brazil. My last visit here was in 1999 to speak at Infoimagem in Sao Paulo, still one of the premier ECM events globally. At the time I was asked to speak on WCM (Web Content Management) and a lot of effort was put into the marketing my workshop. To cut a long story short, less than 5 people attended and the whole thing was a fiasco. The gap between the US/Europe and the adoption of new content technologies was just so big that not only did WCM not interest anyone in Brazil, they didn't really know what it was.

Fast forward to GED-Rio this year where I was honored to give the keynote speech, and the contrast could not have been sharper. At this event, it was I who was on the back foot at times, as smart and incredibly well-informed practitioners prodded and questioned me. In practical terms in 2008 there is no gap between Brazil and the rest of the ECM world. I initially wondered if this was because Europe and the US have not been advancing very quickly since 2001, and hence the gap has closed. But as time went on I realized the change was due to much more pragmatic and ultimately positive reasons, reasons that we might want to learn from.

Firstly, there has been over the last 15 years or so, a heavy focus on training ECM professionals in the country. Through the venerable CompTia CDIA courses, and more recently through AIIM training. Here in Brazil it seems that pretty much everyone who works in ECM has undertaken some kind of training and most carry their designations with pride. What a contrast from practitioners in most North American or European enterprises who seem to believe that specialist training is unnecessary and typically blame technology -- rather than their own failings -- for all the problems they encounter. In Brazil there is a healthy awareness that ECM is very complex, and that even elements such as scanning and imaging require specialized skills that are not best acquired on the fly. Brazil then has a very well trained and competent ECM workforce -- something in short supply north of the Equator.

This leads to a second healthy contrast, that of informed skepticism from buyers and users. After years of neglect and indifference by major North American & European suppliers, Brazilian buyers are not immediately enamored or taken in by the promise of new software and features. They have come to learn that it may be a long time before they see it for real, and that when they do, early adopters will have pointed out many inadequacies. The outcome is that we have a nation of conservative buyers who typically have a good understanding of the technical limitations, and consequently the savvy to budget accordingly to meet the true cost and complexity of business change and implementation services.

A greater focus on training and ECM-specific skills, alongside a more cautious and studious approach to product selection, such as we see in Brazil, would go a long way reducing the high number of failed projects we see in North America. We may not have noticed it yet, but the gap has all but closed, and its time for North America and Western Europe to start recognizing that nations like Brazil, China, and India have not only caught us up but have some valuable lessons to teach.

Cloud Computing and Content Management

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Fri, 30 May 2008 14:43:00 -0400

If there is a buzz around Web 2.0 in the Content Technology community, then there is a roar in the wider IT community around Cloud Computing. It's a great term, "Cloud Computing," as it conjures up visions of an invisible Internet -- an ether-like zone in the sky where computing power and storage is unfettered by the petty restrictions of boxes, cables, and technicians. Cloud computing sounds fluffy, it sounds cool, it sounds limitless, it sounds like the future.

In fact Cloud Computing simply means moving things to big and bigger Data Centers. Data Centers are anything but fluffy. They are huge, energy-sucking giants -- many the size of small towns. They are environmental disasters and the only thing fluffy about them is the C0₂ emissions they belch out. Data Centers will in time according to The Uptime Institute become bigger polluters than the aviation industry. Data Centers require massive amounts of energy to operate -- often as much energy is used to cool the centers as to power them. All that heat has to go somewhere. If you think your air conditioning unit is an ecological no-no, then consider the AC demands on a data center the size of 5 football fields, then consider further that according to market research firm IDC, there are over 7,000 major data centers worldwide, and many more in the process of being built. By the way, just because they are big does not make them efficient; it is estimated that around 1/3rd of Data Center servers continually sit idle.

Yet there is very vocal group that thinks the Cloud is the future of ECM and Archiving -- so, why bother to dispose of data? Why not just send it to the "Cloud" with its limitless processing and storage capacity? The people who run the Data Centers, and those that sell equipment to run them such as Sun Microsystems and EMC, would all think that a good idea.

What puzzles me though is the contradiction between good Archiving and ECM practices versus a demand for ever greater processing and storage capacity. Aside from the fact that Cloud computing by definition means that your data has to move to and from a distant location, and latency issues (and simple physics) will always dictate that this will be slower than on-site deployments, there are much more important issues to consider.

