Two years ago, a journal was discovered while excavating in the Trough of Disillusionment of Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) technologies. The journal told a story of fear, distrust, and desperation.
Today another tome was discovered. Written hastily in the margins of an IDOL manual was the following text. It is estimated that this was written two days after the conclusion of the previously discovered journal (which you should read 1st). The author is unknown.
I don’t know if this was a result of leaving the consulting world or a side effect of not having made any predictions for 2012, but this year appeared to be a very non-newsworthy year in Content Management. Oh, things happened, but nothing big.
I didn’t realize it until Ron Miller asked me what I thought the biggest story was this year. I couldn’t think of a story that was “big”. I could wade through a bunch of small stories and pick the “biggest”, but that wasn’t what he was looking to learn.
I have been busy these past few months. How busy? Just look at my post rate. It hasn’t been for lack of topics, I’ve just been burning the candle at both ends.
Well, I’ve been on “vacation” for the past week and feel rested enough to take some time to write. Coincidently enough, I have two posts to write quickly, the first being this post evaluating the predictions for 2011.
As I did for the 2010 predictions, I am going to score them as either correct, incorrect, or partial (50%). The partial is for predictions that were correct in the causes, but the effects were off.
For years, I’ve had a crazy uncle, Owen Tedford. Now crazy Uncle Owen always like to collect baseball cards. I’ve always liked baseball cards so I always like to visit with Owen for short periods of time.
We always considered him eccentric and not crazy until he started buying other collections. While that wasn’t crazy in and of itself, it was what he did, or didn’t do, with the cards. He wouldn’t look at the collection for overlap before buying it. He would see one or two cards that he didn’t have and just buy.
Once uncle Owen got the collection, he would put the new collection in his shed and slowly cull it for individual cards to add to his main collection. The leftover parts of the collections slowly deteriorating outside in the shed.
We were worried about crazy Uncle Owen being crushed by his rotting collection of cards on a trip to the shed. We figured it was only a few more years until the sheer dead weight of it all collapsed. Then he met Artie, the town loon.
There is a lot of acquisition talk these days, both anticipated and real. When you think on it, it isn’t really news. Acquisitions are a constant in this industry, but there are two of late that indicate how things may be getting ready to change. People keep asking me my thoughts, so I thought I would jot them down.
Keep in mind that I’m not an analyst or expert and I don’t play one on TV. I can write a mean Haiku though.
If you don’t follow the CMS open source world and/or the CMS industry at large, this announcement may leave you scratching your head wondering “So what?” Day Software has been one of the leading open source companies in the Content Management world. They are headquartered in Europe and have been working to build a footprint here in the states.
A couple months ago, Gartner released their annual ECM Magic Quadrant (which I looked at). Sure enough, being an odd year, Forrester released their ECM Wave. I see the pros of waiting two years as the larger vendors take that long, or longer, for a significant release. On the other hand, you have longer to wait for new members to show up.
Well not in Forrester’s world. Only one new vendor (HP) was added and a few were cut, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Okay, let’s be clear. I didn’t travel around with CMIS all day. On the other hand, CMIS got me to the AIIM Expo this year, opened a few doors, and started many a conversation. It is amazing what standing on a soapbox for a year and a half can accomplish. It was an interesting day that was well spent and I wish I had two days at the conference. I was always rushing trying to get to see everyone and talk to everyone, and I failed. I did accomplish my primary objective, and that was a success.
So I was just casually heading over to look at an older Big Men on Content post when I saw their latest. It seems that Interwoven was purchased today by Autonomy. Uh, WOW! Okay, maybe a bit of an over-reaction, but with Vignette in a death spiral, what is next for them?
Before we get to Vignette, lets look at the news itself.
Just wanted to share with everyone. I learned that the OEM agreement that I mentioned earlier between Autonomy and EMC is for the RSA product line and not Documentum. There had been a slight discussion going on in my previous post on the topic that Autonomy wasn’t destined for Content Server. Now we know.
So it seems that Search is still on the same path. Upgraded FAST and an option for Lucene in D6.5. This should also lead to more plug-in architecture for Search engines in the future. It also means that we need to watch Microsoft more closely once they close the deal in Q2.
The folks at Brilliant Leap! and Lee Smith had some interesting thoughts (Read in that order). However, with the information regarding RSA, it spins it a little straighter.
Sometimes I miss the 90s. Search was so easy in ECM environments. Everyone used a bundled Verity and was happy.
Then things changed. People started to notice that if you actually used the system on an large scale, search performance degraded. There were many reasons for this. One was that vendors weren’t upgrading their bundled Verity engine. Another was that the engine was sitting on the same machine as the primary ECM server, so resources were being consumed at an increasing rate.
Word of Pie 