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.

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.

She promised that she’d be right there with me
When I paint my masterpiece.
- WHEN I PAINT MY MASTERPIECE

Open Text’s recent acquisition of NStein means it is time to update the super-spliced Open Text logo that first made it’s appearance in the article When CMS Genes Won’t Splice, inspired by the aquisition of Vignette. So here it is in all of it’s glory, with a nice Red N added:

Feel free to use it all over the interwebs. That means you Miss Guseva – you promised.

Now I need OTEX to buy some companies with an ‘e’ in the logo. Are escenic, EPiServer or Ektron for sale, anyone? The companies gobbled into the logo are, for those that care:

• RedDot
• Obtree C4
• NStein
• Gauss
• Vignette
• Hummingbird

And, dear Open Text, please don’t sue me if this is illegal or brand tampering or anything else.

Colophon: MS Paint, and nothing but MS Paint.

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.

Thought I’d seen some ups and down,
Til I come into New York town.
People goin’ down to the ground,
Buildings goin’ up to the sky.
- TALKING NEW YORK BLUES

People have been talking about their entry into the Content Management world. Pie started it. Lee Dallas followed, as did others. They’ve all got a common thread to their stories – getting sucked into Content Management completely by accident. So I thought I’d join in.

My working life started out pretty sweet. The day after my last University exam, I hopped on a plane to New York town armed with only my wits and a fistful of quickly devaluing South African currency. I was planning to flip burgers or sometihng, but was lucky enough to get a job writing Oracle Pro*C programs for Standard and Poorson Wall Street. For about 4 years, I did about 10 months in the Northern Hemisphere contracting and 2 months back in South Africa, completely avoiding winter. Among other things, I wrote some ODBC drivers in London and did a Verity K2 gig for ABN Amro in Amsterdam.

Although I had played with Java applets at University, the web wasn’t really a big thing at all. In 1997, I did my first pseudo-agency job for Electric Ocean in Cape Town while tutoring 3D Graphics and not doing my planned PhD. Although this was all web based, there was certainly no concept of an out-of-the-box Content Management System. The closest thing to a product then was Netscape LiveWire on Netscape Enterprise Server, which is now iPlanet. It was really just a lot of haxoring with C++, Perl and server-side JavaScript, and a bit of sysadmin on the side.

Then, in early 1999, I started a job on a start-up Accenture (then Andersen Consulting) project which had a big idea and a whole load of funding. I mean really a whole load of funding. We were partying like it was 1999, which it was. The tech team I was on probably peaked at around 15 people, and I found myself sort-of-leading the web tier. We were using Sybase’s Jaguar CTS server, all the Netscape Servers and good old CORBA. And some new thing called Vignette Story Server 4.1.

No-one in the team had ever seen a CMS before, I got to know Vignette really really well. I started out doing the Content Delivery Application (CDA) with my newly aquired TCL skills. Anyone else remember syntax like this:

[SEARCH TABLE retro
INTO var
SQL "select RETRO_OID, RETRO_NAME from CMS_SYSTEM where ( SYNTAX = $crap)"]

I love [FIELD RETRO_NAME [FIRST $var]]

Then, about a month into the Vignette implementation, someone had the nerve to ask how content was actually getting into the system. It was about that time that we realised Vignette Story Server 4.2 didn’t actually come with an interface and we’d have to, um, build on ourself. So we panicked, flapped, scritched and pokked for a while. A team photo at the moment of realisation is shown below:

Team Photo after realising we had to build our own authoring interface

Quite a schoolboy error for a multi-million pound project. So the project plans were hauled out again, and I became Content Management Application (CMA) gimp. If I have to say so myself, we built the best darn CMA in the whole of the UK.

My summary of the project looking back - we didn’t know what the hell we were doing and it is a testament to Accenture’s impressive project management methodology that we actually managed to deliver the project. The startup became Sportal.com and did pretty well in the end. I managed to make a good few friends on the project, many of whom I still see today. Some might actually read this – please comment if you do. After this I guess I became a Vignette consultant for a while and, when Content Management became mainstream, I ended up in agencies doing Content Management implementations all over the place.

