Here’s to Cisco an’ Sonny an’ Leadbelly too,
An’ to all the good people that traveled with you.
Here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men
That come with the dust and are gone with the wind.
- SONG TO WOODY 

 As everyone knows, I think the CMS Watch Content Techonology Vendor Map is awesome. They’ve just released the 2010 version. As far as I can tell, the main differences between this and the 2009 version are shown below:

Get the high res version from the CMS Watch site. 

 So, what’s changed? Firstly, the big mergers and acquisitions:

• Adobe decided to buy Omniture for reasons I haven’t figured out yet. It’s made the map more topologically tricky.
• OpenText has gobbled up Vignette, removing another of the big dots
• Oracle has bought SUN, which hasn’t changed much since Oracle had a few of everything already.
• JBoss and eXo have merged Portal platforms
• ClearStory is now The FeedRoom, who have been recently acquired by KIT digital.

New Kids On The Map:

• Vyre isn’t new, but it’s now recognised as a DAM product too. This was discussed last time. OpenCms has made the WCM big time, along with Hannon Hill, Telerik and Omniupdate.
• Mark Logic storms onto the XML Component Management line after creating quite a buzz in the last few months. Quark is on there too, Revolutionizing Publishing. Again.
• Cisco’s new tools get them onto the Social and Collab line. It’s busy there though – they’re joined by Salesforce (the Daddy), Yammer  (like Twitter for the Enterprise), MindTouch (Open Source Enterprise Networking Platform) and KickApps (another community builder).
• Three ECM platforms I know nothing about: Fabasoft, DocuWare and Objective.

And finally:

• FaceBook has gone. Maybe not enterprise enough. Which is probably why Twitter isn’t on either.
• Poor EPiServer still hasn’t made it onto the SoCo line, even though they’ve got a very mature Community product
• SAP still isn’t considered a CMS, which is fine by me.

So that’s that. A 300 page report costs about the same as an overpaid consultant researching badly for a couple of days to prepare that disappointing Google-fleeced document you were embarrassed to show your boss. It’s a no brainer. Buy the reports. All of them. They rock.

Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God say, “No.” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run”
Well Abe says, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”
God says, “Out on Highway 61.”
- HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED

People are talking about Open Text’s CMS roadmap again. There were some interesting statements made in the latest Earnings Call, the most notable of which is quoted below:

Paul Steep – Scotia Capital

What sort of the timing for the integrated platform, and I guess, would the plan be to migrate that Vignette product over to RedDot that [number] there. I think they are on a different architectures as I would recall?

John Shackleton

Actually, it probably be the other way, Paul, where we would migrate the RedDot to the Vignette platform. We will be showing a detailed road map at the conference in October, so I think you’ll get a good clear. But it looks pretty interesting, the way that things are shaping up.

Ho hum. Another migration in a box. I really liked the post from Markus Giesen on the Unofficial RedDot blog. He asks many of the questions that customers, implementors and investors should be asking. He also has good inside knowledge, and so I’m not going to repeat what he’s already explained so nicely. Read his post. Instead, I’m going to outline the options as I see them.

Option 1: Sophie’s Choice

This one is easy to explain – a tragic choice between two unbearable options. Kill either RedDot or Vignette, one bullet for the CMS product (VCM or LiveServer) and one for the Delivery product (Vignette Application Portal or Delivery Server). This is most likely to mean bye-bye RedDot unless, of course, the people at Open Text pay more attention to the Gartner Magic Quadrant than me, in which case it’s goodbye Vignette. However, there is no chance at all that VAP will die so I think Vignette is safe. Option 1 isn’t going to happen.

Option 2: The Quick PurpleDot Brundlefly

So, next option. Merge the two products together into some kind of new hybrid product. Now this simply isn’t going to work. I’m not going to waste anyone’s time by listing the numerous reasons why this is insane. Instead, I’ll let the good children of South Park explain this for me:

Kyle: Well, what about our pot-bellied elephant?
Mephesto: Oh. Well I’m sorry children, but, pig and elephant DNA just won’t splice … Although, maybe I could help you add a few asses to that swine of yours.
Cartman: You can keep your hands off of Fluffy’s ass!

‘Nuff said. I’m not sure if you’ve ever tried to implement a site on a CMS with four asses. It isn’t pretty. Trust me.

Option 3: The Long Winded PurpleDot Brundlefly

Okay, so we’re not killing a product, and we’re not merging them either. The next option that is being discussed is the creation of a brand new product using the best engineering ideas and lessons from both products. Realistically, however, it’ll take far too long to build a brand new product from the ground up. In reality this will either end in the euthanasia of a product  or a slower route to market for a PurpleDot Brundlefly. I see this option as a marketing spin on the infeasible Options 1 and 2. Not going to happen.

Option 4: The Alterian Gambit

Here is a viable option. Keep them both, keep supporting them both, and keep both products separate. Re-assure existing customers and implementers that nothing is really changing. This approach would keep existing customers happiest, but might make new sales more difficult. However, I think there are many ways they could differentiate the products, as I explained in this post. They could split by technology (Java/.NET), by industry vertical, or by dramatically reducing Red Dot’s license fees to compete lower down the food chain.

Option 5: The SKU Jedi Mind Trick

Keep them both and make the sheeple believe they’re part of the same integrated product suite. It’s amazing what new product name and a CSS change can give to a marketing manager. So in reality this is similar to Option 4, with a bit of confusion thrown on top. This is a fairly likely outcome.

Option 6: The Maintenance Milking Machine

Now this isn’t really a separate option, but a given. Open Text would be insane to rock the boat and potentially scare of the maintenance paying existing customers. The MMM could work in conjunction with either Options 5 or 6. The Shareholders will demand it. Expect to see both products being supported for many years to come, although don’t hold your breath for too much innovation.

While I can’t predict what’s going to happen, maybe history can teach us something. In the spirit of ignoring copyright rules, I’ve attached a screenshot from the CMS Watch CMS Report from 2004.

