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.
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.
[Note that my post on the 2010 Quadrant is now available.]
Thanks to the Documentum voters splitting their time between two topics, discussing the recent Gartner MQ for ECM is today’s topic. The voting was an interesting little diversion that I’ll revisit later.
I’m going to talk about the report here. The recent controversy around Gartner is a post for another day.
Last year I was threatened (my word) by Gartner for putting a copy of the MQ here. I was also chastised for several other nitpicks. So I will only link to Oracle’s courtesy copy of the 2009 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management this year to avoid wrath.
One thing to remember is Gartner really doesn’t want you to compare a vendor’s location in the MQ from year to year. That is both well-advised and unrealistic. To be fair, as the measurements and industry change, scores change. Movement isn’t just dependent on vendor action, or inaction.
However, we are human and we like to perform comparisons. I have a copy to perform the comparison for my own interest. The link I had online to last year’s report is no longer valid, so you’ll have to take my Word on it.
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.
A couple of weeks ago, the Big Men were speculating on potential buyers for OpenText. I opined that maybe HP would be looking to enter the market to compete with EMC. It was a brilliant piece of insight for all the wrong reasons. Right buyer, wrong target.
Turns out that HP has decided to buy their way into the market, but only with a single product, Tower Software. Like EMC, HP is looking to broaden their Information Management offering by adding Records Management and eDiscovery. If that is all they were looking to add, then buy Tower was a great move. I have always heard good things about their software for those purposes, though I always had doubts as to their complete ECM capability.
Word of Pie 