And that’s the story of how I met Vignette over 10 years ago. And although the Vignette name will soon be dead, it might just be hanging around for another 10 years. But that’s a story for another time.

P.S. I think #cmsorigins is a cool Twitter hashtag. If there is a Meme ID out there, let me know.

I went into a restaurant
Lookin’ for the cook
I told them I was the editor
Of a famous etiquette book
- BOB DYLAN’S 115TH DREAM

So, Web Content Management has progressed from a Gartner MarketScope in 2008 to a Magic Quadrant in 2009. I’m normally quite a fan of Gartner, and was fortunate enough to hear Mick MacComascaigh (the lead WCM Analyst)  give a great presentation at a recent event. We even had a nice chat about WCM Maturity Models afterward. However, I’ve got to say that it’s quite difficult not to treat this research as a giant advert for Oracle. To start, here it is:

Gartner Magic Quadrant for WCM Aug 2009

Who Is It For?

I think the introduction to the research is interesting. It starts by listing who would benefit from it:

This Magic Quadrant will help CIOs, and business and IT leaders that are analyzing their Web strategies to assess whether they have the right WCM offering to support them.

This seems to list everyone except the people that are actually going to use the thing and, as a result, seems to place very little weight on the things I care most about: usability for the editors and a warm fuzzy feeling for the developers. The report is far more concerned about market share, geographical penetration and long term company prospects. History shows us that a typical WCM implementation have an average lifespan of only three years. Is this because the buyers aren’t thinking about long term CIO/Business/IT issues? Or is it because the world changes fast and we shouldn’t worry our pretty little heads too much about things too far in the future?

CMS Watch had something to say about the report, mainly around the fact that it is too high level and strategic, and tends to ignore the “nitty gritty” details that can be so important. CMS Wire also talk about it here but they seem more happy with the whole thing.

As an aside, I also don’t necessarily think that a large stable company always leads to a large stable product. Just look at all the recent acquisition activity. The road map for some of the big boys is far from clear and some well established products might start to fester due to lack of R&D investment.

Gartner vs Forrester

So, how much to the two big analyst firms agree? Let’s have a look at the Forrester Wave from a couple of months ago:

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

So they do agree on a most things. Both have Autonomy/Interwoven and SDL Tridion in the Leader area. Fatwire, Open Text (pre-Vignette acquisition) and Day are all up there. Microsoft is struggling on both, although Forrester prefer their strategy while Gartner prefer their current offering. IBM, Vignette and EMC are also put into the same ballpark.

Gartner covers a few more vendors. The three smaller .NET vendors (Ektron, SiteCore and EPiServer) all make the grade. I’d have expected to see the EPiServer dot in almost the same place as SiteCore as, in my experience, the two always come extremely close in all evaluations I’ve seen. I’d have put them both ahead of Ektron, but maybe that’s just me. I guess EPiServer are only just starting their US invasion which might have penalised them a bit.

The two reports also agree on not including Open Source vendors for various reasons. Quite a few people in the blogosphere are upset about this. The cynical amongst you might think that this is because Open Source vendors don’t pay analysts as much to include them on reports, but this couldn’t possibly be anything to do with it.

But What About Oracle?

Aaah, yes. The anomaly. Oracle UCM nee Stellent comes first in the Gartner report while a distant tie sixth in the Forrester one. Oracle is going mental about this on Twitter and any other advertising channels it can find. The research cites Oracle’s strengths as the ability to integrate with other Oracle products, including their CRM system. I’m not a fan of these so-called “tighter integrations” which are diametrically opposed to my view of loosely-coupled separation of concerns. Sounds like Gartner want Oracle UCM to become a monolith which reaches far beyond the boundaries of what I’d define as Web Content Management. Interestingly, Gartner’s three leaders are all vendors more traditionally associated with ECM. Price doesn’t seem to be a factor at all in the quadrant.