Extract from CMS Watch 2004 report. Please don't sue me.

We all know what happened last time. Let’s see if history repeats itself.

It ain’t that I’m questionin’ you.
To take part in any quiz.
It’s just that I ain’t got no watch
An’ you keep askin’ me what time it is
- IF YOU GOTTA GO, GO NOW

A Quiz

Right, the quiz. It all started when I got invited to play some dumb-ass quiz on QuizTweet.com. Something about Which Mixed Drink Would I Be. Now I only drink beer these days, so I ain’t no mixed drink at all. But all the CMS cool kids were turning out to be Martini’s, so I bowed to the pressure to prove I was different. QuizTweet is pretty sneaky as once you’ve invested time and energy answering the questions, it then asks you for your Twitter creds so it can tweet your results. You find out how you’ve done at the same time as the world finds out. So I break my own rules and give the QuizTweet app access to my Twitter account. And it doesn’t really warn you either. @QuizTweet – if you’re reading this, I really think you need to add in a notification screen so people realise what is about to happen.

Once I’d sold my soul and creds to QuizTweet, I figured I’d try to set my own quiz up. The interface is pretty sweet and I was done in 20 minutes. You first define the different possible outcomes (with a description and an easy-to-select image), and then write the questions. For each question, you need to write an answer for each outcome. Which means I needed 13 possible responses for each question. This is far too many – I wish that I could assign multiple outcome to the same question response. The screenshot belows shows the kind of interface you get for each question. I’ve only shown 4 of the 13 response form elements though.

I’ve no idea how the system selects the outcome. I presume that it picks the outcome with the most responses, and is random in the event of a tie. In my quiz, I’m guessing selecting 3/10 questions for a certain outcome will be enough. If I’d known how popular the stupid thing would become, I’d have given the questions more thought! As of now, over 600 tweeps have taken the quiz and it has made page 1 of the Top Quizzes. It’s even “Trending” which isn’t bad considering the small target audience. The annoying way that it tweets the results for you also makes it very viral. I think QuizTweet has potential.

For those that are wondering, the 13 possible outcomes are Alfresco, Alterian, Day, Drupal, EMC Documentum, EPiServer, Fatwire, MOSS (SharePoint), Notepad, Open Text, SDL Tridion, Vignette and WordPress. Day was added late. Alfresco and MOSS added even later. The choice of what was included was pretty random – they are systems I know something about, and are not too close to one another.  I really liked the cheap marketing stunt from @martinvm with this tweet claiming to have done the quiz and got GX WebManager – even though it wasn’t an option. Nice work, Mr Product Manager.

As QuizTweet doesn’t let me see the results, I am monitoring them via a Twitter Search and am getting them emailed to me via Twilert. If people are interested, I’ll post them in a couple of days.

In case you were wondering, it turns out I’m not different from the other CMS nerds. I’m also a Martini. If you have the urge, you can play the CMS Quiz here. And if you’re really impressed or truly horrified by the result it gave you, please leave a comment.

Some Beers

If you don’t live near London, you can stop reading now. Maybe do the quiz again. However, if you do live near London and you’re still reading, I figured I might as well plug the Last Thursday CMS drinks. A few people get together over some beers and talk about Content Management, the web industry and other random things. We meet on the last Thursday of every month. It is a bit like the CMS/Pub/London drinks we used to do about 5 years ago. If you’d like to find out more, have a look at Meetup.com Event. Everyone is welcome. The only rule (especially for CMS vendors) is no hard selling please. Any attempt to sell anything to anyone must be preceded by buying a round of drinks for everyone within earshot. Note that although one of the organisers works for Squiz.Net, the event is in no way affliated with or sponsored by any vendor.

So far there have been about 5 meetings, and they’ve been good fun. Hope to see some more of you there for interesting discussions. By the way, did you know that there is a Free Beer published under a Creative Commons License? That’s free as in speech, not free as in beer.

A Celebrity Visit

Some breaking news. There is going to be a Danish celebrity having some beers in London on July 2 – that’s next Thursday. Come along and get a beer and an autograph. The Danes don’t make beer, but if they did, it would probably be the best beer ever.

Nobody to rescue me,
Nobody would dare,
I was going down for the last time,
But by His mercy I’ve been spared
- SAVED

An interesting play by FatWire. Our knights in shining armour have heard the shrill cries of distress from the damsels stuck at the top of Tower Vignette and Tower Interwoven and have gallantly offered to migrate them away to the safety of Castle FatWire for free. The name of the package (FatWire Rescue Program) implies the damsels are in serious trouble. According to the press release, they have a lot to worry about:

This limited-time program enables organizations that are constrained by the rigidity of their current legacy WCM products, or concerned about the future direction of their current WCM vendor

I love the sneaky use of the word legacay here. Vignette and Interwoven are suddenly legacy simply because they’ve been bought by OpenText and Autonomy respectively? Looking forward to seeing a response from VIGN/OTEX and IWOV/AU.  Interwoven is the fastest growing ECM vendor and Vignette, despite recent troubles, are still fighting and releasing some cool new things. They certainly aren’t legacy in my books.

It is going to be cheap and painless to migrate. No license costs! Woot! The press release tells us that

The program enables customers of these recently acquired companies to upgrade to FatWire’s industry-leading solutions at no license cost, when they employ FatWire’s proven migration tools and services that reduce the risk and increase the speed of migration.

Oh, wait, maybe it isn’t that cheap at all. Our knight comes with strings attached. You need to use FatWire’s migration tools. These come in the form of partnerships with Vamosa and Kapow, two heavy hitters in the world of automated content migration. My first observation here is that these two, while both offering an excellent service, normally compete with each other. So I’d be interested in learning more about the way a company (or FatWire) decides which of the two products to run with. My second observation is that both of these products can come with a reasonably large price tag. I presume the model here is that FatWire will take some cut of the migration cost in return for referring customers to Vamosa or Kapow.

