Gilbane Group Blog: August 2006 Archives

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August 31, 2006

The ECM/BPM Intersection: Infrastructure versus Solutions

The summer of '06 gave credence to the notion that multiple ECM and BPM suite vendors are preparing for the business buyer at the ECM/BPM intersection. Examples include:

June's announcements included EMC/Documentum's acquisition of ProActivity, Metastorm's integration with Documentum, Hummingbird, Interwoven and Meridio -- quickly followed by a major upgrade of its BPMS suite, which includes a strong focus on strengthening its Sharepoint integration. Not to be outdone, Ultimus announced its iBAM Suite, targeting non-technical business users who need visibility into BPM-enabled business processes. The tagline? "Go from Zero to BAM in less than 10 minutes."

July's announcements included one from the open source community, a hot arena across all content technology categories. Describing its offering as the first Zero-Code BPMS, Intalio describes its BPMS 4.2 product as ideal for "complex business processes that include Web Services orchestration and web-based human workflow."

August's IBM-FileNet merger got lots of press and continues to focus on "synergistic BPM technologies." Although this news seemed to overshadow the Oracle-IDS Scheer partnership, this announcement also deserves attention for those following the chase between Oracle, IBM and Tibco Software (who seems to have finally made significant progress in 2006 on maximizing its 2004 Staffware acquisition.

These "catch up" summer activities are strong signals to competing vendors already traveling the path toward meeting the requirements of complex business processes that must combine data-centric BPM integrations (including SOA) with content-centric, human-driven interactions. Players with earlier investments or partnerships supporting this roadmap include BEA's Fuego acquisition in March, the Vignette-Lombardi alliance in April, Interwoven's strategy to bolster visibility for its Fujitsu partnership, and Global 360's steady progress toward "bridging the islands of process automation across BPM, transaction management, ERP and content management systems" by integrating its G360 EX and G360 BOS products.

Now comes the fall and expectations for 2007 products that are not simply infrastructure-ready, but rather solution-specific ready. It is our belief that applying integrated ECM/BPM solutions to real-world issues requires the ability to handle hybrid, complex, and high-volume processes in a manner that enables rapid deployment through ease of use and pre-packaging of vertical or horizontally-specific capabilities including workflow, modeling objects, business rules, and end-user dashboards for monitoring and analytics. This will be critical to vertical uptake in industries such as Banking, Insurance and Telecommunications as well as horizontal arenas such as compliance, claims processing, accounts payable, and human resources.

Some vendors can already point to these capabilities, which ultimately cross the unstructured content and structured data worlds; Others are well on their way to demonstrating them. The fall of 2006 should be an interesting quarter.

Posted by Leonor Ciarlone at 12:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 25, 2006

Massachusetts puts its Shoulder Behind ODF Again

Writing for eWeek, Peter Galli brings us up to date on Massachusetts' support for ODF.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 15, 2006

A Marriage between CMS and CRM?

I try keep up with the latest trends in IT strategy. (Some of my favorite sites are Darwin and IT Business Edge.) You know, the topics that are of interest to CIOs and other top-level business and technology minds. And I have to say that content management comes up sometimes in the trades, but when it comes to major headlines, all the rage these days is CRM—Customer Relationship Management.

It is interesting to me that CMS and CRM seem to have followed similar paths in terms of starting out as not-well-understood concepts and growing into fairly well defined systems with a prescribed set of functionality.
What I haven't seen a lot of, though, to my surprise, is many people making a connection between CM and CRM—what to me would seem like a perfect marriage.

If you look at the many facets of CRM, you'll find that it's often very intricately interwoven (no product plug intended) with content.

Take, for example, these aspects of CRM:

Sales & Marketing Automation. A key task in the sales and marketing side of CRM is educating the customer (the well-targeted customer) about your products. How do you do that? You arm your sales staff, your Web site, e-mails, you call center teams, and your advertising channels with great content.

Customer Care. The support piece of CRM relies heavily upon the discipline that we refer to as knowledge management. Especially in the area of post-sales support or tech support, where organizations are pushing for more self-service. This is a no-brainer. If you're going to empower the customer to help themselves, how do you do it? With content.

Personalization. I've long touted the fact that personalized communications with customers is a fabulous idea, but don't even think about personalization until you have a solid content management foundation. I mean, seriously, it's one thing to say, hey we've been able to divide our customers into these tiny demographic groups so we can send them messages that are right on target. But, guess what? Those targeted messages are content. Where should they live if not in a CMS?.

So, I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that there's a potential new wave on the technology horizon. Maybe not tsunami size, but definitely good for surfing. It's the vendors who start to recognize the powerful link between CMS and CRM.

In my crystal ball, the lines between knowledge management, content management, and customer relationship management will start to blur. As some already have, more CRM vendors will include document management (for things like managing contracts) in their suites. The Web plays a huge role in CRM. Will we see mergers of WCM and CRM companies?