For the very observant among you, note that all the URLs to Gartner’s public “sponsored” research contain /oracle/, not just this one. So I wouldn’t get hung up on that – I presume it’s the platform they use? [UPDATE: See the comment about this below]

Niche Players: Good News and Bad News

Here’s the good news. Gartner advises that maybe a Niche Player is good for you:

Gartner advises organizations against simply selecting vendors that appear in the Leaders quadrant. All selections should be buyer-specific, and vendors from the Challengers, Niche Players or Visionaries quadrants could be better matches for your business goals and solution requirements.

Here’s the bad news. I can’t for the life of me figure out why anyone would want to look at a Niche player according to Gartner’s metrics. They have no ability to execute, and no complete vision. Sound like a bunch of losers. In fact, in my view it’s probably better not to be on this MQ at all than to be a niche player. You’ll save yourself a bunch of money, and a bunch of bad publicity. Nstein tweeted happily about being included on the quadrant for the first time. On the other hand, I’d be furious if I was an established vendor like Alterian and got stuck in the bottom right. So, a question to all you vendors – would you rather be on this as a Niche Player, or not on it at all?

Note that in the MarketScope from 2008, both IBM and MediaSurface (Alterian) were “Cautions”. IBM have progressed safely into the Challenger zone while I’m not sure exactly what they’ve done in the last 12 months to get there. And poor Alterian seem like the victims here, being penalised primarily, it seems, for having more than one WCMS product. Now while this can be confusing, they certainly aren’t the only vendor in this position.

I’ve decided I certainly prefer the research that doesn’t rank the vendors and serve as self-fulfilling marketing for the vendors that do well. The strengths/weaknesses listed are really high level and vague, so you need to take a leap of faith. This kind of advertorial isn’t for me, I’m afraid. Maybe if Gartner published the complex calculations (and they are complex) that go on behind the scenes I’d trust it more.

So Why Trust Me?

Well, I’m Head of Development for the company that came first in the most recent Forrester Wave™: European Interactive Agencies — Web Design Capabilities. What more proof do you need?

Arthur Weasley: This is very, very peculiar. It seems as if your hearing is to be in front of the entire Wizengamot.
Harry Potter: I don’t understand. What has the Ministry of Magic got against me?

Well, I had to go down and see a guy named Mr. Goldsmith
A nasty, dirty, double-crossin’, back-stabbin’ phony I didn’t wanna have to be dealin’ with
- CRY A WHILE

Someone at Clickability has had a really bad idea. Firstly, they decided it was a clever to launch a smear campaign against one of their competitors. Secondly, they made the mistake of misquoting a few sources while doing it. The negative tactics and bad journalism were enough to annoy many people, so Irina just kicked them in the nuts. You should read her post before carrying on with this one.

If you want to download the “white paper”, you can get it here. When filling in the details form, use the email address “sales@clickability.com” and your mother in law’s phone number. I’m not going to talk about the bad journalism. I’m going to talk about the dodgy content, and I’m going to use their tactics and quote a few random passages from the “white paper”.

Like Salesforce.com, Clickability is a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) company that lives in the cloud.There is no expensive software or hardware to buy or install. We provide our solution entirely in the cloud with a tested reputation for reliability, performance, security, and scalability. In contrast, Vignette’s installed software model is flawed (the same is true for any installed-software WCM vendor).

Like Salesforce.com indeed. And is it “the cloud” that has this tested reputation? In fact, this whole passage makes no sense. Slight diversion, but I hate the use of the word Cloud for *aaS. A data centre or two does not a cloud make. LBi have two data centres where we host sites for our clients. We don’t call it a Cloud. I’ve ranted about this before.

Here’s the key takeaway to remember once you start managing your content in the cloud: it fundamentally changes the relationship the vendor has with you, the customer. Clickability is now responsible for ensuring the availability, reliability, security and scalability of your websites.

Ho hum. Damn this cloud, it develops the sites too? Remember that, unlike CrownPeak who only offer the Content Management aspects as a service, Clickability also offer the delivery service. And you write your own templates. If I write some crappy, slow template code that is laced with cross site scripting holes and SQL injection, is Clickability responsible for the reliability and security of the site? Bad PHP developers rejoice! It’s all Clickability’s responsibility now.