The other piece of the revenue pie will come from the associated implementation services, either from FatWire Professional Services or an implementation partner. As Irina mentioned earlier today, implementing a CMS costs more than buying a CMS. And what if it isn’t only a CMS in the mix. For example, you might have Vignette Portal in there too. Or one of Autonomy Interwoven’s many other products. FatWire don’t have a product suite to replace all of these components quite yet, so this offer seems to focus primarily on customers that only use the WCM product from their current vendor.

I don’t know enough about this offering to guess whether this migration will only cover the content management and migration aspects. Any delivery side “migration” will involve a significant amount of work. Maybe FatWire already have tools in place that can either statically deploy the same files generated by a baked Interwoven site, or replace the Vignette/Interwoven API with the FatWire one for fried sites.  All three products have a Java API so at least we don’t need to worry about language-level changes too.

Maybe this is a marketing stunt. I received my email from FatWire marketing as the announcement was made. But maybe it is a genuine way for customers to save time and money if they are planning to migrate from their current platform. FatWire is a solid choice (Forrester just patted them on the back in the WCM for External Sites wave) and the content migration products are industry leaders.

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

If you are considering this option, I’d love to hear more from you once you know the costs involved and how the process will operate. They are many ways that this could work, and it’s all going to come out in the wash.

Now, if someone offers me a joke
I just say no thanks.
I try to tell it like it is
And keep away from pranks.
- GOIN’ TO ACAPULCO

More like this please. As much as I enjoyed the CMS Vendor Meme, I have to admit that the results are fairly meaningless. Most of the answers were extremely corporate and towed the party line. So I was overjoyed to see Adrian Mateljan post his view on the Open Text response to the meme. If you are a developer and don’t know what this is about, or haven’t seen the response from your CMS vendor, the summary and all the responses are here.

Score one for the good guys

In a very honest response, he calls major bullshit on two of the answers, and questions quite a few more. He spots some cunning marketing-speak that I missed completely first time round. Open Text gave themselves 40/45 (actually, I marked their answers, but anyway). Adrian gives them a more believable 34/45. Please, developers, get in the ring.

His thoughts on Question 4:

4. Eval versions of the latest edition(s) of our software are always available for download from the company website.
Open Text’s Response: Yes, all our software is always available for download to our customers. The same is true for early beta version to those customers and partners that participate in beta programs.
Open Text’s Score: 3
Adrian’s Response: Although this is true, I don’t think it answers the spirit of the question – which is that this software should be available to non customers to evaluate – which as far as I am aware, it definately isn’t. In my experience, the whole procurement process of Management Server is very tightly controlled by Open Text and its sales team and is in no way “open” *until* you have signed on.
Adrian Score: 1

For more like this, read his full post. If you disagree with the responses from the vendor you know and love, follow Adrian’s lead and have your say. I suspect the majority of the responses have holes in them. I might even be tempted to break rank and do a few myself.

And Mr Google, if you’re watching, have one of these: 9c56d0fcf93175d70e1c9b9d188167cf

UPDATE: List of the developer responses so far is:

• May 12, 2009: Open Text – Adrian Mateljan
• May 13, 2009: Interwoven – Darren Ferguson

Well, my head’s full of questions
My temp’rature’s risin’ fast
Well, I’m lookin’ for some answers
But I don’t know who to ask
- MIXED UP CONFUSION

It’s been a few days since the announcement that Open Text will absorb Vignette. Most of the important analysts have thrown their opinions on the deal into the ring, and some patterns are emerging. AIIM’s John Mancini has compiled collections of commentary here and here for those that want everything in one place. I’d like to offer my thoughts on what has been said from the tech perspective. I’ve no idea about exactly what keeps shareholders happy. Everything in this post is of course pure speculation.

Why did they buy it?

According to this CMS Wire post, Open Text CEO John Shackleton has the answer:

[Shackleton ] indicated that Vignette is one of the last big players in the market and they saw a number of synergies with the web content management assets that the Vignette deal brings them. Along with sharing a number of high profile brands, Shackleton also indicated that Vignette’s records management expertise and their analytics capabilities had caught Open Text’s eye.

The fact that they share clients is true, but I don’t get why that makes it a good idea to buy them. Surely they want to buy new customers, not the ones they have already? The WCM synergies bit might make some sense. The rest is nonsense. I’ll talk about Open Text’s more mature records management expertise later in this post, but what exactly are Vignette’s analytics capabilities? If we mean Vignette Experience Optimization Products, I thought that those were:

• Recommendations, which is an OEM’ed Baynote with a light sprinkling of new features
• Analytics, which is just Omniture SiteCatalyst and a “best practices integration guide”
• Advanced Search, which is “a more powerful version of the IDOL engine from Autonomy”. Not sure what the “more powerful” bit means. I wonder if Interwoven will get the weak version from their new parent company.

Surely Open Text isn’t buying OEM deals? Let’s try another justification, from RBC Capital Markets analyst Mike Abramsky:

Vignette’s WCM solutions/technology/expertise brings to OTEX sophisticated features (transactions, analytics, ecommerce, etc) required by larger online accounts, which represent a lucrative opportunity and potentially a growth area when the economy rebounds.

Where do they get this stuff? Analytics mentioned again. What “transaction” or “eCommerce” sophisticated features will Vignette’s WCM solution bring? I suspect they bought it for exactly the reasons I don’t understand, don’t like, and will eventually screw the implementers and customers. Which is why none of the official press releases make much sense. The unofficial commentary from people like CMS Watch (Kas, Alan) is surely closer to the truth.

Vignette was sitting in the Enterprise CMS Vendor Clearance bucket, so Open Text got it extremely cheaply. The reasons for the acquisition are certainly strategic and don’t involve technology. Open Text have bought plenty of other CMS vendors and the products ended up on the fast track to oblivion. Five years ago, a post from Bloor Research entitled Open Text Rolls Out The First Fruits Of Its Merger With Ixos started like this:

You could imagine that Open Text had been suffering somewhat from indigestion after having recently acquired a range of content management and Web publishing companies that include Ixos and Gauss, not to mention Corechange and Obtree. Open Text says that the fit between Ixos and Open Text, its most significant acquisition, has been excellent with very few overlaps in capability.

