I don’t have the strength
To get up and take another shot
And my best friend, my doctor
Won’t even say what it is I’ve got
- JUST LIKE TOM THUMB’S BLUES

Gather round, children. Let me tell you about my Dad. He’s a wonderful, smart man. He taught me to play chess when I was 3. He is also an orthopaedic surgeon, which means he fixes broken bones and things. He comes from a long line of doctors, which I broke when I turned out to be a computer geek. He worked for many many many years in government hospitals until, about ten years ago, he moved from the operating theatre to the courtrooms, working in the medico-legal world.

Here is how it works. Someone gets injured somehow. In South Africa where I grew up, it is normally a car accident. South Africa has one of the worst road safety records in the world. It is often whiplash. Don’t ever get my Dad started on whiplash. Seriously.

Anyway, the insurance companies need to reimburse the victim for medical bills, loss of earnings, psychological trauma and other goodies. And this is where it gets tricky – you need to put a dollar (or ZAR) value onto all of this. It is complicated even more when some victims (either fraudulenty, subconsciously or due to lawyer’s pressure) fake or exaggerate their situations.

Which is where the experts come in. Both the insurance fund lawyer and the victim’s lawyer need to ensure that they have medical experts on their benches. And here is the cool bit. All the senior orthopods in South Africa know and respect one another. Most of them will represent both the patient or the insurance fund – they don’t play favourite.

So the two doctors will sit in the courtroom, recognise each other, and think to themselves “Oh look, they’ve got Doctor {insert name here} . He’s a good guy who knows his shit and will fairly represent the situation.” And, more often than not, they’ll quickly come to a fair and equitable agreement. The doctors normally don’t even open their mouths in court. They just sit there like finely tuned bullshit detectors and only get involved when the bullshit levels rise. However, if either side lacks a respected expert, things can drag on a whole lot longer and end in a mess. Of course this isn’t always the case but, as I understand it, it is pretty close.

So what? Well here is my point. I’ve recently been engaging a lot of third parties product and service vendors. And I’ve been really fortunate to work with people from these companies that really really know what they’re doing. And, they seem to think I know what I’m doing. Which has made the entire process quick, painless and fair. Both sides know what a fair day rate for consultants is. Both sides know which products are real and needed for the solution, and can smell snakeoil a mile away.

So, the moral of the story. When engaging third parties, make sure that you have someone on your team that knows the industry backwards, and make sure the third party knows that you know. Secondly, make sure that the third party has someone that knows their industry backwards and doesn’t just sprout hot air.

You’ll save yourself a fuckload of time and stress. Trust me. I’m a Doctor’s son.

I began to think what a deed I’d done.
I grabbed my hat and I began to run.
I made a god run but I ran too slow;
They overtook me down in Jericho
- IN SEARCH OF LITTLE SADIE

Lordy, has it been a year already? Sure has. The 2010 Gartner Magic Quadrant for WCM is out. You can get the report here courtesy of our friends at SiteCore. As usual it is worth a read, but here is the juicy bit:

I’ve marked the guys that have improved a reasonable amount with a green line, indicating where they’ve moved to since 2009. No-one has really slipped, although a few have vanished. EMC have given up on WCM and are partnering with Fatwire instead. Vignette and Nstein are also now part of the Open Text dot. Expect to see Day replaced by Adobe on here in 2011.

They’ve stuck with the same Big Three (Oracle, Automony/Interwoven and Open Text) in the lead as last time. Two other Big Guys – Microsoft and IBM – are inching closer to the Leader Quadrant. It does seem that to be near the top of the “ability to execute” axis, you need to be a massive company and have technology that is at least ten years old. I ranted about this last year, and the same thoughts apply. I should point out that this dimension is defined as “how well a vendor sells and supports its WCM products and services“, not on the success of implementations or happiness of customers. If you want to get the products with the most marketing dollars behind them, this is the axis for you.