For if you only stop for a moment you will see that there is something fundamentally wrong with the Archiving/ECM equation. Take E-mail Archiving for example. Almost all EAM systems promise (and typically deliver) a reduction in storage capacity needs of about 80%. Good e-mail management can reduce that still further, till ultimately your e-mail mountain has dropped to less than 10% of its original size. In other words the efficient management of content can reduce server farms to single servers, with active archiving and disposal of redundant data keeping the volumes from growing exponentially. Now that is not only Green Computing, it's smart computing, because in reducing the data volumes, you increase the processing speeds by as much more than an order of magnitude and you leave a tiny carbon footprint. So much better than the SUV -- sorry, "Cloud" -- approach to computing.

Vendor criticism of CMS Watch

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Fri, 16 May 2008 10:43:00 -0400

As you know at CMS Watch we write critical product evaluations to help you avoid expensive procurement and deployment mistakes. We write reports that detail both the warts and merits of big vendors like EMC, Oracle, Xerox and IBM -- through to smaller specialist vendors like Hyland, Autonomy and Nuxeo. Readers of our reports often ask me "what did vendor x say when they read that!" The assumption, sometimes correct, is that vendors freak out on reading such criticism.

In an industry whereby most of the "independent analysts" are heavily dependent on revenues from the very firms they claim to be "independent" of, it's unusual to see truly critical research get published. So it becomes a surprise to both buyers and sellers when they read such criticism. In our reports we widely distribute the compliments and brickbats -- if something is truly terrible we will tell you.

But most of the time it is not a case of bad technology versus good technology. Rather it is a case of good fit versus bad fit: a product that could become an outstanding performer in a larger legal firm may make a terrible fit in a mid-sized manufacturing and ERP-centric environment. Hence we urge you the reader to study all the alternatives and balance them out, rather than look at one preferred vendor in isolation.

Speaking of isolation, the marketing groups of some vendors seem to operate in in a kind of vacuum. I guess it's part of the job for them to drink their own Kool Aid, but some of them seem to think it's part of their job to attack and stop any criticism of their product or company. At CMS Watch we're often on the receiving end of that wrath; that stinks sometimes, but so be it. Just as it is the vendor's job to wax lyrical about the joys of their product, so too is it ours to unearth the reality. If you want to get an insight into this particular dynamic, whether you're a curious end user or a vendor AR (Analyst Relations) person, check out the article I published today.

Now more than ever, reading is not believing

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Tue, 13 May 2008 00:06:00 -0400

As a content producer, it has been fascinating to watch the evolution of channels where technology suppliers talk to technology customers -- the trade press and industry conferences in particular.

Take conferences. In the go-go 1990s, prospective speakers were busy making money, and conference organizers (of which there were many!) aggressively courted panelists and often paid them to speak. During the last recession, most conferences stopped paying speakers (except for keynotes and training). In fact, in many venues the pendulum has shifted towards pay-to-play, and you see more exhibitors on conference panels than ever. Not surprisingly, when this happens the quality suffers apace.

The trade press has not been immune from this trend either. Still, I was shocked last week when a UK-based IT publication asked one of our analysts to pay the publisher to run an article that the magazine itself had solicited. This was not a "sponsored white paper," but a regular article in a regular trade publication. Everyone knows the 4th Estate has fallen on hard times, but I didn't realize it was that bad, and in any case one would hope that basic ethics don't get lost amid shifting business models.

I think these trends reflect a broader phenomenon: There is more marketing money than ever chasing finite buyer attention. You see it at conferences that are longer on exhibitors than attendees. And webpages that are longer on ads than content. We've written previously on the substantial conflicts of interest baked into traditional analyst industry models.

What does all this mean for you the customer? It means you need to be more skeptical than ever. At some level you already knew that, but it's possible that your colleagues helping you to make technology choices do not. That's why you need to hard-wire careful, hands-on testing into any software procurement. Surely, there are products and vendors out there that really could offer a good fit for your needs. But in the end, experience really is the best selector.

We think doing proper advance homework is essential, or we wouldn't sell evaluation reports for a living. But now more than ever, you need to trust your own judgments. Base those judgments more on actions than words.

Imaging - the most important element of ECM?

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Fri, 9 May 2008 15:49:00 -0400

As an "Enterprise-focused" content management analyst, I am asked two basic questions on a regular basis. The first (which I shan't speak of further here) is "what about SharePoint?" The second is, "what about imaging?"

At many conferences, and regularly via e-mail, people ask me about imaging in the context of ECM. Imaging is the the major cost that most projects either forget about or dramatically under budget for. Partly this is due to the fact that during the buying process it's all too easy to get caught up in the flurry of believing that every file will soon be digital. Even though paper is clearly here to stay.