Where are Ixos, Gauss, Corechange and Obtree now? I wonder if history is repeating itself.

Will the Technical Stacks Ever Merge?

As I said in my previous post on the acquistion, the Open Text and Vignette technology stacks overlap enormously. Virtually every Vignette product is man-marked by its Open Text counterpart. So will there be consolidation and integration within the product suite? Most likely, no. Most analysts think that the products are going to stay separate. Even if they wanted to, they probably couldn’t. I like Alan Peltz-Sharpe’s summary of this the most, from his CMSWatch posting Why Open Text bought Vignette — the real story :

Gluing them together is just not feasible on this scale, it cannot be done regardless of what the marketing from Open Text (or Autonomy in it’s turn) might like you to believe. All you can really do is to slash costs where possible, leave the technology pieces alone as much as possible, and milk the product and customer base as cash cows.

So Can Open Text Milk These Cash Cows?

Where does Vignette currently get its revenues from? Here is a summary of the figures from Q1 2009 taken from the earnings report. It compares the numbers (which are in $ millions) from Q1 2009 with the same period in 2008.

The numbers are lower in 2009 than 2008. No surprises there. Digging a bit deeper into the three areas:

• Licenses - New license sales seem to be about 20% of the revenue, and that’s likely to continue to decrease significantly with the current economic climate and the uncertainty created by the aquisition
• Maintenance and Support – This is currently over half of their revenue. Certainly the fattest cash cow which needs to be milked with care. Service levels need to remain constant or improve. Many existing customers will be relieved that Vignette have been acquired and will happily continue paying here if Open Text can keep them sweet.
• Professional Services – This was traditionally a large part of Vignette’s revenue. I remember people saying that at one point it was 50% of the total but my top secret sources (Yahoo! Finance) don’t think it has been that high for many years. It was 33% in Q1 2008 and down to 25% in Q1 2009. I can’t see this rising dramatically. VPS earn cash when new projects are sold, so their revenue contribution will fall as licenses fall. I wonder if VPS and Open Text Professional Services will merge.

Clearly just milking the Maintenance and Support cow isn’t enough as Vignette is currently losing money. What about new opportunities for OTEX:

• Migrations - The existing Vignette customers will not have an appetite for expensive migrations to Open Text products, and would probably like to stay where they are. It is also unlikely that Open Text would want to migrate any customers in the other directions. Not many migrations will happen in either direction.
• Cross Sells/Up Sells – This seems to be where everyone is betting the farm. If OTEX can’t sell new products or services into the existing (non-profitable) client base, the whole thing might have been an extremely bad idea.

This is summerised nicely by Gartner’s Toby Bell in his article Win ‘Em, Wring ‘Em, and Wean ‘Em. He also adds an important insight about the timing of Open Text’s move:

Open Text seems to have wisely waited until the falloff of potentially more fickle customers and prospects had been completed. The business core thus revealed, it swooped in with the right offer at the right time. VIGN’s value to Open Text is not the technology, it’s the seats. The very plushy ones of large enterprises with global potential to look at one of its own (now) incumbent suppliers to provision other user needs. And, Open Text has options for those enterprises in spades.

Open Text have now Won ‘Em. I don’t think they’ll be able to Wring ‘Em for much. The most important piece is how well they will Wean ‘Em.

What’s the Open Text new sales strategy going to be?

Let’s forget the past, for a second. Picture the scene – you’re a sales guy with a Vignette history and an Open Text business card and you’re meeting with a new prospect. What are you going to be selling?

You’ll still be selling Vignette Content Management (VCM). It has the perception of being “more enterprise” than Open Text Web Solutions nee RedDot. It is possible that they’ll follow a similiar model to Alterian and have two different tiers. Alterian have Corporate Edition (Immediacy) and Enterprise Edition (Morello). However, Open Text already push their RedDot solution as Enterprise ready (for example, this recent press release ), so I think it is more likely they’ll split on technology. If a customer has an existing J2EE infrastructure they’ll sell Open Text Web Solution For Java (a.k.a Vignette), and they’ll sell Open Text Web Solution.NET (a.k.a. RedDot) to the Microsoft based clients. Of course they need to brand all this nicely so that the customers don’t get confused.

Vignette Application Portal (VAP) will also be on your selling list. It is the only major product that doesn’t have an Open Text alternative, so it could lead a long and healthy life. Open Text might also push this to their existing customers as the delivery mechanism of choice. I hope they only do this when it is appropriate – see my previous rant on Portals That Walk And Talk Like Ducks. If both VAP and VCM are sold, that probably means that Dynamic Portal Module (DPM) won’t get the bullet quite yet. Pity about that.

Digital Asset Management will be Open Text’s Artesia. Possibly the end of Vignette’s Rich Media Services. Maybe it will still be sold into certain verticals, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Vignette IDM already has an integration with Artesia. Speaking of which, I’m not sure if the Imaging part of this will survive either. The Document Management product of choice going forward will undoubtedly be LiveLink. After the Tower aquisition, “Vignette never really figured out what to do with the document management solutions and they dropped out of sight as far as the market was concerned.” Open Text as a company understands Transactional Content Management better than Vignette does, has a long history of Records Management, and I think all their products will dominate in this area. The quote is taken from the timely article Google should buy Vignette – but not for the obvious reasons by Michael Wilson, who knows more than most about Vignette’s capabilities in this area.

The bad news for our hyphothetical salesman is that I don’t believe we’ll be seeing many large new sales this year. Some people think otherwise. For example, Yuval Ararat blogs here that the Financial Sector is going to wake up soon, and that’s going to be good news for Vignette and their pipeline-waiting-to-happen. They do have a large financial sector client base, but this might be part of their problem at the moment. I hope Yuval is right, but I don’t share his confidence.