The Open Text logic still confounds me. Here is how I see it. In 2009, Open Text was one of the three leaders, based on what I can only assume was The Product Formerly Known As RedDot. Vignette and Nstein were lingering in the shitty quadrant (VIGN on the border, admittedly). So my only conclusion is that RedDot was the favoured product in the eyes of Gartner. However, my spider senses (and OTEX staff layoffs) tell me RedDot is on its way out and the Vignette WCM product is the Chosen One. So I’d have expected the Gartner folk to move OTEX further into the danger zone, but the uncertainly and product direction have actually given them a boost.

The tussle between the younger upstarts is as close as ever. The Java vendors (FatWire and Day) have gained slightly on the .NET ones (SiteCore, Ektron). The Java/.NET hybrid, SDL, keeps its nose in front. I think we’ll see bigger gaps in 2011.

Last year, I noted that poor EPiServer had got a bit of a raw deal. That’s been fixed. I’ve always felt they should be sitting right next to SiteCore on this thing. And CoreMedia also got a big bonus. Alterian got a little boost, but they’re still in the quadrant of despair.

There are two new vendors on there, Atex and Dynamicweb. I’ve heard of the latter but never seen them. And only heard of Atex when they aquired Polopoly as few years ago. Never seen their product either, so not comments here.

Still no Open Source vendors on here, for the same revenue related reasons as last time. I’m not going over all that again.

Most of these little yellow dots haven’t drifted very far in a year – the report is pretty similar despite the M&A activity that has kept us bloggers busy. So pretty much a repeat of last year. And, like last year, here is hoping Gartner’s lawyers don’t serve me any takedown notices.

The joint is jumpin’
It’s really somethin’
The beat is pumpin’
My heart is thumpin’
Spent my money on you honey
- HAD A DREAM ABOUT YOU, BABY

It’s pretty addictive watching your blog stats, isn’t it? Remember when Google Analytics came to town and instead of waiting days to see traffic reports, you could see updates in mere hours. On a good day, you could sometimes see things in 15 minutes. Well, GA, there is a new new kid on the block, he shows you data in real time, and his name is chartbeat.

I’d never heard of it until last week when I was lucky enough to meet the cool folk at betaworks (@Borthwick and @aweissman). These guys don’t mess around – they’re behind such social media hits as TweetDeck, bit.ly and twitterfeed. You heard it here first – chartbeat is going to be big.

It’s really easy to get started – you just stick a couple of JavaScript tags onto all your pages a.l.a. Google Analytics, and you are done. The reports you get are much simpler than those from GA, but it is really real time. You can see the visitors on your site within a couple of seconds of their arrival. I wrote a test link bait post (sorry), tweeted it, and saw my 17 concurrent visitors within seconds.

Visitors to your site in real time. Notice one person is writing a comment. Click for large image.

But there is more. GA simply registers a hit when a page is loaded. chartbeat has a heartbeat and chats to the server every couple of seconds. This means that it can more accurately measure time spent on the site, user actions like scrolling (giving a nice scroll depth metric), and even keypresses. In the screenshot above, you’ll see one person is writing – they were leaving a comment at the time.

Typical detail page. Gotta love the scroll depth and engagement indicators

It also comes with a nice preintegration with backtype. This searches the social media buzz of the interwebs and reports activity as part of your report. When @izahoor, @theg, @irina_guseva, @cmsreport and @kevinc2003 were kind enough to retweet my horseshit blog post, I saw my dashboard get a bit busier and saw their link love appear shortly afterwards in the backtype console. Good stuff.

Nice integration with backtype. Click for large image.

It has an API and a bucket of prebuilt widgets. I haven’t had time to play with these, but I might add a widget here soon. The downside being, of course, it would pretty much always say “1 user currently viewing this page”. And that would be you.

It gets better. chartbeat even monitors the health of your site. While I was testing, my dickhead hosting company GoDaddy had yet another embolism, and my site flatlined for about 5 minutes. But unlike the previous million times this happened, it didn’t die silenty. I got a nice email from chartbeat informing me of the tragedy. Also, it tells you how long a page took to load for each user. 20 seconds isn’t great, GoDaddy. And yes, it has a free iPhone app too.

