Recently in EII & ECI Category

Our colleagues over at CMS Watch have published a new report on enterprise portals. As our earlier reports here and here on the portal market suggested, the list of vendors covered in the report shows the market is now dominated by infrastructure players. Janus Boye, the author of the report is giving a tutorial on Enterprise Portal Software: Architecture and Products - Intensive Review & Roadmap for Product Selection at our upcoming conference in San Francisco, and also speaking on Challenges in Integrating Portals & Content Management Systems. The report, tutorial, and conference session would be a great way to get fully up-to-speed on corporate portals and content management.

A while back Frank Gilbane and I were talking. One of the outcomes of our chat was that he graciously asked me to be a Guest Author for the Gilbane Report Blog. This is my first foray for Frank's blogosphere, and I'm grateful for the opportunity. With that....

Recently closing on Oracle's acquisition of the company I founded (www.contextmedia.com), and having lived in what we considered the "unstructured" data market for ECI/EII for over six years, presents a chance to look back, and perhaps, at what lies ahead.

Where we've been- Sowing the seeds for ECI

The gestation for Context Media as a concept and idea began with my tenure at Netscape. The first company I founded, InSoft, was acquired by Netscape in late '95 and provided a multimedia and realtime collaborative footing for the company with products and standards (LiveMedia, LiveAudio, LiveVideo, Media Server, Conference), 1st Shared Whiteboard, H.323, and RTSP for streaming). Those years, now ten short years ago, saw the exponential growth of "content." Information heretofore inaccessible became as simple to access as clicking on an URL and experiencing instantaneous gratification. It is no wonder that Netscape set the bar and the table for the years to come.

Remember "information wants to be free ?" And even with the mis-guided notion that copyrighted material should all be free and readily accessible, it is critical to remember what is was like to be able to search and find information immediately, particularly knowledge that was domain specific to you and your job ? This "high value" content was previously locked in its own proprietary silo.

What was that ? Well, considering that even the Document Management sector was not yet a big market, it typically meant that the silo was a file server somewhere in your company. Web serving and HTTP made it relatively simple to "HTML-ize" this kind of data and make it available. Old geeks like myself who were used to authoring in nroff/troff and interconnecting file systems with NFS mounts began to see the light with HTML. In house file servers with NFS mounts interconnecting them were the norm. That was considered early stage collaboration. This state of sharing which at the time felt cool and leading edge was rendered obsolete almost overnite by the web. The web became the new lingua franca. Hacking the UNIX /etc/hosts became a thing of the past. The web server opened the world of content.

Although not officially announced, a number of trade publications have reported on Oracle's acquisition of Content Media, and Tony Byrne succinctly captures what is of immediate interest to followers of the content management market.
What we started calling EII (Enterprise Information Integration) a few years ago, and what many vendors called ECI (Enterprise Content Integration) remains one of the biggest challenges organizations face - too big to be served by a small niche market, as evidenced by Oracle's move, as well as by the earlier IBM and EMC acquisitions. For a more in-depth look at the problem, players and the market see our article on What is Enterprise Information Integration (EII)?

Reminder: The deadline for submitting speaking proposals for our Boston conference on November 29 - December 1, is May 15. In fact, it helps to send proposals even sooner since we are already outlining the program. We'll be covering our usual range of content management technologies, but will have a special focus on new technologies, and which ones are ready for prime time and what business applications they are appropriate for. Enterprise blog, wiki and RSS technologies will certainly be one major focus. There is some early guidance on this year's topics here. If you are new to our events, you can see our typical content coverage and conference structure at last year's Boston program, or this month's San Francisco program.

See the instructions on how to submit proposals.

Bill Gates weighs in on XML and interoperability.

"Binary XML" sounds like an oxymoron. It is, after all, the plain text encoding of XML that makes it so easy to work with. Heck, I still use the "vi" editor to make quick changes to XML and HTML files.

Writing in the Australian edition of Builder.com, Martin LaMonica provides a nice roundup of the pros and cons of some efforts to develop a binary XML. He summarizes some related projects at Sun and the W3C, and has some very lively quotes from XML guru (and Gilbane Report Editor Emeritus) Tim Bray. (And if you want to hear directly from Tim on the issue of binary XML, his blog has plenty of related entries.)

I'll leave it up to people much smarter than me to figure this one out, but the discussion of binary XML is related to the larger question of performance. As XML is more and more pervasive, organizations will need to find ways to deal with performance impacts over time. We talked about XML hardware in this context a few days ago, and ZDNet is reporting today that Cisco may be getting in the XML hardware game. Stay tuned.