Vamosa has released version 2.9 of their content analysis and migration software, Vamosa Content Migrator. Vamosa Content Migrator version 2.9 has enhanced document migration capabilities and introduces ‘link cohesion’ for the document world. Link Cohesion has been a long-standing feature of Vamosa Content Migrator and has been used to great effect when migrating web content to translate all internal website hyperlinks. The extension of this functionality to incorporate documents will be beneficial to organisations with large document and content repositories. Link Cohesion for documents allows Vamosa Content Migrator to analyse organisation’s documents (Word, Excel or PDF etc) and examine links held within those documents. Where necessary the product will automatically and intelligently adjust these links to maintain their validity and ensure that the content referred to by the link remains accessible in the new content management system and architecture. http://www.vamosa.com
Category: Enterprise software & integration (Page 23 of 30)
There are two new posts on the CTO Blog to check out: Eric Severson on XML and Office 2.0, and Carl Sutter on What is the future of software as a service.
As Tim Bray says “Wow”. Here is the announcement post with a huge number of comments. This is discouraging. As I have argued before, we need the kinds of capabilities WinFS was striving for to make the next leap in managing information. I remain skeptical that database platforms are a sufficient solution for effective object management – they may be the necessary next step, but they are certainly not the ultimate answer.
There are no doubt many easier, shorter-term ways to get return on software development than a radically different operating system, but hopefully at some point there will be sufficient recognition by all the software infrastructure vendors that working together to build a modern OS would be worth it. On the other hand, perhaps what has happened to WinFS is really a sign that the days of huge operating systems are numbered. The problems are really bigger than any one platform. What kind of cross-platform infrastructure is feasible to accomplish the fluid, granular and meaningful interchange of content and behavior we know we need? This is a more interesting question than whether WinFS itself is dead.
UPDATE: There is a lot of commentary out there, but as usual Jon Udell has a view worth reading.
Since we have our conference on Content Technologies for Government in Washington this week I probably will not get to Tech-Ed which is at our new convention center here in Boston, even though it is less than 2 blocks away. But if I had the time, I would be there scouting out the new WinFS beta and the intriguing Project Orange, (which may be relevant to the previous post on Viper). Mary Jo Foley has a list of the top 10 things to watch for there. She and others have pointed to this post for some clues on Project Orange.
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.
Microsoft’s InfoPath was announced with great fanfare in October 2003 as part of the Office 2003 release. Microsoft then included some enhancements to InfoPath in a Service Pack release (SP1) of Office, which was distributed in June 2004. Since then, there has been little news about InfoPath. The InfoPath team blog at the Microsoft Developer Network went quiet in early 2005, with its last post in November of 2005, which was an announcement of an InfoPath 2003 Toolkit for Visual Studio 2005. There is a newish InfoPath tips-and-tricks blog by Microsoft blogger Tim Pash, but other than that, Microsoft has been very quiet about InfoPath. Does this suggest a reduced commitment by Microsoft?
UPDATE: As you can see from the comments, Microsoft appears to be plenty busy with InfoPath. See also this post from Eric Richards, who is a development lead on Microsoft Office.
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.
It was cool, and then, what happened ? It was just like any wild great party or event. Often times, the best party you ever attended was secret, it was in the woods, or on an island in the Caribbean (now everyone knows about Foxy’s for New Years on Jost van Dyke…), etc. Then, everyone found out about it, and, POW, chaos. The thing about this kind of chaos was that it didn’t go away. There was so much pent up demand for “ease of access” that it continued to drive more and more chaos in the enterprise. But… business is not a party (although it felt like it at Netscape from ’95-’97). Further, chaos is really not appropriate for creating and sustaining shareholder value.
That’s what happened to the web. So, (at least in my view, and the now archived view of Context Media), this chaos in the enterprise demanded “order.” Thus, the setting of the table for the massive growth in content management, and it’s upscale big brother, enterprise content management. These players brought order back to the chaos. Early document management players, i.e., Documentum, morphed into what we now call ECM. The pendulum swung back and put us right where we were pre-web. You could now get access, you just had to pay the licensing toll to get at your data. Of course, workflow was the raison d’etre for ECM positioning. My experience in every large organization I’ve worked at was that real users hated workflow. People like to define their processes, not the other way around. Nevertheless, the over-correction in ECM “order re-establishment” did the job. You may not have liked it, it may have cost too much, but at the end of the day, businesses want order. They got it !
This was exactly Context Media’s reason for being. Our DNA, having gestated at Netscape really didn’t place “order” ahead of access. We wanted open access and the rush of instantaneous gratification. Yet, in being the FIRST web-based enterprise software company, we knew that introducing enterprise webservers into a business with a derivative unforeseen by-product of “chaos” was not going to win the day. You needed to have order WITH access. Perhaps that would keep the buzz going. With that, we woodshedded and ultimately launched Context Media. We thought that ECI would keep the goodness of ECM (order) and bring back the lovefest of the web (access). That was our mission.
The six years of Context Media introduced the “Unified View,” something we rolled out and demoed to key analysts such as Frank Gilbane, Connie Moore, Sue Feldman, and many other analysts in mid 2001. Our vision, using web services as a loosely coupled asyncronous construct (later coined an SOA by tech pundits), ultimately provided what we called “pipelines” that interfaced to other ECM systems, proprietary systems and databases. The architecture of these pipelines was fundamentally different from other “connector-based” approaches. Ours were plug and play, off-the-shelf WSDL based services that interconnected radically different systems. The “Unified View” brought back the use of the browser as your core navigator, again allowing you to peer into all content, even if you didn’t hold the secret handshake card to use the high cost per seat ECM system. We coined it “InterShare.” Our vision was realized. Technically, at least…
Where we are- circa 2005-2006
For Context Media, the culmination of our vision, engineering and market development efforts ultimately resulted in Oracle’s acquistion of our company.
What’s it mean for them ? Context Media’s technology now forms the basis for Oracle’s Enterprise Content Integration (ECI) strategy, and is a foundational element embedded across multiple product lines: the Oracle Collaboration Suite, and Oracle Fusion Middleware. This newly acquired ECI technology from Context Media will also manfiest itself in other key Oracle apps and strategies, e.g., Oracle Enterprise search, and Oracle Data Hubs.
We weren’t the only ECI players to be rolled into a gorilla’s M&A strategy. It’s interesting that the two then-acknowledged leaders in ECI were both acquired by leading database players. Context Media —> Oracle, and, Venetica — >IBM. Another observation is that these acquisitions were perhaps the right fit(s) for both Oracle and IBM. Context Media’s roots were in hardcore software tools and applications development. We were acquired by a company that stresses engineering and products as key differentiators versus a heavy services-laden approach. Venetica, a company that had been around for years building experience as an IT professional services vendor building “connectors” between banking systems in Charlotte, went to IBM, where the 5X to 7X services revenue model is increasingly important, e.g., recent IBM financials show that services drive approx. 60% of revenue. Thus, a case can be made that in the realm of technical DNA matching, these outcomes were reasonable.
But now….Where’s it going ?
Why didn’t this technology ultimately become OEM’ed and/or acquired by a leading, or combination of leading traditional leading ECM players ? Both Context Media and Venetica had OEM traction, but no player had a key lead. Is the ECM market’s ultimate competition the database gorillas ? Is it that the established ECM base needs to entrench and protect their hill from the DB players approaching from the sea ? Is ECM really just a subset of the database wars ? A mere “feature” in the gargantuan stack ? Will we all ultimately wind up playing not necessarily on a web-based platform, but one that has been underlaid and hijacked by database kingpins- IBM, Oracle, MSFT ?
Next, is this a grand opportunity for guerilla warfare from startups wielding XML, RDF, atom, and open source EWMD (Enterprise weapons of mass destruction) ? Has the CLOB become the BLOB, weighted down by multi terabyte databases that are just too costly to run ? Is there a reason that, arguably, the world’s largest “database,” the Google File System (GFS) is not based on leading gorillas database technology ?
In a broader sense- Is the consolidation in the software industry killing innovation ? Are all innovative enterprise software startups destined for either (a) flameout, or (b) acquisition by monoliths like Oracle/IBM/Microsoft ? Did ECI technology, that which was invented to connect, interlink and provide a more universal access layer for end users actually hasten the advance of the database players dominance of all things data ? In the end, even large(r) public ECM companies look for the investor exit. Perhaps the consolidation of our industry’s enterprise software sector is well underway. The signs are everywhere.
Finally, what’s it mean for the people that matter, the customers ? Do they really believe that they’ll get more/better/faster when buying from any of the remaining 3-4 players left standing ? Is there a way to do M&A that keeps what Tracy Kidder called “The Soul of the Machine” in the enterprise software machine ? Or, is the enterprise software machine, like the carbon fuel-based automobile, destined to be replaced by something new and better ? Perhaps that’s the topic for another blog….
Dan Harple
dan@harple.com
Reporting about Microsoft’s announcement of Windows Live and Office Live today, Boston Globe reporter Robert Weisman wrote:
With the new Microsoft tools, small businesses will be able to build an online presence and manage projects over the Internet, and consumers will be able to share digital photos and other files that can be accessed from home, the office, or on the road.
I don’t know about you, but I find this to be really underwhelming. I mean, haven’t we been doing all this for years? Now, in fairness to Microsoft, I haven’t delved into the details of the news yet, but if this is what Weisman took away from the press conference, Microsoft has to develop a better story about this new initiative–especially since they seem to be making a big bet on it.
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