Installed-software customers must wait for costly upgrades, usually based on 18-month development cycles. In contrast, by using an agile development model, Clickability delivers daily enhancements to its platform, matching real-time market needs and the rapid technology changes on the Web.

Daily? Holy shit! Really? WordPress does it every few months and we all know what a headache that can be. And don’t get me started on maintaining my FaceBook applications with their rate of change. Unless all changes really are always 100% backwardly compatible with everything, which I seriously doubt. That said, I don’t know enough about the product to say this for sure. It is possible that customers love seeing new things arrive as if by magic. My customers like to test things before they change.

Are you a Vignette V5 or V6 User? Did you answer yes to this question? If so, be afraid. Be very afraid.

The story about going from V5/V6 to V7 is old, old news. V7 is 5 years old. The real pain is actually 7.3.0.5/7.3.1 to 7.4. After that, it gets easier. I’m guessing V 7.4 -> V8.0 will be relatively painless. Touch wood. V8.0 looks quite nice from the demo. It’s too thick just to be lipstick.

Clickability is the only company with real world experience migrating Vignette customers (from mid-size to Fortune 1000 companies) quickly into the cloud. If you want to migrate to another installed solution similar to Vignette, it will take months to deploy and you’ll still be stuck in the traditional installed-software, release-and-upgrade paradigm. With Clickability, your Vignette migration will be handled by experts and take only weeks. It will not affect your current site or result in down-time during the transition.

Wow. No down time? It won’t affect my current site?  Wow. I can’t think of any part of any of my existing Vignette implementations that can’t be easily, automatically ported into the cloud at all. No, sir. I presume that one big differentiator is that, because The Cloud is so much bigger than A Server, it is much easier to migrate into. And also, Clickability will provide experts to migrate the site, while the other competitors will presumably provide morons. Expert don’t need to worry about these content migration issues.

As stated earlier, the goal of this document is to provide strategic data and insights that will help in your decision-making process regarding Web Content Management and migrating off Vignette. The decision is yours. But please know that Clickability is here to show how a simple migration can affordably change your entire business in a matter of weeks.

Sweet! Aren’t Vignette customers lucky. First, FatWire offers to save them with a cheeky, yet believable, migration path. Now Clickability go even better. I dream of simple migrations. One wonders why Fatwire think a specialist migration partner is needed, while Clickability can migrate one of my Vignette clients in a few weeks. If anyone from Vamosa or Kapow reads this, a comment would be welcome. And can you put my big, back end transactional systems in your cloud too? In fact, if anyone at Clickability is reading this, could you outline the migration process and ballpark costs. It would be genuinely interesting.

I’m going to stop now as it is getting late. But I could go on. This document is appalling.  On the other hand, I have heard a lot of good things about Clickability. One thing in particular that the analysts (how ironic) mention is their excellent customer service. Maybe the customer service guys should have a word with the marketing guys, ’cause this “white paper” was a really stupid mistake. You’ve not made any friends in these here parts.

Well, I had to go down and see a guy named Mr. Goldsmith
A nasty, dirty, double-crossin', back-stabbin' phony I didn't wanna have to be dealin' with
But I did it for you and all you gave me was a smile
Well, I cried for you - now it's your turn to cry awhile

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.

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.]

Mr. Frog went a-hoppin’ up over the brook, Uh-huh,
Mr. Frog went a-hoppin’ up over the brook, Uh-huh,
Mr. Frog went a-hoppin’ up over the brook.
A lily-white duck come and swallowed him up, Uh-huh.
- FROGGIE WENT A COURTIN’

Had a look at the People’s United Bank site that has just been launched and recently tweeted. Firstly, well done to everyone involved for getting it live. Always nice to see a new big CMS driven site. It looks good too – nice and clean. Hats off to the designers.

But I do have to ask my friends at Vignette – was it really necessary to use your portal products (Vignette Application Portal and Dynamic Portal Module) for this? I have only looked at the site for 15 minutes, so have probably missed something huge. But I’m going to assume I haven’t and soldier on.