Ironically, it almost seems that we've come full-circle back to the birthplace of CM (circa 1996) when Broadvision and Vignette dominated the CM marketplace and it was all about one-to-one customer communications. That (broad) vision was apparently too hard to realize back then! Maybe it's possible now.

P.S. I'd love to hear your comments if you've been involved with any CMS/CRM integrations! Please add a comment or e-mail me at rita@ziacontent.com.

Posted by Rita Warren at 5:42 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Big news indeed

Update: Promoted from comment to Frank's one-liner.
Big news indeed, and in fact IBM's fourth largest acquisition of any kind - ever - according to the AP. One of the more compelling takeaways from the analyst conference call is the effect on the market's ability to deliver cohesive vertical and horizontal solutions in the ECM-BPM intersection. (blog archive)

FileNet and IBM reps repeatedly stressed their ability to "provide content-centric BPM in the context of business processes." Not hard to envision. FileNet's historical investment in its BPM modules is a large part of its competitive differentiation. On equal par from a SOA/BPEL-driven perspective, IBM's v6 Websphere BPM products provide the STP/integration capabilities for the sibling requirements. The opportunity for a technology merge is intriguing. Fully preparing for the intersection is clearly a primary goal; as per the call, "the timing is good for a combination of forces." I wouldn't call it a smooth road however, despite the promises of "nothing but goodness for everyone."

Although the two former partners and competitors stress the "preservation and enhancement" of both ECM platforms (the ECM divisions will become one), the holy grail of post-acquisition integration (culture, technology & strategy) could be quite significant in this case.

Posted by Leonor Ciarlone at 2:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 10, 2006

IBM to Acquire FileNet

More when I'm not on vacation, but obviously this is big news.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 11:55 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 8, 2006

CM Pros Tackles Globalization at Fall Summit 2006

Content Management Professionals emphasizes its role as the international community of practice at its Fall Summit 2006. The Summit, titled "Content Management and the World Enterprise," takes place on Monday, November 27, and is co-located with Gilbane Boston. The program focuses practices, processes, and technologies for communicating effectively with global audiences. It is designed to enable content managers to have direct, positive impact on enterprise globalization initiatives. See the call for papers if you'd like to present, participate in a panel, or run a workshop or roundtable. Registration is now open, and sponsorship opportunities are available.

Posted by Mary Laplante at 11:04 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 7, 2006

The Hummingbird Door Closes; Open Text Offer Accepted

The acceptance by Hummingbird's Board of Directors of the Open Text offer closes the door on this summer saga, albeit with less drama than I predicted.

I do find it surprising that even a ripple of a bidding war never occured since the agreed-upon Open Text bid remains at only 10 cents more per share than the preceeding Symphony offer. Plus, there's that $11.7 million termination fee payable to Symphony. Still, Hummingbird reports that the offer represents a 4.1 percent higher bid than Symphony and a 20.5 percent premium over the company's May 25 share price.

Now that the saga is over, the real effects will surface. There is clearly redundancy between the two companies, and that can only mean some amount of layoffs. We would be surprised however, if that prediction extends to the RedDot division, as Open Text fills a hole with this solid WCM solution. In addition, the merger creates a larger competitor to the platform players in the ECM market but also bolsters the "foes can be friends" theory in terms of Open Text's June decision to provide Oracle-based solutions as well as to continue strong SAP and Microsoft Sharepoint integrations.

Finally, the acquisition forces Open Text to continue proving that numerous acquisitions equal strong, integrated vertical and horizontal solutions while simultaneously pleasing longtime Hummingbird customers.

Posted by Leonor Ciarlone at 11:37 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 3, 2006

New Conference News Blog

Today we launched a new blog specifically for Gilbane Group conference, webinar, and other event announcements and news. Of course there are RSS and Atom feeds availble for the new blog so those of you who prefer to keep up with all our event activity can subscribe to those. We will still mention conference activity here, but but mostly in an editorial context. The new event blog will contain all the PR material, and also information about call-for-paper deadlines etc. The new blog is at:
http://gilbane.com/eventsblog/

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 10:04 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 2, 2006

Content Strategy and Modeling for IT Professionals Workshop

Industry colleague, consultant, and Content Management Bible author Bob Boiko is teaching an intensive two-day workshop, "Taming the Content Beast: Content Strategy and Modeling for IT Professionals" in Washington DC September 18th and 19th. Bob is an incredible presenter and will keep you engaged while you're learning. More info.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 4:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 1, 2006

Gilbane Boston session descriptions published - registration open

We have now published tutorial and session descriptions for our Fall conference (November 28-30, 2006 Westin Copley Place, Boston MA) and registration is also now open. Speaker details will be added soon.

Conference track descriptions:
http://gilbaneboston.com/ConferenceProgram.html

Conference session descriptions:
http://gilbaneboston.com/Conference-Sessions.html

Pre-conference tutorial descriptions:
http://gilbaneboston.com/Conference-Tutorials.html

Complete conference schedule:
http://gilbaneboston.com/Conference-Grid.html

Registration:
http://gilbaneboston.com/Registration.html

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 12:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack