Emu Bob

Aussies in Content Management

Gartner has recently  released their Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management featuring 17 companies including the usual suspects of IBM, Oracle, EMC and Open Text as well as some smaller niche players.

One thing that struck me is that of the 17 vendors, 2 of them are Australian - Objective and Tower Software. This led me to think about how large the presence of Australians in the content management market is. It is really quite astonishing.

Here are some highlights and some other "content management related" companies that have an Australian connection that I am aware of:

• Ephox - $2M+ in sales. Makes EditLive!, leading authoring software for web content management. Founded in Brisbane in 1998. (I helped found Ephox and still work for Ephox.)
   
• Objective - $35M in sales made Gartner Magic Quadrant. Founded by Tony Walls in 1987.
   
• IBM/Presence Online - IBM's web content management product from acquisition of Presence Online. Presence Online was founded in Sydney in the late 1990s. Development is still largely done from Sydney and many former Presence Online team members still work for IBM's Lotus/WCM area.
     
• Atlassian - $25M+ in sales. Makes Confluence, leading enterprise wiki software. Founded in Sydney in 2002.
     
• Tower Software - $10M+ in ECM revenue, made Gartner Magic Quadrant. Founded in Canberra in 1985.
     
• Vignette - the Vignette Collaboration product came from acquisition of Australian company Tower Technology (no relation to Tower Software) and the development team is based in Sydney.
     
• Mambo Communities Pty Ltd - leading open source web content management that has also spawned Joomla. Founded in Melbourne.
   
• Centric Minds - successful Java- and .NET-based web content management. Founded in Adelaide by Tod Peddler in 1997.

I am sure there are many more that I am missing too? James Robertson of StepTwo Designs has a list of over 50 vendors based in Australia.

What is it about Australians and content management?

Portals, Content & Collaboration Software Goes Social

Today I am at the Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit in Orlando.

I am currently sitting in on a BEA presentation regarding the next generation of enterprise portals. To quote: "popular consumer-based Web technologies will transform enterprise IT." They are announcing a product called Builder that is a wiki-like product for building situational applications. Kind of like what I have heard described as an "appliki" with components that can be connected to databases/spreadsheets/web service/etc. Looks kind of cool.

However, they are by no means unique in their positioning. Virtually every analyst, presenter and vendor are talking heavily about Web 2.0 and social software for the enterprise. All of the big vendors appear to be weaving social software features into their overall pitch. They are calling it the "consumerization of the enterprise". I guess that is why we are hearing cool new brand names like Quickr, Graffiti, Runner and so on.

Given the emphasis on these topics I would not be surprised that next year Gartner might rename the conference to the Social Software Summit. May be they will even give it a cool glassy-style logo?

Another observation is that multiple presenters have talked of "rouge user applications such as blogs, wikis and SharePoint". The contention between emergent usage of social software in teams and the desire to control/manage social software infrastructure at the enterprise level is quite clear. I have described this top-down, bottoms-up contention before... it's a natural thing that goes in cycles.

Cox Communications are up discussing exactly this situation where they had dozens of separate intranets that they consolidated onto a single portal. They still let departments/locations manage the content applications, but they wanted to provide a common managed infrastructure.

An interesting factoid is that there appears to be very few new solution providers pushing these ideas here. Social software capabilities are being positioned as +1 features to existing platforms from SAP, IBM, Microsoft, BEA, Vignette, etc. I suspect that this has got more to do with the chosen route-to-markets and average selling price of start-ups in this space (web marketing, affordable) vs. these existing players (face-to-face sales, expensive).

One last quote from the presenter: "we know self-service content creation and categorization is not as easy as it could be." Well... it is good Ephox has a mission!

 

Technorati tags: gartner, bea, social software, enterprise 2.0

Intranets In Infancy

Sorry I haven't posted much lately. Much happening!

But for now, here is an interesting set of conclusions from a recent survey on intranet usage by Jane McConnell:

1. The intranet is still in its infancy. It has achieved a first milestone of being a primary information tool. Its benefits as a collaboration platform and productivity tool have not yet been fully achieved. More importantly, it is rarely perceived to be a tool to bring business value to the organization.

2. The intranet is moving towards the individual. This is clear seeing trends in personalisable portals, feeds to hand-held devices, implementation of web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, and initiatives in the area of PKM (personal knowledge management).

3. Senior management has a stronger role to play in the intranet. Numbers and comments throughout this report repeatedly show that senior management in most organisations is not yet fully aware of  the role and potential of the intranet nor of their own responsibilities regarding the intranet.

Of course my view is that the intranet as the place in which to create and share information is on a massive 10 year upward trend.  Main street users and the large organizations they inhabit just don't change that fast. Witness: Microsoft Office had just 10 million users in 1993 (10 years after launch) ...and 450 million in 2006 (23 years after launch).

ECM & Web 2.0 Podcast

Andy MacMillan from Stellent (soon to be owned by Oracle for $440M) talks about current trends in the ECM Hot Seat podcast:

We see a lot of growth in composite applications. These are really applications that take advantage of multi pieces of content management ... Utilizing digital asset management as well as web content management to build a more comprehensive solution or web site ...

We also see a lot of growth around Web 2.0 technology, things like blogs and wikis ...

We’re seeing a lot with records and specifically retention management, which is not just keeping things that you are legally required to keep ...

And finally, we’re seeing a lot of interest in information rights management.

I know Andy from our partnership with Stellent, he is a clever guy who appears to be making great strides in his work with Stellent.

Whilst all the new wiki players in "Enterprise 2.0" such as Atlassian, SocialText and so on have the advantage of a clean sheet of paper Oracle, Microsoft and others have a very big play with their rich repositories and install base. If it ends up anything like the web content management market, there is room for many players.

And - in a related anecdote - Dries Buytaert, the lead developer of Drupal is predicting 0.3% market share:

There are many million websites out there. But by the end of 2007, if you take 1,000 random websites, at least 3 of them will run Drupal.

Given the popularity of Drupal, this illustrates how heterogeneous the CMS market remains.

Technorati tags: drupal, stellent, oracle, enterprise 2.0, ecm, cms