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Gilbane Group Launches Content Technology CTO Blog

For Immediate Release:

9/19/06

Analyst firm hosts chief technology officer blog for content management and information technology community 

Contact:
Mary Laplante
617.497.9443 ext 212
mary@gilbane.com

Cambridge MA, September 19, 2006. The Gilbane Group today announced they have launched a blog for Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) who are involved in enterprise content applications, whether vendor, integrator, or enterprise implementer. The content technology CTO Blog is hosted by the Gilbane Group as a service to the content and information technology community. The purpose of the blog is to facilitate ongoing discussion and debate on technologies, approaches and architectures relevant to enterprise content applications.

CTOs have a wealth of critical information about technologies that is not always accessible to enterprise customers. CTOs also have demanding jobs, and have limited time available to meet with each other with customers, or with other industry influencers. This blog is intended to encourage communication both between vendor CTOs and between enterprise customer CTOs and vendor CTOs. All CTOs are invited to participate.

“Long gone are the days when analyst firms, marketing departments and VARs had a lock on product technology information channels. But it is still a challenge for many companies to find the in-depth technical expertise they need for strategic IT decisions.” said Frank Gilbane, CEO, Gilbane Group. “Our mission has always been to facilitate dialogue about information technologies between technologists, implementers, customers, investors, analysts and consultants. The CTO blog is a great addition to our open information community approach and complements our conferences, analyst blog, website, and other activities.”

Two CTO Blog charter authors have already contributed posts during the pre-launch testing. John Newton, a Documentum founder and now founder and CTO of Alfresco, provides a provocative take on “content management 2.0”. Vern Imrich, CTO of Percussion Software, shares insights into the apparent contradiction of content management technology moving up and down the technology infrastructure stack at the same time. See  (CTO Blog posts are integrated in with the Gilbane Blog) to see the full posts, a list of topic areas, to comment, or learn more.

Additional charter authors of the Content Technology CTO Blog include:

  • Bill Cava, Ektron
  • James Gonthier, Refresh
  • Jason Hunter, Mark Logic
  • Vern Imrich, Percussion
  • John Newton, Alfresco
  • Bjørn Olstad, FAST
  • Eric Severson, Flatirons Solutions
  • Carl Sutter, CrownPeak

Vern Imrich, CTO of Percussion Software, said, “This is an ideal time for the Gilbane Group to launch their Content Technology CTO Blog. The content management market is maturing in a variety of different directions, and organizations are looking closely at how they can apply content management to everything from basic storage and retrieval to new content-driven applications used to produce measurable line-of-business returns. Giving CTOs a place to comment on the issues surrounding this dynamic market will provide significant value. I’m happy to participate and eager to hear what my peers have to say.”

About Gilbane Group Inc.
The Gilbane Report serves the content technology community with publications, conferences and consulting services. The Gilbane Report also administers the Content Technology Works program disseminating best practices with partners Software AG (TECdax:SOW), Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ:SUNW), Artesia Digital Media, a Division of Open Text, Astoria Software, ClearStory Systems (OTCBB:INSS), Context Media (Oracle, NASDAQ: ORCL), Convera (NASDAQ:CNVR), IBM (NYSE:IBM), Idiom, Mark Logic, omtool (NASDAQ:OMTL), Open Text Corporation (NASDAQ:OTEX), SDL International (London Stock Exchange:SDL), Vasont Systems, Vignette (NASDAQ:VGN), and WebSideStory (NASDAQ:WSSI). https://gilbane.com

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New CTO blog

Over the summer we came up with the idea for hosting a blog for CTOs from all parts of the content and information industry to debate technologies and architectures. We finally got around to launching the Content Technology CTO Blog today. Here is the press release, and more info on how it works and how to contribute. John Newton, CTO of Alfresco and Vern Imrich CTO of Percussion already have posts up. Stop by and comment!

Acrobat Still Suffering from Schizophrenia

On Monday, in the wee hours of the night (my email was sent at 12:27 a.m.) Adobe emitted three short press releases announcing Acrobat 8. I’m a fan of Acrobat and PDF, so I always look forward to new versions of this ungainly but hugely-popular product. Sadly release #8, at first look-see, leaves me thoroughly unmoved.

The main press release captures the excitement behind the announcement: “The Acrobat 8 product line introduces several major innovations in the areas of document collaboration, PDF content reuse, PDF forms, packaging of multiple documents, and controlling sensitive information. For example, shared reviews put collaboration within the reach of virtually anyone with access to a shared network folder and Adobe Reader2. A participant in a shared review can see comments posted by others, track the status of the review, and work even when not connected – reducing duplicated work and enabling large groups to collaborate more efficiently. Acrobat 8 also enables PDF content to be exported into popular formats to enable reuse and repurposing of content.”

Most of these “innovations” are just “new and improved” old features.

If you’re looking for news, press release #2 is where to turn. Macromedia Breeze is now called Acrobat Connect, and will be available at a lower price-point and to smaller groups of users than the old not-so-gentle Breeze. This represents the first fruit of Adobe’s $3.4 billion acquisition of Macromedia. How do ya like them apples?
Press release #3 reveals that Adobe will continue to nurse Acrobat and PDF through its severe case of schizophrenia. Acrobat 8 ($449 by itself) will also be bundled into the awkwardly named Adobe Creative Suite 2.3 Premium edition ($1199). This is “to enable creative and print professionals to efficiently create, collaborate with, and automate output of Adobe PDF files.”