It’s been over ten years since Vignette IPO’ed. I started working with it in the days of Story Server. I hope that some of the technology makes it into the next generation of Open Text products. Surely they wouldn’t spend all that money and kill off the tech? But $310 million is a fraction of what Vignette paid for OnDisplay in the dot-boom days. And we all know how much of that technology survived.

We grew up together
From the cradle to the grave
We died and were reborn
And then mysteriously saved.
- OH, SISTER

I gotta admit, this one took me by surprise. Open Text has just announced that they are aquiring Vignette. There were the usual rumours in the air, but I don’t think many people took it seriously. I know I didn’t. First RedDot. Then Vizible. Now this. Anyone remember Gauss and Obtree? I’ve been using Vignette since 1999 and have become very fond of it. Maybe this is the Stockholm Syndrome, but anyway.

I’m not going to write much now – I need time to digest things – but there is a lot to think about here. But off the top of my confused head:

• The Vignette name will probably vanish in the same way that the RedDot name recently did. How about “More Open Text Web Solutions”? That’s catchy. The end of an era, as I blogged about here.
• I suspect that Vignette Content Management is going to be around for a while. A lot of customers have been through a lot of effort recently to get onto the latest versions. I can’t see Open Text messing with that baby. So it looks like three Open Text CMS choices for a while – the original, the ex-RedDot and the ex-VCM.
• Vignette have a Collaboration product, and have recently announced their new Vignette Community Services. OpenText have a large Collaboration and Community Management component. Something is going to happen here.
• I think the Portal will stay as it is. Open Text currently have the Open Text Portal Integration Kit. Expect to see this become tightly ingrated with VAP via the JSR-168 portlets. Hopefully it will replace Dynamic Portal in the longer term. Open Text don’t have their own portal.
• The needs to be some Records Management consolidation I would think. No point have both Open Text Records Management and Vignette Records Manager is there? I’m guessing one of these will become dominant, and customers will be (slowly) migrated. This will take many years, though.
• Maybe there will be a similar product collision in the Imaging/Workflow/Capture area, and the Business Process Management areas. I don’t know much about this stuff, so ain’t going to guess anything.
• Open Text have a more more mature DAM offering in Artesia. I wonder if the much heralded, newly launched Vignette Rich Media is going to have a long and healthy life. Maybe some of the fancy front end technology will get used (Vizible is more fancy). I suspect the Vignette’s DAM days are numbered.

I really really hope that this is going to be a good thing for Vignette. Maybe it is exactly what they needed. But, on the other hand, maybe it isn’t. In my experience, these things are never that smooth for the company that gets absorbed. I do worry about the existing Vignette employees. These kinds of deals are never without pain, and I hope that the people that have been sweating blood for VIGN aren’t badly affected. I also worry about the existing Vignette customers – I see roadmap changes on the horizon. I’m sure the customer-centric analysts will have a lot to say here.

And finally, I wonder how much fun Tony Byrne is going to have drawing the 2010 Content Technology Vendor Map. The number of big stations is getting smaller every day.

Can’t talk any more now. Got a call with a Vignette OpenText client.

[UPDATE: It seems not everyone was as surprised as me! Laurence "@piewords" Hart gazed into his Crystal Ball and called it in January. And the Big Men On Content picked it up last August. Matt Asay even had the numbers right back then. They've got their ears to the ground.]

Dear landlord,
Please don’t dismiss my case.
I’m not about to argue,
I’m not about to move to no other place.
Now, each of us has his own special gift
And you know this was meant to be true,
And if you don’t underestimate me
I won’t underestimate you.
- DEAR LANDLORD

So, the CMS Vendor Meme has come and, it seems, gone. 20 vendors of all sizes joined and in provided us with some valuable insights. Not to mention a list of vendors to follow on Twitter. Interestingly, all of the “Enterprise” vendors claimed the questions weren’t really suitable for them.

As promised, Vignette have posted a new set of questions, which they’ve called the “Enterprise Web Content Management (WCM)” Meme. Personally, I don’t really like the WCM abbreviation for this and so I’d suggest we call it the #ECMMeme, even if it is quite focussed on the web part of ECM and ignores many of the dimensions of classic ECM.

I’m not sure if the vendors will respond to this one as readily as they did the last. The first one was certainly a brilliant, original idea. I think this is great, but there is a chance that it could be considered the start of what @kirstenpetra calls “an ongoing ‘meme-off’”. I for one hope that they do respond.

Onto the questions. They cover traditional Content Management, but some stray into delivery services and products such as the delivery portal and social media solutions. They feel quite “By Vignette, For Vignette” and lack the authority of the last meme as those questions were drawn up by a trusted third party in Kas Thomas. Have a read of Irina Guseva’s thoughts on this.

I remember a long long time ago doing plenty of CMS selection exercises that ended up with Vignette against Broadvision (remember them!). Back then, Broadvision offered a whole range of products, while I favoured Vignette as they were “just a CMS” and “focussed on the core competencies of the product”. How times have changed, with every major vendor becoming an End-to-End eBusiness Solution.

A few additional questions I’d have like to have seen:

• The different products in our offering are fully integrated, and feel like they are part of the same family
• Our products are easy to upgrade, with most customers running on the latest version

Vignette have tagged Interwoven, Fatwire, SDL Tridion, Oracle, Day & OpenText – three of which didn’t reply to the first meme. Interesting that no-one is bothering to tag Microsoft. And does anyone count SAP as an ECM vendor these days?

And just so you know, you can actually comment on their FaceBook page. You just need to be a fan of Vignette!

Game on.

There’s a lone soldier on the cross, smoke pourin’ out of a boxcar door,
You didn’t know it, you didn’t think it could be done, in the final end he won the wars
After losin’ every battle.
- IDIOT WIND

Part 1: The Beginning
Part 2: The Meme Spreads
Part 3: The Aftermath

Right, it is time to draw this chapter to a close. If you don’t know what this is all about, please read Part 1 and Part 2 mentioned above first. There has been a great response, and there is talk that an ECM focused meme will start soon too. This has been reported by Julian Wraith, who also did an excellent job keep track of all the responses. Thanks! Google Bertrand Delacrétaz’s Meme ID to find everything there is to find: 9c56d0fcf93175d70e1c9b9d188167cf.

