Oracle Buys FatWire, Now What?

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If you missed it, Oracle bought FatWire yesterday. Whether or not this was a shock depends on who you ask. In fact, I suspect that the tension of the sale has been rippling though events for several months.

This acquisition raises several questions, such as, does anyone care, that is, outside of the FatWire install base and those competing against FatWire? I think it matters. Not because of the actual purchase, but because of what Oracle does with FatWire. That will show us volumes about their long-term Content Management strategy.

Before proceeding into my world of hypotheticals, you should read Real Story Group’s collection of thoughts on the deal.

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Creating Thought Leadership

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Every company, to some degree, wants to be considered a thought leader in their industry. Vendors want to drive new sales and reassure their install base. Consultants/analysts want to have potential clients knocking on their doors for answers. The final side of the triangle, Buyers, they want their competitors to follow them and attract talent to work for them.

(Note that roles shift from market to market. Nuxeo is a vendor in the Content Management market but a Buyer in the ERP market.)

The importance varies, but it is a goal that any company wanting to be a leader in their industry wants to achieve. It isn’t easy. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. So the question is, how do you do it?

Taking the software market as my example, given my experience there, I am going to explore the process.

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The Allure of Selling Product over Services

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imageA few weeks ago, Peter Monks asked the twitterverse the following question:

Does anyone else think that services companies claiming to be product companies is weird? Seems like a rather difficult pivot to execute.

I agreed that it was a difficult pivot but that it wasn’t weird. In fact, I did it once. Ten years ago, when I was with Infodata System, I transitioned from a consultant to a Product Manager for about two years. My team took the results of a consulting engagement and created the AnnoDoc product. It was an annotation tool, similar to the current Documentum PDF Annotation tool, but with less overhead.

Why did we do it? How did we do it? Why were we successful? Let’s dive in and look.

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Popularity in Leadership

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image Had a really strange day today. Lot’s of thought on strategy at work, a series of striking events, participation in #LeadershipChat, and finally an album that took me back to a reflective time in my life.

During #LeadershipChat, Lou Imbriano said True leaders have little concern with popularity ~ which leads to credibility. This lead to a mini-debate that was partly brought about by trying to make things black-and-white and the fact that we were communicating 140 characters at a time.

One key distinction is that there are two aspects of leadership that are impacted by popularity, the leaders and the decisions they make.

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I’ve Been Doing This Four Years?

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This year as I write my post observing my blog’s anniversary, I am hit with conflicting realizations. One is that I cannot believe that it has been four years already. It seems like only yesterday I wasn’t blogging and I was just another local hack consultant.

Now of course, I am a hack on a much larger scale.

The other thought process is that when I go to events it seems like I’ve been doing this forever. When I started this blog, blogging in the Documentum space was thin. There were some other Content Management bloggers, but it wasn’t nearly as widespread as it is now. It used to be that if you blogged about Content Management, you made the blog roll. Now things change so much the roll has been sitting half-way through a revision for several months.

I started during the days when Johnny Gee was the only widely known Documentum blogger. That does seem like forever and an ago. Over that time, the Word has come to define who I am in the industry.

So, who is this annoying hack known as Pie……..?

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Looking Ahead to CMIS 1.1

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This week, over in Seattle, the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee is getting together for face-to-face meetings complete with plugfests every afternoon. It promises to be fun, but they are trying to accomplish some real work during all of this. The largest piece is the thought they are giving to what is going to be in the next version of CMIS.

Now I have some definite opinions which I am going to share. In order to facilitate disagreements, I am publishing the list of items they are taking under advisement. I have added bold to the ones that I care about the most.

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EMC Goes Mobile, Creating a Redundant Déjà Vu Experience

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You know the guy: Ned Ryerson the insurance agent in Groundhog Day, One of the strangest things to happen at EMC World was the announcement by EMC of a mobile client for the iPad. It is scheduled to arrive in Q3 of 2011 (I made them commit to a specific Q3). Some people even said July 15, but I’d be more than happy with an arrival before Labor Day.

So why is that strange? Doesn’t everyone need a mobile client? Isn’t that a cornerstone of Choice Computing? Doesn’t Sarah, the new user, want access to information anywhere on every device. Well, you are correct on all fronts.

The strange part is that when you take a step back, you realize that the market is already addressing this need.

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Collaboration, Just a Documentum Side Effect

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Last year I posted an article on how CenterStage was the Latest ex-Collaboration Tool from EMC. Turns out I understated the case. EMC isn’t going to be building a collaboration tool, at least not one purposely built to encourage collaboration.

In many ways the announcements at this year’s EMC World just reaffirmed the direction set last year. Last year I was sad. This year, I’m starting to lose my sense of humor.

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Documentum has a Vision Again, How About Execution?

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Last year I was pretty strong in my criticism of EMC’s lack of vision or strategy in the Content Management space. In a way I should thank them because it inspired me to write a post on the Future of Content Management that was later received fairly well at Gilbane Boston and info360.

Of course, none of that helps my existing Documentum clients, nor does it help the community at large. Well this year, EMC presented both a vision and a strategy at EMC World. I was pretty excited, not so much because I thought it was the best vision, but because it even vision.

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Unforgiven, Reflecting on Momentum 2011, Vegas

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Time for the overdue Momentum evaluation post. I write this one every year because it was my concern about the loss of Momentum that first inspired me to start this blog. Normally I write this post between the end of the conference and my plane. This year I had only a couple of hours due to a busy schedule and I spent that at the Pinball Hall-of-Fame (and I wasn’t the only one).

In keeping with my theme of naming these posts after Clint Eastwood westerns, I have moved on from the trilogy to one that I feel more exemplifies this year’s conference, Unforgiven. Why? Simply because for most of the EMC World life, the Momentum conference has been a shell of its old self. Marriage had taken away who it really was. Well, Momentum looks like it might be back.

Before I go any further, remember I am talking about the conference only, not the content of the conference. Those follow next.

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