Gilbane Group Blog

Yesterday, it was announced that another CMS poster child of the late 90’s is to be acquired as Adobe Systems Incorporated and Day Software Holding AG announced the two companies have entered into a definitive agreement for Adobe to acquire all of the publicly held registered shares of Day Software in a transaction worth approximates US$240 million.

This follows Adobe’s acquisition of Omniture late last year and clearly demonstrates their intent in entering the web experience management (WEM) market place that we cover with interest here at Gilbane - as we anticipate they bring together the audience insight gained through the web analytics of Omniture and Day’s CRX content platform.  

This will presumably add momentum to Day’s own move into the WEM space with their recent product marketing strategy, as they have reinvented themselves to be closer to the marketer with recent attention paid to functionality such as personalization, analytics, variant testing and messaging around using their repository for marketing campaigns and asset management.   We await with interest firm integration plans. 

In addition Day are a longtime advocate of CMS repository standards (JCR and CMIS), something that is also close to our heart at Gilbane. This announcement has also sent tremors through the Open Source community, as they wonder about Adobe’s commitment to the Apache projects like Sling and Jackrabbit that Day have been so supportive of.    

Whilst Adobe and Day have been very quick to state that they will maintain Day’s commitment to these community projects, it’s hard not think that this commitment inside Day is cultural and we wonder whether this can realistically be maintained as the acquisition matures and Day is brought into the fold. 

The acquisition also raises questions about what this means for Alfresco’s two year relationship with Adobe that runs pretty deep with OEM integration to Adobe LiveCycle – and Erik Larson (Senior Director of Product Management at Adobe) has publically stated the intention to integrate Day and LifeCycle to create a ‘full suite of enterprise technologies’.  It will be important for the Adobe customers that have adopted the Alfresco based integration, to understand how this will affect them going forward. 

One other area that I am sure my colleagues here at Gilbane in the Publishing Technologies practice will be watching with interest is the impact this will have on Adobe’s digital publishing offering.  

As we’ve seen with previous acquisitions, it’s best to be cautious over what the future might hold. From a WEM product strategy perspective bringing Ominture and Day together makes a great deal of sense to us. The commitment to standards and open source projects is probably safe for now, it has been a part of the Day identity and value proposition for as long as I can remember and one of the most exciting things could be what this acquisition means for digital publishing. 

Let’s wait and see… 

Suggested further reading:

• Adobe Press Release 
• Day Software FAQ 
• CMSWire - Perspectives: What the Adobe + Day Software Deal Means
• Real Story Group - Adobe To Acquire Day - First Take ECM Perspective 
• Adobe Buys ECM Vendor (and Apache Contributor) Day Software

When I last wrote about us becoming part of Outsell, Inc. I mentioned that in addition to continuing to provide our existing services, we would be adding additional products. Last week we announced our first new Outsell/Gilbane product to executive subscribers to our syndicated services.

Our new product, Outsell’s Technology Leadership Council (TLC), is an invitation-only environment for CTOs, CIOs, VPs of IT, and VPs of product development in information and publishing companies. The TLC provides a confidential, peer-to-peer environment for sharing ideas, best practices, strategies, development methods, and other topics of specific interest to senior information product technology management.

While the TLC is a new product, it is modeled after the very successful Outsell Leadership Councils for CEOs, COOs, Managing Directors, or Presidents. There are two off-the-grid meetings a year and year-round networking and communication of research and ideas with fellow council members and the council chairs. The TLC is chaired by me, Marc Strohlein, Outsell’s Chief Agility Officer, and Bill Trippe, VP & Lead Analyst, Outsell’s Gilbane Group. The TLC's first meeting will be in Boston this October.

To find out more about the Technology Leadership Council, download the brochure and email me at frank@gilbane.com.

Recently I wrote an article for my blog – Taking the W out of CMS – exploring content management and content delivery as separate disciplines and this is a follow up to that article.

To summarize that article - firstly, to know me professionally, is to know that when it comes to the tribes of CMS folks, I am firmly in the WCM tepee.

Secondly, I disagreed the first time this discussion rolled around, as the millennium clicked over – we were all going to use portal platforms and content management functionality would be in our application server infrastructure (we don’t and it didn’t).

Thirdly, the difference between the systems we are building for tomorrow and then – our digital engagement activities were single threaded following a website groove and the end was very much the driver for the means.

For the mainstream CMS industry it was a web site centric world and in most projects and applications the term ‘CMS’ was interchangeable with ‘WCM’. Today we have a fragmented communication channel; it’s the age of the ‘splinternet’ (in this context, a term coined by Josh Bierhoff), delivering relevant content consistently to multiple places.

This not just devices - our websites are less the single and only web destination, folks consume information about our products and services from other web destinations like Facebook and Twitter (to name two). Plus, of course the needs of customer, consumer and citizen engagement means that we can chuck in multiple touch points, in e-mail, call centres and real life.

We used to get ourselves worked up about ‘baking’ or ‘frying’ content management/delivery applications, about decoupled systems that produce pages and dynamic content – but (as I said in response to a comment on my original blog post) today’s consumer wants super dynamic content fresh caught that day, prepared their way, hot off the griddle - Teppanyaki served to share – family style.

So, we have a new level of complexity and requirements for our systems to support our digital marketers and communicators. A level of complexity of requirements that sits between our content repository and our consumer, which used to be the section of the RFP that simply said “must produce compliant HTML”.

When talking about delivery of content, this is typically where our requirement starts to gain some uniqueness between projects.

The question is, so you have your well-ordered, neatly filed, approved content – but what are you going to use it for?