Because I’m a social media guru who understands transparancy and douchebaggery, I’ve shared my wonderful stats with the world. So have a look at my chartbeat dashboard.

You do have to pay a small fee for all this goodness, but it is money well spent. Buy it. Finally, a huge nod to @arctictony for helping me out.

Hang on to your woman if you got one
Remember in El Paso, once, you shot one.
She may have been a whore, but she was a hot one
- BILLY

Sorry, so very sorry, dear reader. This isn’t a real post. But it is research for a real post. You see, I’m test driving a new analytics package which, on first impressions, is awesome. Problem is, my blog doesn’t get enough traffic to make any screenshots interesting. Which is why you are here.

So, before you leave, browse around and read some shit. It’s all in the interest of science. Retweet it, leave a comment, tell your friends and make my screenshots the busiest darn screenshots any analytics review ever had. If you’re very very lucky, you might even notice your visit in a picture in my next post.

Let’s see if 1337 Twitter followers are worth anything. I’m serious. I’ve got elite followers. And I’m sure I’ll lose a whole bunch of them pretty damn soon.

UPDATE: You can read the real blog post now – It Can All Change In a ChartBeat. And I only lost 2 Twitter followers. Fuck ‘em.

I already assumed
That we’re in the felony room
But I ain’t a judge, you don’t have to be nice to me
But please tell that
To your friend in the cowboy hat
You know he keeps on sayin’ ev’rythin’ twice to me
- SHE’S YOUR LOVER NOW

We’ve got some more BlueWashing going on. IBM announced today that they’re acquired analytics and marketing vendor Unica for $480 million. It seems like a lot of cash to me, but then again IBM have got plenty and what do I know. I do know it follows quite shortly after they bought pure analytics vendor CoreMetrics.

The “Farewell to Coremetrics and Web Analytics as you knew it” post from the Unica blog (two months ago) is quite interesting in retrospect:

Now, IBM’s acquisition of Coremetrics follows suit as IBM folds Coremetrics into Websphere with the likely intention of making it part of the Websphere eCommerce technology stack.

With no major standalone contenders remaining in the market (WebTrends had signaled their interest in getting acquired) prospective web analytics buyers must evaluate the core competencies of the parent company in order to determine the best match for their current and future needs.

IBM does NOT appear to be making a play for a broader analytics offering

The wise seem to be saying that IBM isn’t actually going to bother marketing either Unica or CoreMetrics, but rather just add them into the already vast IBM Suite. Which effectively mean they’re being withdrawn from the Analytics battlefield. If that is the case, then the three players that will be slugging it out will be Adobe Omniture, Google Analytics and WebTrends. And although WebTrends are alledgely not trying to put themselves up for sale, I suspect they might be gobbled up quite soon. Maybe AAPL will feel left out of an Adobe vs Google slugfest, and buy WebTrends just to join the fracas. Maybe we should count Nedstat too, but I don’t see much of them. Or have they already been bought?

I’m the kind of guy that likes to believe the IBM <-> HAL thing (although Arthur denies it), and I’ve got this vision of poor IBM acquired vendors trying to wriggle free of the corporation. For no good reason, let’s end on this:

Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
- MASTERS OF WAR

A friend of mine just reintroduced me to my favourite game of all time. A curse on all of his houses. Civilization Revolution is available on iOS and, the bad news is, it is as good and addictive as ever. It’s actually been around for almost a year, but I was blissfully unaware. I don’t play games any more, trying to balance my life between my kids, my job, my drinking, my blog and the odd bit of sleep. That’s all about to go to hell.

I’ve given it a try and it rocks. I feel like I’m 18 again when all I had to do was play Civilization I, go out and get drunk, play some more, drinks some more, write some pretty easy university maths exams, and play even more. But two decades later, I’m told I have “responsibilities”. I’ve got a bad feeling that this week the kids are going to go feral, my wife will leave me, the fridge will fester, and I’ll get fired.

