Comments on: Enterprise Content Management 2.0, Still in Beta

By: ldallas

ldallas — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 04:05:53 +0000

You’re right – better stated – “in the minds of some vendors, standards erode competitive advantage.” To be fair, none of them are completely standards averse.

If memory serves, all of the above were on the committee for ODMA. I just believe that there has to be a significant driving force to get them to adopt it and I don’t think developers can do it. The desire needs to originate in paying customers which is difficult to drive because this topic is so IT centric.

Notice that both of us leave Oracle out of that list. I have religious problems with Oracle’s classification of ECM with middleware but it serves this purpose nicely.

By: Jed cawthorne

Jed cawthorne — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 09:23:32 +0000

Good points Lee, but do open SOA standards really work against competitive advantage ? It might prevent ‘secret sauce’ based advantage (and lock in) but surely it also frees development time and resources to improving aspects of a solution, such as an improved user experience that would absolutely provide competitive advantage.

Where is the competitive advantage for RedHat, Novell/SuSe and Canonical et al, whom are all making money out of selling the same standards based product, versions of the GNU/Linux OS.

If EMC, IBM, OpenText et al think they can continue down non-standards based paths they will start to loose ever more custom to Alfresco !

By: ldallas

ldallas — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 22:45:35 +0000

I think I get it already – if “it” is the realization that utopian EMC is just a standard away. Every consumer and integrator’s life gets better as a result I just don’t think the market will ever get “it.”

An open SOA standard works against competitive advantage. It will take a huge federal declaration like CALS to get the vendors to support it. Now that I think about it, they may decide to support the idea simply to solve the integration problems brought on by their shopping addiction.

By: Jed

Jed — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 21:37:39 +0000

Hey dude, ta for the mention. I would blog in response, but trying to wrap things up as an ‘ECM Programme Manager’ do a little consulting work for my new employer, and pack stuff for the international movers, so quicker to comment here !

I am not so sure that ECM 1.0 platforms can actually provide the basis for ‘Enteprise 2.0′ – integrated records management for your Wiki posts, well I am sure your clever enough to code it, and the current platforms might be flexible enough to provide, but they dont make it easy enough …..
Hence the need for the ‘paradigm shift’ required towards standards based, SOA compliant, web service happy, componentised ‘ECM 2.0′
Bring it on……….

By: lopataru

lopataru — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 09:32:45 +0000

Visions are nice and keep everybody focused on the master plan to “conquer the world” (Bwahaha!).
My thoughts are that the real ECM 2.0 must be exactly what it means: a new version of the ECM products, finally stepping up from the “first version”.
All major vendors are still having troubles with core technology in one way or the other. This hurts in real life. Customers do not have perfect IT skills. Nor does the consultancy/implementation company. The ECM must be stable, reliable enough to withstand not so clean installation / operation.
My dream is that I open the “ECM 2.0″ box, put in the CD and install the ECM infrastructure. And that ECM infrastructure simply works. Always. This is what I expect from the second version of a ‘product’. Or is it to early (grin)?
PS: The CEVA’s and other stuff are a different story.