So before you fall into that trap let me offer you a few words of advice. Firstly, dealing with the "backfile" of paper documents may well be the most costly and difficult part of your entire ECM project. Though you almost certainly do not need to capture and convert all the paper, the very task of identifying what is important to convert and what is not, is labor intensive in its own right. Secondly, the scanner is the least of your concerns. The cost and complexity of capture do lie not in hardware. Rather, your bigger expense will come in the form or software -- software that processes the captured image, indexes it, and puts it through quality controls, and (in many cases) extracts data elements and instigates workflows. Thirdly, recognize that capture and imaging will likely always be a part of the ECM process; you can try to eliminate it, but you will likely fail. So address it early on.

To many customers, particularly IT buyers, Imaging and Capture seem dull and uninteresting. It's not sexy like WCM or DAM are supposed, yet it is typically much higher cost, and typically more of a challenge to install, test, run and support. On the other hand, imaging is also where almost immediate process change and potential cost savings can be seen and calculated.

Imaging remains big business, which is why the likes of Oracle, IBM and EMC are so serious about developing these capabilities. It's why web oriented firms like Vignette cling hard to their (acquired) imaging legacy solutions, it's why specialists like Hyland and Laserfiche continue to thrive in turbulent markets.

And it's why you the buyer should prioritize imaging budgets and concerns early in your project and procurement process. Remember at core ECM systems typically consist of 3 core subsystems: library services, imaging, and workflow. Those are the same 3 core technology blocks that existed in the earliest document management systems, and it is those core technologies that continue to dominate the market, regardless of SharePoint.

Budget time: How much should I set aside for software licenses?

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Sat, 3 May 2008 17:14:00 -0400

When budget-building time comes up, many technology customers face the interesting question of how much money to put aside for new software licenses. Even without looking at specific vendors, you might have to tell your manager some ballpark figure for expected license costs.

As an analyst I'm frequently asked about license prices. A recent interesting discussion among peers challenged my views and provided helpful feedback that might assist you in arriving at the right numbers in today's marketplace:

List prices aside, buyers can presently obtain significant discounts on enterprise portals and on Web CMS tools. This may be caused by the increased SharePoint infiltration. A commentary in February on big software discounts and recent numbers from Vignette seems to confirm this trend. SharePoint licensing for websites is the exception that proves the rule. In general if the Web CMS comes from an ECM vendor, it will be more expensive -- potentially way more expensive

With enterprise search at the high end, the reverse is true. The marketplace is seeing strong demand at the moment. Many enterprise-tier search offerings come only as a bundled offering, so there is little list pricing to benchmark against. Deals quickly run into the millions of Euros in large, global, and complex enterprises.

Among the huge array of mid-market vendors across different content technologies -- many them local/regional in footprint -- you can typically find solutions that meet the needs of even organization-wide deployments in most enterprises, but at a factor of five (or more) cheaper than the higher-end solutions

If you are willing to serve as a reference client or appear on the customer list -- or better within a press release -- this is very valuable for the vendor and should help you to get significant discounts. (And of course as you look to evaluate vendors and they provide such testimonials, you should also understand how this game is played.)

Remember that enterprise deals entail complex negotiation and pricing models that ultimately boil down to what the salesperson thinks you can afford. Perhaps needless to say, but still: Implementation costs are higher than licensing costs and open source projects are not necessarily cheaper just because you might save licensing costs.

Thanks to Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Apoorv Durga, James Robertson and Martin White.

Content Management - UK vs. US

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Fri, 2 May 2008 08:55:00 -0400

On a flight back to Boston from London yesterday I took a little time to digest what I had observed during the past week in the UK. It was an odd week really, and somewhat disconcerting as the contrast between the US and the UK was quite stark.

First, it must be said that there was no sign of a recession or downturn in the content management industry in the UK. The doom and gloom we hear daily from all and sundry in North America is not echoed across the Atlantic. Far from it. People across the board that we met talked of project growth, and vendors boast of business improving quarter on quarter. Of course, part of this could be that I was attending a web-oriented conference, and WCM has remained frothy around the globe, in this recession as in the past. But still, the mood in London was unusually upbeat.

Second, it seems clear that the vendor landscape and the channel landscape is becoming ever more regional. Of the 300 plus vendors at Internetworld, only a small fraction were from North America. In the past North American vendors dominated events, but not any more.

Third, there is a real appetite for governance and strategy consulting in the UK. Buyers appear to be aware that content technologies change business practices, that content needs to be managed...and that software cannot do that for you.

Fourth, the need to create multilingual sites and manage multilingual content is far more acute in the UK and continental Europe than the US. Be that Hindi, Gujarati, or Punjabi in the UK -- or French, German, and Italian in Switzerland -- the skills to do this are honed, the solutions found, and the workflows better understood.