I realise it is a bank, so there are probably a lot more Portal suitable features behind the different logins. But all of those seem to go off-site away from the Portal implementation at the moment. It’s often the other way round. The post-login functionality is driven by a portal, not the pre-login informational/marketing section. The site seems to be primarily static content. Maybe the content differs depending on your ZIP code – not easy to tell.

Portals are meant to aggregate applications, not provide a set of off-site links to them. The login goes to a server running ASP.NET. The career application is an offsite IFRAME. The branch finder goes to MapQuest. The search goes to Mondo with a secure/unsecure warning. Even the search results are displayed on Mondo, but maybe this is for the term highlighting.

I’ve noticed on the Vignette site that the Portal product is now classified under Intranet , not under Web Content Management. That’s a step in the right direction. It can make a mighty fine Intranet. But it still seems to get recommended as the delivery mechanism for every site you launch.

Maybe there are no downsides to using the Portal for this site. But if it is so easy to fix the friendly URLs , the validating markup, and the TABLE based layouts , I’m looking forward to seeing them in the next release of this site. Google really digs that stuff, and banks really dig organic traffic. At the very least, please put the <link> to vgn-ext-templating.css somewhere after the opening<html> tag.

The implementation was probably a fair bit of effort too, I’m guessing. Did you choose an external spider for the site search because it felt right, or because it is actually quite difficult to implement an internal search on a Portal? Any issues with sessions and bookmarking? Do the editorial team need to use both the VCM and VAP to create new pages, or do they have a nice, single tool that they use to create pages and content? And it is all easy and cheap to maintain?

I guess someone might have played the “we’re not using the Portal functionality for Phase 1, but we need a future-proof platform to carry us forward” card. Or did someone say synergies a lot? Oh for a penny for every non-implemented planned Phase 2 feature I’ve seen. We all love agile development these days; whatever happened to agile product choices? If the post-login part of this site is live on VAP in the next 12 months, however, I’ll eat my hat, apologise, and buy everyone lots and lots of beer.

I really like the VCM. And I really like VAP. But this site isn’t a Portal. Dear Vignette, please don’t make us use VAP for everything. You do have other delivery mechanisms. Dear other major vendors, stop smirking. Many of you do the same.

Not every site is a Portal. Sometimes a Portal is really a Gate To Hell. Here there be Demons.

You will search, babe,
At any cost.
But how long, babe,
Can you search for what’s not lost?
- I’LL KEEP IT WITH MINE

Had an interesting meeting with Bruno Pereira from Autonomy/Interwoven yesterday. He gave us an eye-opening update on the future plans of the company after the merger with Autonomy. The ink on the contract finalising the merger is hardly dry, yet I am proud to present the first architecture diagram of the new, integrated product suite. Here it is:

The Not-So-Official New Autonomy/Interwoven Product Suite

Okay, so I lied. It’s just a scribble on a flip chart. Hopefully a better version of this will come up shortly. For those of you that can’t read the writing, the boxes say things like WorkSite, OD (OpenDeploy), TeamSite, LiveSite, MT (MetaTagger), MB (MediaBin), Optimost, Virage, Meridio, etalk, Zantaz and IDOL. More here and here.

I really enjoyed the meeting. I’d not met Bruno before, but his enthuasism for the company is obvious and infectious, and he clearly knows his trade. He was able to talk at many different levels, and showed us a few demos too. I was pleasantly surprised by the vision that he painted. He assured us that the knowledge from the long forgotten Verity is all safely tucked away in IDOL these days. And he could even answer my collegue’s question about custom fixed layouts in LiveSite, which was cool. We’re hoping SP1 is going to help us out a bit.

One piece of news that I was glad to hear – we no longer need to wait with bated breath for TeamSite 7. The version numbering system is going to continue to jump in little increments. So I think we’re going to be living in 6.x land for a while.

Sadly, I forgot to ask one of the questions that has been on everyone’s lips. What’s going to happen to the other CMS vendors that OEM Autonomy in their product? For example, will Vignette continue to ship Autonomy for their repository search, or will they become yet another CMS Vendor that moves to Lucune/Solr.