A requirement for an approval process supported by workflow is fairly ubiquitous – but if you are a membership organisation that engages its audience over email or a consumer packaged goods company with fifty products and a YouTube channel - your Engagement Tier requirements are going to be quite diverse.

This diversity in requirements means two things to me.

1. As an industry we are very good at understanding, defining and capturing CMS requirements – but how are we at identifying, understanding and communicating an organisations engagement needs?

2. If there are diverse requirements, then there are different solutions - and right now it’s is a blend of dynamic web content delivery, marketing automation, campaign management, email, web analytics (etc. etc.) - There is no silver vendor bullet – no leader, no wave, no magic quadrant – its different strokes for different folks.

It’s this that I want to explore, how do we define those needs and how do we compare tools?

So, into the Engagement Tier - my colleagues here at Gilbane challenged me to draw it. Hmm.. right now it’s a box of content, a big arrow and then the consumer.

I am going to need to work on that…

It will still be a couple of more months before you see much change, but we are planning a major update to gilbane.com. We know, it is a bit overdue, cobbler's children and all that, but if you had a Web site since 1997 and been using dozens of different tools to create and manage many thousands of pages in almost every version of HTML, and with a mix of CSS / no CSS, etc., you might procrastinate a bit too. Now that we are part of Outsell Inc., we also need to rationalize the two sites. outsellinc.com is also a large site, but fortunately, it was completely updated a couple of years ago with modern tools. We will be refreshing both sites and will be rolling out some incremental updates during the process. Right now we have a team architecting the end result and would love to hear from any of you who have suggestions about either of our sites. Comments are off because of the volume of comment spam, so send an email with suggestions to webmaster@gilbane.com, and thanks!

 As we start to delve into some of the interim results of our survey of book publishing professionals, there is a great deal of good data to mull over. While the results are preliminary (and we welcome your participation here), some trends are emerging.

One interesting set of data points surround how publishers are viewing XML, how extensively they work with it, and what technologies they are using to support the management of the XML. Among those using XML, it's significant that only about half have invested in some kind of storage mechanism specifically for XML, including both relational databases and dedicated XML repositories such as Mark Logic server.

While that overall number might or might not be so striking, I am struck by what some publishers feel is a barrier to adopting an XML repository, namely, the "Challenge of building XML knowledge, skills, or awareness."  This trumped more traditional barriers to technology adoption such as cost and the maturity of the technology and would seem, on balance, to be a solvable problem.

Click on the thumbnail below to see a snapshot of the current answers to the question.

Given the popularity of the presentations / topics at our recent San Francisco conference we are organizing the Boston conference around the same theme (Customers, Collaboration, Content) and tracks (Customers & Engagement, Colleagues & Collaboration, Content Technology, Content Publishing).

You can find out more about what we covered in SF from the GilbaneSF-Tweetstream, from Sue Anne's post below, from the videos before and during the conference, and elsewhere.

See detailed instructions for submitting proposals, and send speaking proposals to speaking@gilbane.com. No sales or marketing presentations please.

The deadline for proposals is June 14, 2010.

Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend Gilbane SF. The conference brought together some of the top content management people from the U.S. and internationally. Overall, one of the things I really enjoyed about the conference was the mix of people on each of the panels -- you had analysts, developers and content creators responsible for developing content and building web sites.

I focused on my time on the Customers and Engagement Track and also went to a few sessions in the Content Technology Track. As expected, there was a lot of talk of Web 2.0 and how to implement social into your content management strategy. There were also several sessions examining return on investment (ROI) for implementation. 

 [ The Deadline for Speaking Proposals for Gilbane Boston is June 14, 2010 - STT ]

It is not always the obvious experts who have the best solutions to problems. Since it is clear the gulf oil disaster is resistant to the most obvious solutions, crowdsourcing the problem seems like a no-brainer. The cost of a small team to sift through all the ideas to pick out any with current or future promise would be negligible. See Anthea's post and call for action.

Update: BTW, neither Outsell, nor Innocentive have any financial or commercial gain associated with this piece. It is not fee-for-hire, advertising, nor is Innocentive a client. We simply want to help and believe the voice of the information industry must be heard as part of finding solutions that can work.

The call for speakers has been issued, with June 14, 2010 being the deadline to submit a proposal for presenting at Gilbane Boston this year.

Guidelines can be found here: http://gilbane.com/speaker_guidelines.html

Feel free to ask us any issues you have that aren't covered above!

We've been providing regular updates on Gilbane San Francisco over on our dedicated announcements and press release blog, as well as on Twitter, but since not everybody subscribes to either of those, here is a quick summary for both conference attendees and technology exhibit visitors, with links.

Open to all:

• Opening Keynote session with: Jeremiah Owyang, Partner, Customer Strategy, Altimeter Group & Daniel W. Rasmus, Strategist, Author, Listening to the Future
• Industry Analyst Debate: What’s Real, What’s Hype, and What’s Coming with: Forrester, Gilbane, IDC, The Real Story Group (CMS Watch)
• Technology showcase with 34 content management technology vendors
• Sponsor Reception, Wednesday May 19
• Access to Product Labs on Wednesday and Thursday

Conference options:

• Four different conference packages
• Four in-depth pre-conference workshops
• CM Pros (Content Management Professionals) Summit
• Thirty-one conference sessions with the industry's best, and most fun, speakers
• Register

Follow the conference Twitter stream. The main hashtag is #gilbanesf. You can join (dm @gilbanesf) or follow the list of twitterers at Gilbane San Francisco.

Hope to see you there.