I don't really know why there is such a stark difference between the two markets. It's not new really, it was evident in 2007 and 2006, but it appears to be getting more acute and the divisions widening at a faster pace. One factor is probably an overall more positive and optimistic economy in the UK, but there are other industry-specific things to consider.

Very high-speed internet access in Britain is typically faster and more widespread than in the US. Many homes in the UK have faster connections than typical SMEs in the US (8mbps is common in UK homes). Greater bandwidth has allowed companies to exploit rich media and more complex websites more effectively than their US peers. There is greater advancement of 3G cellular phone technologies, and interactive television services, and these have provided a welcome challenge to content developers and publishers to exploit.

Greater adoption of standards across the EU have by definition fostered greater interconnectivity at the network, device, and delivery levels - and have also provided more suitable benchmarks to purchase against. Take for instance the MOREQ 2 specification for records management, a standard that is both practical and designed for general usage, as opposed to DOD 5015 that is a somewhat over-engineered military specification. Consider also the universal adoption of shared cellular networks, and device portability across providers -- as opposed to the confusion of competing networks and proprietary devices in the US.

At the procurement level, one can also see slower buying cycles and greater attention to vendor intangibles the UK paying off in the long run. Historically, (though there are many exceptions) purchasers of technology in Europe have taken longer to come to decisions, but then also stick with their chosen technology supplier for much longer than their US counterparts. It means that there is time to develop, test, and really get to know a product over time - and ultimately to use it to its maximum potential.

Of course all is not rosy in the UK. Big customers still get ripped off by big vendors; projects crash and burn, and all the problems we know about here in the US are encountered regularly there too. But there is certainly something to be learned from the UK's experiences. If you are in the process of buying Content Technology you should of course always ask for and follow through on customer references. It might well be a good idea to ask for specific UK references to be provided. Particularly if you have multi-lingual, governance, or mobile web issues to address. It may well be that they can give you better insights than colleagues in the US.

Recessions come and go, and economics is like political polling; since it is the most inexact of sciences, the experts usually get it wrong. However, we are in the midst of gloomy times here in America, and rather than get envious of our friends across the Atlantic, we can potentially turn the gloomy times to our benefit.

EMC's best-kept secret: Documentum financial performance

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 13:26:00 -0400

It's hard to know how Documentum is doing these days, now that it's been assimilated into EMC (the $32 billion ILM colossus). EMC, of course, does not break out detailed financials on Documentum, instead rolling the numbers up under "Content Management and Archiving." The latter division includes (among other things) the 15 or so document-capture and ILM products that are sold under the Captiva name. (Recall that EMC acquired Captiva in 2006 for $275 million.)

In the aggregate, the CMA product catalog accounted for $773 million in revenue for EMC in 2007 and $185 million in Q1 of 2008. The latter number is up approximately 8 percent from the same period a year earlier. On the surface, a nice performance.

Under the surface, things are a bit murkier. CMA license revenue slipped in Q1 of 2008, to $58.6 million, from $68.5 million for Q1 of 2007. But compared to the previous quarter's performance, the slip was huge: Q4 of 2007 saw CMA license revenues come in at $115.3 million (after trending upwards all year).

It should be noted that software license revenues were down across the board, for all business units except VMware, in Q1 2008 versus the previous quarter and the previous year. (Software maintenance revenue, on the other hand, is up across the board.) The biggest license-revenue upset by far, however, came in CMA, Documentum's business unit.

In EMC's Q1 2008 earnings call (the transcript of which is available from SeekingAlpha.com), Documentum is never mentioned by name. The sole reference to the "D6 platform" came when company CFO David Goulden said: "During the quarter we saw good demand for our D6 platform, particularly internationally, and the business pipeline is strong. The lumpiness in our Content Management business this quarter was partly due to timing of some deals and partly due to some of our own execution challenges, which impacted the quarter's license growth."

It's hard to know what it all means. But a 50 percent plunge in license revenue, quarter over quarter, is never good, no matter what the reason(s) behind it. It bears watching, which is what we will continue to do.

More on Wikis in the Enterprise

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 13:05:00 -0400

Our partners in Denmark, J. Boye, have just published a white paper, Wiki in the Enterprise.

There are many useful nuggets in the research (including a handy project check-list), but what I liked best about the paper is that it clearly contrasts the real value of wikis in a workgroup setting with the thorny challenges that wikis present enterprises once they evolve beyond a single departmental implementation. Have a look.