All this should unfold soon. Keep your eyes glued to your RSS readers …

“Oh no,” says the Sergeant. “I’ll have no such chat,
And neither will I take it from snappy young brats,
For if you insult me with one other word,
I’ll cut off your heads in the morning.”
- ARTHUR MCBRIDE

In the beginning there was the CMS Vendor Meme, which turned into a light hearted and entertaining exercise in which over 20 CMS vendors participated. As a response to this, Vignette posted a second meme which appears to have backfired. There aren’t going to be many (any?) responses, and Luis Sala has posted a rather biting response on his *personal* (not Alfresco’s) blog.

Before I comment on this, I’d like to say for the record that there is a lot about Vignette that I like. They were, without doubt, CMS pioneers. When Vignette V7 was released many moons ago, I genuinely believe it was the best Content Management System out there. Apart from a couple of major gripes, I still like the CMS and think certain aspects of it are uniquely attractive. VAP is one of the leading portals too. I hate the Dynamic Portal/Site integration but that’s just me. But I would still happily implement Vignette and do currently work with it.

Before reading this, make sure you read Luis’ post Vignette tries to start a WCM Vendor Meme (yawn!). I wonder if Vignette are going to respond to this, or just leave it at that. Vignette have lost their way a bit and I agree with a lot of the comments that Luis made. They have also been in the press quite a lot recently for a number of reasons, and I’m not going to repeat things that have been already said elsewhere. Some of the points in Luis’ post have been discussed in the CMSWire article Five Reasons to Choose Vignette (or Not…) by John Conroy and Irina Guseva. I am, however, going to add my thoughts to a few of Luis’ comments.

I would argue that one of the main reasons that happened was because Vignette, Interwoven and Documentum are entrenched in 7-15 year technologies and mindsets that have resulted in stagnation while the smaller, more agile vendors that ranked a little higher on the list can more successfully innovate and adapt to changing market conditions.

I think is completely true that the speed of development of the ECM vendors mentioned is much slower. Compare Vignette VCM 7.3.0.1 to 7.6 – not as much progress as one would hope in about 5 years. It isn’t only Vignette – we’re still waiting for TeamSite 7 for example having had a sneak peak 2 years ago at GearUp 2007. But I blame the technologies more than the mindsets. In the Vignette CMS case, I’m going to point the finger at an extremely complex J2EE implementation using some technologies that are pretty old by current standards. Aim some monitoring software like SpotLight at the VCM, change and publish a simple content type, and watch the party. Quite staggering just how much is going on behind the scenes. Not surprising that it is complex to extend and change. In addition, I think the larger players are hamstrung by backward compatibility promises as they tend to support much larger, business critical implementations. You’d think this means that their upgrade paths are easier and more reliable, but sadly recent history his taught us the opposite.

That’s probably one of the main reasons Vignette’s earnings continue to drop and, more alarmingly, Vignette Professional Services account for roughly 50% of their revenue. Very scary…

Yes, Vignette’s PS account for a large part of their revenue. From the agency/systems integrator (that’s where I live) perspective, we are very cautious of this model. It doesn’t make our lives any easier when we need to compete against the vendor’s PS team if we recommend their CMS for an implementation. More and more small vendors are moving to the Partner Channel only model, which makes life much more pleasant for everyone. And I appreciate that the vendors need to ensure that partners have the skill to implement correctly and want to certify some parts of the solution, but I believe the Professional Services should be contracted to the partner, not directly to the client.

All vendors must be very careful about claiming “massive scalability” as every implementation is unique and while the software may be capable of scaling in one use-case, it could die in sputtering, driveling fits in the other.

Of course. Bad implementation can kill any software. Let me tell you a story that depresses me a bit. 10 years ago, Vignette had what I consider an excellent caching model. They used “Components” which actually ended up as output cached HTML fragments. They used Server Side Includes (SSIs) to allow for an extremely flexible mix of cached and dynamic content on the same page. They didn’t have a very sophisticated dependency graph based de-cache back then, but no-one really did. They were very proud of it, claimed it had multiple patents, and I think it was the dog’s bollocks (that’s a good thing for the non-UK readers). The model vanished in later versions, and was replaced completely when Vignette Application Portal (VAP) become the recommended delivery mechanism.

