Content management vendors are vying for market domination. AMR
Research analyst Jim Murphy assesses which applications are most
likely to prevail
Introduction
E-commerce has made efficiency in
developing and managing content as important as managing products.
In the Web world, product is content, and quality, accuracy, and
availability are crucial to success. Developing and delivering the
right content, to the right audience, at the right time - via the
most convenient vehicle - can be as troublesome and complicated as
managing a product supply chain. Most companies have yet to
standardise on content management platforms, and others are
re-evaluating their decisions. Many vendors are trying to grab a
piece of this new and needy market. In fact, many see it as a race
for domination a la SAP and Siebel.
Who's wielding the content killer application?
Vignette
makes a convincing case for itself as the content infrastructure
for huge, high-traffic, distributed enterprises. Though it has
recently re-branded itself as a "Content, Integration, and
Analysis" vendor, its newer systems stem from its core content
management technology. With a proven, unified technology, enhanced
by the recent addition of native support for J2EE and Microsoft
development environments, companies retain the flexibility to adapt
to changing market dynamics and technology.
BroadVision's content management component, One-to-One Publishing,
is sometimes lost amid a barrage of verbiage about commerce and
personalisation functions, but BroadVision acquired a pioneering
content management product in Interleaf a year ago. Many customers
are using separate content management applications with BroadVision
personalisation and commerce, but expect this to change: an
integrated approach to content and personalisation is ideal, but
BroadVision can't afford to let overlapping vendors take away
share.
Interwoven is growing faster than any content management vendor by
applying accessible products and friendly tools to complicated
business models and workflows. Interwoven's success has come
largely by filling out its content production and deployment
capability without straying far into the realm of personalisation
or analysis. TeamCatalog looks to tackle the thorny problem of
managing product content, and will be crucial in convincing B2B
prospects and customers that TeamSite can be the one tool to manage
all enterprise content.
Documentum has a solid, established customer base and a reputation
for managing critical content in highly regulated industries. The
mistaken, but seemingly inescapable association with document
management - as opposed to content management - has been both a
boon and a burden. Documentum has long recognised the value of XML
as a means of making content independent of the medium it sits on.
Still, as more companies look to ensure accuracy when syndicating
content to partners and other channels, the value of document
expertise should not be underestimated.
Of course, numerous other vendors, including FileNet, Open Market,
Openpages, IntraNet Solutions, Ncompass Labs, eBusiness
Technologies (eBT), and Percussion Software are vying for
contention. But there's limited room for successful vendors in the
enterprise market, as mid-market vendors may get squeezed between
the larger, more established entities and the increasing viability
of homegrown, or rather, assembled systems.
The invasion of the desktop
The most imposing challenge to enterprise content management
vendors comes from the desktop. Most of the aforesaid vendors boast
that content contributors can use products like Microsoft Word and
FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver to author pages and develop
Web applications. In fact, many build interfaces to look and behave
like Microsoft products. Meanwhile, Microsoft has all of the
components of a robust content management system, and the authoring
tools already sitting on the majority of desktops. IBM, with its
market-leading application server and its Notes products, could
present a similarly compelling alternative. Macromedia continues to
enhance Dreamweaver's approval, site management, and development
capability, and the merger with Allaire will appeal to a loyal base
of Web designers, producers, and developers.
This is not to say that companies like Macromedia, Microsoft, and
IBM don't have work to do, especially in terms of XML expertise.
But if XML is truly the lingua franca of the new economy and
business itself, sooner or later it's also going to be the language
of the desktop. Current enterprise content management vendors will
have to distinguish themselves by tackling the advanced functions
that Microsoft and IBM can't or won't do.
Recommendations
Keep in mind, content management is primarily a business process
problem, not a software problem. E-commerce has heightened the
importance of product content, so determine the best way your
company can ensure high quality, accuracy, consistency, and
efficiency.
Beware of vendors that promise complete out-of-the-box
functionality. For one thing, it's unrealistic; for another, you
don't want it. You've spent a great deal of time differentiating
yourself from your competitors, don't let the uniformity of a
popular software package make you look like everyone else. If you
buy packaged applications, make sure the core technology is
extensible and your own developers can adapt it to your current and
future needs.
Be demanding of service contracts. As with any bursting market, the
content management vendors tend to gear their efforts toward new
sales and technological developments to gather press and Wall
Street attention. Many users have been left with half the
functionality they thought they were getting.
Talk to real, live customers, not logos. While this should go
without saying, numerous companies are finding that, in their
scramble to get a Web site up and running, they chose software that
couldn't scale and couldn't adapt to their needs.