For the record, the 24 vendors that responded (with links to their responses) are: Jahia, Ektron, Hippo CMS , Magnolia, EPiServer, Nuxeo, GX, Midgard, Knowledge Tree, infopark, Day, Alfresco, CoreMedia, Sitecore, OpenText, Alterian, dotCMS, Vignette, Autonomy/Interwoven and Escenic. Not yet in the table: eZ Systems, e-Spirit, Enano, Sense/Net.

Below is my summary of the results. Click the image for a larger version. Please note that everything here is extremely subjective. You’d be insane to use this as part of any vendor selection exercise!

Summary of the Scores

Notes on the scoring:

• Vendors shown with a blue background did not score themselves. So I scored them based on what I think their answers meant.
• GX gave themselves a 0 and a 1, where they meant a 1 and a 2. So their score rises from 40 to 42.

The Overwhelming Yes Questions

These questions had an average score of 2.8 and above:

• Amazingly, everyone thought their Software Does What It Says it did. That’s great news for the CMS buyer. Everyone is honest . Most don’t even try to justify this, although Ektron justify their reply with the fact that they have “more WCMS implementations than any other vendor in the marketplace”. I’d be interested to see the list/research on which this is based.
• They all claim to have a Free SDK. I wonder if Kas Thomas had a vendor in mind when he put that question onto the list?
• The No Reboot topic caused a bit of controversy, with three vendors claiming it isn’t important. I disagree with this. A reboot doesn’t cause any downtime in a load balanced environment, but I feel it is architecturally wrong for the CMS to go so close to the Operating System to warrant one.
• Alfresco were the only ones to admit that they need their technical presales engineers to help the Sales Guys. Maybe the other vendors included these techies as part of the sales team so gave themselves full marks.
• Again, Alfresco were the only ones that confessed their Sample Site wasn’t great. I’ve seen a lot of these sample sites, and some of them are really quite dire. I think a few more vendors should have given themselves a “Sort Of” here. But I guess the question did not ask for a Good sample site, so they are technically honest. They all have a Tutorial, most of which are good.
• Three vendors admitted that they didn’t have a Full Installer. dotCMS lost some points here, but at least it is on their roadmap. I do think that the Hippo were a bit hard on themselves. I prefer a standard EAR/WAR deployment to an install Wizard, especially in a large, clustered environment. A One Click Update question would have brought some interesting answers as upgrades are often much hard than installs.

The Differentiator Questions

These questions had an average score below 2.8:

• About half the vendors struggled on the No English challenge. The smaller US based vendors normally do worse here as many of their clients are single language. The European based vendors live and breath multi-language every day.
• Interwoven is the only vendor that does not offer a Download. Six others offer one with conditions attached.
• Most vendors eat their own Dogfood, apart from SiteCore, who drink their own pre-release champagne. Quite a few aren’t on the latest version though. Escenic gave themselves a 1 for this, while many other vendors gave themselves a 2. And I’m taking bets on when Vignette’s site is going to be running V7.6. KnowledgeTree gave themselves a very kind 3 seeing as they don’t do WCM. But their score does prove that most of the questions are noting to do with WCM and could apply to almost any software vendor.
• Escenic were the only ones that admitted their Price List is able to “adapt to a large variety of customers”. I believe that all the major vendors do this, and that the price can vary enormously. Maybe the answers refer to list price as opposed to the actual golf-course price, but I think Escenic showed honesty here that some of the others could have done. Vignette did also admit their model is complex. Half claim a 5-year old could understand it. But I hope this five year old can also drink a lot in the pub and negotiate a good discount or he is going to get screwed.
• Surprisingly, the question with the lowest average score was the Raise Issues From Product one. All vendors have an issue logging system, so this would be extremely simple to implement. It could just be a link from the admin screens to the support screens.
• The most controversial question was probably the All Help Files And Documentation are Part of the Install. Now I’m going to disagree with Kas on this and side with some of the vendors. I prefer online documentation to local installation for a number of reasons: It is kept up to date and continuously enhanced, it can include user submitted contributions, it can be powered by an advanced search engine, it can contain offsite links, and I don’t like having extra items installed on the servers. I do like to have a local of the SDK, but this should be embedded in the IDE and be an optional extra download as part of the SDK. And if people do still work when they are offline, the ability to download all the documentation would be a bonus.

The Jon Vendor Meme Awards 2009

Any great competition needs an awards ceremony. So, in the spirit in which this whole contest was conducted, I’m honoured to be able to announce:

• The Jon Award For Transparency goes to Escenic. Sure they came stone last, but I trust the guys.
• The Jon Award For Agility Above And Beyond Expectations goes to Vignette. I really didn’t expect them to respond, yet they were the first ECM player to do so.
• The Jon Award For The Best Product Name goes to Hippo CMS. Of course.
• The Jon Award For Anti-Cheating goes to Nuxeo, who miscounted their score on the low side. I’ve added a point to their reported score.

And thanks once again to Kas Thomas for his “A reality checklist for vendors“, and Day for starting this party, giving CMS geeks like me something to smile about. It’s been real.

UPDATE: 28 March 2009 – Added KnowledgeTree and Ektron.

UPDATE: 03 April 2009 – eZ Systems have responded. I’ll update the chart when I have more time.

UPDATE: 08 April 2009 – e-Spirit set themselves up for a fall by giving themselves a perfect score. Anyone know enough to see if they’re being cheeky? Not a vendor I know much about sadly. 45/45 seems a bold claim to make. They didn’t publish any contact details for question 15. I notice @espirit_news joined Twiter 15 minutes ago. Just in time. Well done, e-Spirit! Thanks for playing.

UPDATE: 09 April 2009 – Adding Enano (seeing Julian included them in his list) and Sense/Net.