A couple of years ago I was presenting at Vignette Village 2007 with a customer. One of the main themes of this Village was that Vignette had the fastest, most scalable delivery mechanism in the universe, ever. Another main theme was that the product roadmap was very driven by customer demand. “You asked, we listened” kind of thing. So I found it quite ironic that a major product launch at Village was a brand new component that sped up the delivery even more: Vignette High Performance Delivery (HPD). Now the fastest delivery mechanism in the world is even faster! And the architecture behind HPD is remarkably similar to the caching model they had in the late 90s!

I’m going slightly off topic here, but I don’t like the way the blurb on the site for this product says “HPD lets organizations deliver fresh, customized content online without either the high cost of hardware or the unacceptable cost of slow site performance“. There are other options. For example, Vignette really did a great job on the Atlanta 2004 Olympics site. It looked excellent and performed well under massive load. But this was all Akamai fronted. I’m a big fan of CDNs and ESIs for massively scalably delivery.

After wasting investing hundreds of millions buying OnDisplay, DataSage, Revenio, Epicentric, Intraspect, Tower Technology and most recently Vidavee, one could argue that Vignette could *possibly* address all those areas, but the dirty little secret is that even over a decade after some of those acquisitions occured, Vignette has positively and quite spectacularly failed in truly integrating all those services.

I think the key word here is “truly”. Some of the products are reasonably well integrated, but these are point integrations between product A and product B. I’d like to see a generic integration architecture instead. A single repository (or illusion thereof) for the different products would be the dream, but that seems unlikely. I think the word wasting is unfair, although some of the acquisitions have been worse than others. I’d also like to add that I believe Vignette are aware of these issues, do embrace and support enabling emerging standards (JSR-168/286, JSR-170/283, maybe the new favourite CMIS) which could help with their integrations, and still have some really smart people. But their current product stack makes this a really difficult problem which is going to take them a lot more time (which maybe they don’t have?) to solve.

The Vignette Application Portal is pretty much the only *simple* way to render content. While the sales and sales engineers might say that customers can create websites using any web framework and programming language, a realization of the effort involved will serve as a near-instant death-knell to such foolhardy notions.

I’m going to disagree with this on two points. I like the VCM Content API and have successfully implemented systems that use a non-Vignette (this doesn’t mean bespoke!) delivery framework. Surely one of the main benefits of the “decoupled” ECM approach is that one does have the option to use the ECM suite simply to manage content to be consumed by any delivery channel. My second disagreement is that VAP is a simple way to render content. For a public facing site that does not need a portal, I believe that using VAP (or any portal) is overkill and fraught with peril.

Customers foolish enough to buy from Vignette are faced with an 8 page-long pricesheet (please take a look!)

Actually, the PDF version is more like 30 pages. In response to the “Simple Price List” question in the initial meme, part of the response was “Look out for a pricing innovation coming soon to a price sheet near you … it will probably be simple enough for a five year old”. Vignette are aware of the over-complication and hopefully will address it. If they don’t, they’re in trouble.

Vignette’s product suite is so expansive and disjointed that the typical Vignette sales engineer cannot even fathom how to install them all. So Vignette has a “Sales Enablement Team” whose primary job function is to figure out how to install all these moving parts and set up a hosted VMWare environment so that they can demo it. I pity my brethren there who still have to run more than one Vignette app on their laptops.

*cough*

Anyway, enough of this now. Let me close my coffin on this near extinct meme with a final thought. I still believe Vignette has some really good software and some really good people. They’ve also got some really big architectural and software problems. I, for one, hope they can sort them out before it is too late. If they don’t, they wouldn’t be the first US Pioneer to die in Texas. And it is only 81 miles / 1 hour 22 mins drive from Vignette Corporate Headquaters to the Alamo.

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