But a man has gotta do what a man has gotta do. The game won’t beat itself on Emperor level, you know. Those asshat Greeks need to be taught a lesson, the shifty Aztecs can’t be trusted, and Ghengis Khan is really, really pissing me off. So until I’ve sorted that out, you won’t be seeing much on this blog. £3.99 is a small price to pay for your life to fall apart. Buy it, you know you want to.

[UPDATE]: The iPhone version went FREE the day after I flushed £3.99 down the bog. Makes my time-stealing, money-stealing friend that ruined my life even more of a ballsack. At least the rest of you can have your midlife crisis for free.

All the tired horses in the sun
How’m I supposed to get any ridin’ done? Hmm.
- ALL THE TIRED HORSES

Where there is smoke, there is fire. In this case, it’ll be a shitstorm of a fire that’ll consume everything useful in it’s path. A bit like a Scorched Earth Campaign of Content Management.

Of course I’m talking about the Autonomy/Open Text speculation here (@hakana), here (@ldallasBMOC) and here (@piewords). In truth, the few rumours are, according to the crowds, highly unlikely to have any substance so this whole post is a waste of time. Apart from photos of CEOs in bed with hookers, no-one in Twitterville can produce a single good reason for it that I can swallow. But if this post even slightly reduces the miniscule chance of this joke of a deal materialising, it’s time well spent.

The whole is less than the sum of the parts

Onward. It’s pretty clear there is no way that this deal could make a new sale more likely. The number of different CMS and search products The Firm would have warrants the invention of a new Collective Noun. How about a Gaggle of Products? Or Confusion of Products. Or Mindfuck of Products? Should some poor customer go through a vendor selection exercise and pick Opentonomytext, they’d need to go through another one to pick the product. Ain’t gonna happen.

And the poor existing customers. Following the Open Text/Vignette deal, many poor customers are still wondering whether or when their product will be discontinued. They’re playing Russian Roulette with about 2 bullets in the chamber. If this deal happens, they’ll have about 4 bullets. Some will jump ship, so the whole idea of creating a maintenance revenue cash cow doesn’t make sense either. In simple maths terms: (Autonomy Maintenance 2011) + (Open Text Maintenance 2011) < (Opentonomytext Maintenance 2011).

Spare a thought for the search engineers at Vignette. They OEM’ed Autonomy as their search for years. “Best of Breed”, they all cried. Then arch-rival Interwoven was aquired by Autonomy. “We’re not paying our arch rival cash every time we sell a product”, they  cried. “Autonomy is a piece of shit. Let’s embed the Open Text search engine.” So they did. Hopefully they didn’t delete the code, cause they may be flipping it back pretty soon.

And spare a thought for yours truly. I’ve pushed my MS Paint skills to the limit creating the Super Spliced Open Text Logo. I think the only way I could make a logo for the new beast is on a Möbius strip, and I don’t have any lying around.

Now I’m not saying that the road ahead for either company is paved with gold. But they’ve both got some good products, some great people and a fair bit of cash. If they roll up their sleeves and innovate, they might just be okay. If they keep playing Pass The Parcel with products that develop more slowly than tectonic plates, they’re toast. Wait! Hold on a second! What’s that putrid smell? Oh, look, it’s an an elephant graveyard. And elephants don’t make good software. Especially dead ones.

P.S. Remember, this isn’t actually going to happen. Surely. They’re gonna buy someone else. Answers on a postcard.

No, there’s nothin’ you can send me, my own true love,
There’s nothin’ I wish to be ownin’.
Just carry yourself back to me unspoiled,
From across that lonesome ocean.
- BOOTS OF SPANISH LEATHER

Finally, finally, an acquisition I think I understand. Adobe have just announced they’re buying Day Software (press release) for about USD $240 million – just slightly less than OTEX paid for Vignette. Adobe’s re-entry into the CMS game is well overdue. Some might argue that the Creative Suite tools are becoming more CMS like. They dabbled briefly in it when they aquired Macromedia (remember Contribute, anyone?) and the Product Formally Known As Stellent comes from this line.