I ain’t lookin’ to compete with you,
Beat or cheat or mistreat you,
Simplify you, classify you,
Deny, defy or crucify you.
All I really want to do
Is, baby, be friends with you.
- ALL I REALLY WANT TO DO

Part 1: The Beginning
Part 2: The Meme Spreads
Part 3: The Aftermath

It was the morning after the night before, and the CMS Vendor Meme started by Day Software began to spread. Two further vendors (Magnolia and Alfresco) were infected on the first day, but the days that followed saw the meme spreading like the Undead. So far, we have 18 Vendor Zombies. What follows is a day by day account of the unfolding events.

dotCMS have good designers

Big news. Vignette have responded using a FaceBook note. I gotta be honest, I didn’t think they would. Hats off to them, I say. They started with an intro explaining how Kas’ checklist didn’t really apply to them, only to ” stand-alone, SMB-focused software targeted at companies” that are “managed by a very small IT team”. They also find “that the Enterprise customers we serve don’t typically let the needs of IT drive their Web experience decisions”. So what? Why does that mean that the checklist doesn’t apply? I would have left a comment, but sadly no comments allowed. [UPDATE: Mea Culpa. You have to be a Fan of Vignette to comment on their page. But you can.]

They didn’t give themselves a score, but gave a YES for most questions. The occassional NO was well justified. The one SORT OF that made me chuckle was the “running on latest version of the software”. They’re “not on the latest point release”. Well, have fun upgrading that. It’s only a point release after all. Shouldn’t take long at all. Just a click, I’d think …

20 March 2009: Nuxeo enter the fray with a 40/45. They haven’t tagged anyone since they think there isn’t “any serious player that hasn’t been tagged already” . And they seem to be my kind of company. They’ll trade SDK’s for beer. They’re threatening to spread the meme to DM and Collaboration too.

Sweet! Another big player is up for a bit of fun. OpenText have entered, but not given themselves a score. Like Vignette, they start with a well written but very corporate intro explaining how the rules of the game don’t really apply to them. Nevertheless, they kindly agree to play anyway as “our customers expect nothing less than a transparent, strategic vision from Open Text”. Impressive stuff. An extremely slippery dodge on Question 14 – one price sheet. They also manage to squeeze in a few sales pitches (question 9 and 10). The RedDot name didn’t appear once. The brand is truly gone it seems. All in all, nice one OpenText.

Hot on their heels comes EPiServer, who score themselves highly with 42/45. Right up there at the top. Now, I am a skeptical little man and that sounds on the high side. But I know EPiServer extremely well (believe it or not, I’m a certified developer who isn’t allowed to code) and I don’t think I can’t fault their logic. They’re certainly very accurate about their answer to the language question. If anything, when you install it as English you might see the odd bit of Swedish. And maybe I’d lower the 2 to a 1 on the licensing model as the definition of a site, as they confess, is confusing as hell. But a big thanks to EPiServer for entering. They haven’t tagged anyone yet.

SiteCore in next. They gave themselves a modest 40/45. A very nice response though. My favourite was the response to the Dog Food challenge – not only do they use pre-release versions on their site, but they call it Champagne instead of Dog Food. Also like their answer to the documentation question. I’m starting to think that the Documentation question doesn’t belong on the checklist. Online documentation is probably more useful than locally installed documentation. Thanks for playing, SiteCore. But I’m not going to link to your ugly red “star image” cause it is 500 KB big.

Autonomy/Intervowen and SDL Tridion – come out, come out, wherever you are …

21/22 March 2009: It’s pretty quiet over the weekend. Almost too quiet. Then, suddenly, another big player posts their response. Thanks to Tom Wentworth from Autonomy/Interwoven. It’s absolutely brilliant to have all the major vendors getting involved in this. Really good for the CMS Community, I think. Like the other Enterprise Vendors, they haven’t given themselves a score. I think if they were to score themselves, it would be pretty low. However, all their responses are sensible and highlight the fact that the ECM players considers themselves very different to the smaller companies.

So, it seems that only one large vendor that has been tagged who is staying out of this. I’m not going to name the chickens again, but I wil say that an anagram of their name is “sordid lint”. C’mon, people, air that dirty laundry.

23 March 2009: Things appear to be getting quieter now that most of the main players are in. Doesn’t look like the meme is going to infect non-CMS vendors. A new entry today comes from Alterian (who own both MediaSurface and Immediacy). I liked the tone of their response. Very collaborative, very honest, and even congratulating some of the vendors on their response to other questions. They, like others on Twitter, question the validity of the reboot on install challenge, about which I’ll say more when everyone is in.

They don’t give themselves a score, but we’ll forgive them as they would probably have to score their two products independently. This would confuse the league tables horribly. I think the tone of their response proves how wrong I was about how this was going to play out. It isn’t a Deathmatch at all. But “CMS Celebrity Deathmatch” is a more catchy title than “CMS Collaborative Love In”.

“Some think the noble hippopotamus a somewhat pointless rhinoceros“. Not these guys, though. Hippo CMS come next, tagging Open Source Vendors OpenCMS, eZ Publish, Joomla!, TYPO3, Plone and Drupal. If this meme spreads into the Open Source land, all hell could break loose. Maybe someone will tag WordPress? Anyway, Hippo join Jahia at the top with a whopping 43/45. And where they deducted points from themselves, you can tell they feel they have the moral highground. Who needs an installer when you can deploy WARS and EARS? And surely editors speak more than one language? Did you know that hippos kill more people in Africa than any other large animal?

Another great side effect of this meme is that we are finding CMS Gurus on Twitter to follow. They’re all crawling out of the woodwork. Bill Trippe is compiling a list. He said he’d post a link here in a comment when it is ready. [UPDATE: Bill has posted the link below, but I got this wrong. It is a list of the actual vendor accounts, not individuals].