A few years back, Adobe came close to abandoning this group of PDF enthusiasts (and major buyers of Creative Suite). It realized the gross error of its ways at the 11th hour, and now makes sure to invite them for tea each time there’s something new happening with Acrobat. The features that appeal to “creative and print professionals” bear little resemblance to the features that appeal to the “knowledge workers,” who remain the big buyers of Acrobat itself. So while each group is told a slightly different story, Acrobat’s schizophrenia has not blocked its ever-growing popularity.

Also in press release #3 we find the second instance of the fruit-bearing acquisition. Not surprisingly, Adobe has decided to jettison the never-very-successful GoLive out of Creative Suite in favor of the incredibly successful Dreamweaver. Saving face, somewhat unconvincingly, we’re informed that “Adobe will continue to develop GoLive as a standalone product.” Right. That’s until Adobe finishes getting a little cash off the GoLive orphans as they make the switch (“upgrade”) to Dreamweaver.

The word on the street is that Creative Suite itself will be upgraded to V3 by early next year. Perhaps then the flaccid features of Acrobat 8 will start to make more sense. Or maybe some knowledge workers will acquire some knowledge, enough to tell us why this upgrade was released.

Index Data Releases Zebra 2.0

Index Data has released Zebra 2.0, a major upgrade of its Open Source database server and indexing engine. This upgrade makes index profiling much easier, supports increased tuning of search results, incorporates XML technology into core functionality, and increases performance speed. Some of the highlights of the improvements of Zebra 2.0 over the 1.3 version are: a 64-bit based index structure, elimination of the 2GB limit on register file size, new on-disk format providing increased stability and faster indexing and retrieval, new record filter using XSLT transformations to drive both indexing and retrieval, improved logging and analysis of external traffic, and revised and expanded documentation. Zebra 2.0 replaces the previous versions’ tight coupling to the Z39.50 BIB-1 attribute set with a new XML friendliness, making Zebra easy to use for such XML-based formats as Dublin Core, MODS, METS, MARCXML, OAI-PMH, RSS, etc. The software’s new plug-in architecture allows the skilled user to write his or her own record indexing and retrieval filters as loadable modules. The performance enhancements incorporated into version 2.0 mean that Zebra can now index and search even faster than version 1.3. In a test of Zebra 2.0, the software was able to build a 31 GB database of very large records in four elapsed hours on a 1800 GHz Dual AMD box. It processed an average of 2.2 MB of data per second. Zebra 2.0 offers more precise logging of external traffic, access and indexing, and log messages are now printed in a style similar to Apache server logs. http://www.indexdata.com/zebra

 

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.

Movin’ on up? or was it down?

The Content Management market today seems to be moving in two contradictory directions at once. On the one hand, we see ever larger software players, such as IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft building or acquiring content management, driving it “down” into infrastructure. To IBM and Oracle, content is just an extension of their dominance in the data center. ECM to them is thus an extension of the database. Microsoft’s push, with both Windows SharePoint Services, and eventually WinFS (no longer part of Vista) is similar, but treats content more as the extension of the file system – the “back end of Office” as it were. While based on Microsoft’s very different perspective of working from the desktop inward to IT, it is still fundamentally an infrastructure play. Content management in this world is still fundamentally way down in the IT technology “stack.”

Yet on the other hand, we see customers increasingly funding content management from line-of-business budgets, and purchasing content management based on its ability to solve line-of-business problems. Performance, scalability, reliability are not to be ignored, but other questions dominate selection, such as: “Will we get more returns from our internet marketing efforts with this system?” or “Will our department be able to move up deadlines with this system?” In short, these buyers are positioning the content management system far “up the stack” as one or more different content-driven applications used to produce measurable line-of-business returns.

How can buyers be moving up the stack while the major vendors move down? The answer is part semantics, and part market shift. The term “content management,” including all of its current acronyms ECM, WCM or just CMS, is too generic. This is largely due to the fact that managing content itself is so new to both applications and infrastructure, that there it belongs in both places. Secondly, there is a real bifurcation going on in the market. The true infrastructure aspects of content management, such as optimal storage and retrieval, indexing, and library services are increasingly becoming commoditized and absorbed into the infrastructure software stack. But as these content services precipitate downward, they become too generic to solve any particular line of business problem on their own. This means that another layer of content-driven applications must emerge at the top of the stack, to provide the horizontal and vertical applications, such as internet and multi-channel marketing, something I blog about quite a bit. All of these very different offerings are today called “content management” with vendors for each moving down and up the stack respectively.

While technologists love the simplicity of block diagrams showing “the content management goes here,” the reality is that content management goes in a lot of places. For the foreseeable future, we’re going to have many systems, all of which do very different things, and yet all called Content Management of one kind or another. If you can better understand the specific initiative driving each new system or solution, you can better understand how your current systems do or do not apply, and whether you need to add more “content management” to achieve your goals.

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