Part 1: The Beginning
Part 2: The Meme Spreads
Part 3: The Aftermath

“There must be some way out of here,” said the joker to the thief,
“There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief.
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth.”
- ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWER

CMS Vendor Day has responded to this in the “CMS Vendor Meme“, and challenging other vendors to do the same. They “called out” the vendors they consider to be their main competitors – OpenText, Coremedia, Interwoven, Vignette, Fatwire, Nuxeo, Magnolia and Tridion. I won’t repeat the rules of the challenge, which are outlined on all of the vendor sites linked to below. But the general idea is that the vendor rates their own product against the 15 categories, giving themselves a total score out of 45.

This feels like it is done in a very different spirit to the recent CMS Showdown at South by Southwest. The SXSW event involved three Open Source Vendors (Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress) competing in a good humoured manner, with the general feeling being that all three entries, and Open Source CMS in general, were the winners. The Day Challenge feels more like a declaration of war.

I think I really like this. According to the Daily Show tonight (the UK is a day behind the US), “angry popularism is all the rage”. I think that the community should put pressure onto the other vendors to respond to the checklist, and let the Herd decide how honest the answers are. Any vendor that elects not to rise to the challenge should be given a mental black mark. The response from Day is shown below. Very cheeky giving themselves a 3 star rating for Reality and justifying it with a smiley face only.

Day's Self Evaluation

I’m not for a second saying that I agree with Day’s self evaluation, but that isn’t the point. It’s quite brave of them to put their thoughts out there. It didn’t take Open Source Vendor Magnolia long to trump the 40/45 from Day with 42/45.

Magnolia Responds

Magnolia also tagged Alfresco (and many other open source vendors), who responded extremely quickly. They decided (wisely) that the Magnolia score was verging on the incredible, so toned it down a notch giving themselves an average 41/45. I like their honesty on the Help & Docs front. [ UPDATE: They have just lowered their score to 40. ]

Alfresco's Response

I’m sure that this thread has a lot of life in it left, and hopefully more vendors will join in and someone will tabulate the results. And the crowds will tear into any responses they feel are not as true as they could be. Maybe the vendors could go a step further and put some votes or surveys on their sites to see if the users believe their answers. I am really hoping on of the big 3 (OpenText, Interwoven or Vignette) respond to this. I think this kind of honesty (if it is honesty) is more difficult for them.

I’m going to leave it at that for now. But I am wishing that I hadn’t stuck with my Bob Dylan song lyrics theme for post entries, and could use something like Guns and Roses’ Get In The Ring.

Tagging with Meme ID: 9c56d0fcf93175d70e1c9b9d188167cf

Well, the rifleman’s stalking the sick and the lame,
Preacherman seeks the same, who’ll get there first is uncertain.
- JOKERMAN

It’s been a busy year in Mergers and Acquisition land in the CMS and Search space. I’m always extremely worried about the future of a product that is acquired by a larger beast, and always interested to see whether they survive the acquisition. And the re-branding is fascinating. To summarise some of the recent activity:

• The death of the RedDot brand has been formally announced. So another memorable product name is going to vanish, becoming part of the not-so-catchy Open Text Web Solutions family. I would be surprised if we see the re-branded product on CMS Vendor Selection shortlists as often as we saw RedDot.
• Last month, Microsoft announced their plan for FAST ESP and FAST Search for SharePoint. There was silence for a while, but it looks like FAST does have a fighting chance. It does, however, beg the question: If SharePoint Search was as good as we thought, why did Microsoft acquire FAST?
• In January 2009, Autonomy announced that they would acquire Interwoven. Forrester use the word “swallows” in their recently released report. As a random aside, amazingly parts of the Forrester research site still appears to be running on Vignette 5 aka StoryServer! Gotta love the URL format. It seems like only yesterday that Autonomy and Verity merged into the uber-search company, but that was three years ago.
• Oracle is still going crazy, finalising their BEA deal last year. According to wikipedia, they are now bigger than IBM. The acquisition came with all of the items that BEA had formally acquired. Does anyone remember the Plumtree Corporate Portal, which looked set to be the next best .NET based portal, before becoming BEA Aqualogic Portal and vanishing (although still active, we’re told) into the Oracle family? And remember about 20 months ago when Stellent became Oracle Universal Content Management. Another catchy name. Stellent appears in the Middleware section on the Oracle site!

There was an interesting article in CMS Watch recently noting how many companies unimaginatively name their system after the product or company (Christening your ECM product). It is also interesting how the big vendors are following the Microsoft naming convention. More and more products are being called <Vendor Name> Content Management or <Vendor Name> [Content|Web|Enterprise] Solution. Maybe it is just me, but I find it extremely confusing. Especially now that the big players invariably have more than one product. For example, In July 2008, the Mediasurface group was acquired by Alterian. Immediacy CMS and Mediasurface became part of Alterian’s suite of products described as an “Enterprise Marketing Platform”. I love the fact that Alterian Corporate Edition is Immediacy, while Alterian Enterprise Edition is Mediasurface’s Morello. The description of the products on the Alterian Web Site is extremely uninformative – especially the technology section. I’d be interested if anyone can extract any information for the whole section. Also, sadly, the name Pepperio appears to have survived.

Finally, on the topic of CMS M&A, a thought on CMS companies buying agencies. Now I work for an agency, and find it slightly strange that some of our competitors are actually owned by vendors. About two years ago, Microsoft acquired Avenue A/Razorfish. Even more strangely, about a year ago, EMC (the same people that bought Documentum in 2003) aquired Conchango, a smaller UK based agency. While I appreciate that Conchango was bought to form part of the consulting division, the fact that they also promote CMS products that compete with their parent doesn’t gel for me. I wonder if all the Conchango employees have become Fans on the FaceBook page yet.

I’m not sure what the point of this posting was. I would say that, in summary, the best place to get a decent overview of the CMS offerings from a major vendor is probably a report such as those produced by CMS Watch. The second best place is probably wikipedia. And the worst place is probably the vendor’s site. And if you don’t believe me, try to figure out IBM’s Content Management offering from the IBM site.