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Fatwire : Content Integration Vs Content Migration

Few days back Fatwire Software announced the launch of the Fatwire Rescue Program for Vignette and Interwoven WCM customers.
The program will enable customers of Interwoven and Vignette to upgrade to FatWire’s WCM solutions at no license cost. However, this holds good only if they engage Fatwire’s supported or so-called ‘proven' migration tools and services.

If you remember Fatwire already has a Content Integration Platform(CIP), which is a “web-services-based” content sharing tool. In this Fatwire CMS user can access content stored across the enterprise without leaving the Fatwire CMS interface (CS-Direct). CIP offers connectors to access content from Documentum, SharePoint, and Windows and Unix file systems.

So why this rescue package from Fatwire when they already have a solution in place? Here are my insights on the demarcation between the two offerings and the differences in the approach -

1. In Content Integration Platform, the source WCM/ECM sever must be up and running in order to serve the content. The only difference will be accessing the content using Fatwire console (dash/advance/insite interfaces).
[Access + Connector = Integration]

2. Fatwire rescue program is based on the expertise and past experiences of Content Migration service providers (Vamosa and Kapow). Server Instances of Teamsite or Vignette will not be required after full content migration.
[Entire data movement (Assets/Content/Templates/Workflows/Roles/Security/Users/Publishing Events) = Content Migration ]

Since there is no Fatwire connector for Vignette and Teamsite as of now, I believe this is another way of attracting the customers to move completely into Fatwire at lower cost (No license cost + No Running Instances of Teamsite or Vignette required).

Content Migration is a very risky, customers are advised that there is no fully automatic or a neat way of doing it. Manual intervention and tweaking of trusted scripts, XMLs and non-java based templates is very much required in order to do the migration. Evaluate and request for case studies or a proof of concept from the product vendor before you make a decision.

I am glad that in the midst of acquisitions in the WCM space, Fatwire is the one of the niche player who is moving a step forward by collaborating with content migration service providers like Vamosa and Kapow. I hope this move will hold well for Fatwire in WCM market space.


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How IBM is #1 in web portal software?

IT analyst firm Gartner, Inc., has ranked IBM as the worldwide market share leader in the Portal Products and User Interaction Tools enterprise software segment. Here is my take -

There is no question on the capabilities and functionalities of IBM WebSphere Portal V 6.1, which is well designed to collaborate the information from users, communities, corporate enterprises, and the Web. I will not discuss the cool and robust features of IBM but will list down the external factors that might have influenced the ranking-

1. Technology: Still the market share of .net is much less than java. IBM being a java based portal and is adopted by organizations who either already have java based software infrastructure or their decisive people are pro-java. I agree with Janus-

“Microsoft is known to give away SharePoint like candy, so SharePoint might indeed have less revenue. A substantial portion of SharePoint licenses remain unused.”

Yes, the Adoption of SharePoint (MOSS) is much higher than any portal in the market (07-08), and who does the marketing better than MS, but the point has still not reached where SharePoint can be ranked as #1.

2. Choice: Do customers have choice?..ummm –lets find out-
a) Opensource/Liferay: Even though Liferay is named as the Visionary portal product in Gartner’s magic quadrant, the financial industry has no confidence in this open source portal. On the other hand, IBM software is being used by the top 10 global banks.

b) Sun JES Portal: before the acquisition: The setting sun finally decided to stop the further release if its enterprise portal product (last version 7.2) and decided to contribute towards Websynergy and Webspace (Liferay-Sun combo Prj).

c) Oracle/Weblogic/Webcenter: Oracle invested huge $$$ in their Webcenter portal project but failed to market their so-called strategic portal product. Market still questions Oracle’s portal leadership. With five portal products under its belt, seems like that sale and marketing team is confused on which portal to highlight. I believe that aqualogic and weblogic are doing pretty well but not widely adopted as IBM WebSphere.

3) Leadership/Support/Cost: IBM tops the chart in terms of cost for its product, services and support. Even then, organizations opt for security, availability, collaboration and other web2.0 stuffs over the cost. It might be because IBM promises better ROI. I believe that 2011 will be a crucial year for IBM portal after the economic recession ends as most of the organizations have kept their decisions on hold for buying an expensive portal products.

There can be other reasons as well such as innovations, industry types, underlying architecture etc that might have valued customers more in buying this product.


More information about the report, features, and a case study is here-
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Web-Services-Web-20-and-SOA/Report-IBM-Number-One-in-Portal-Software-333186/

Another buyout. Who's next?

Another big acquisition from shopaholic giant. Finally Oracle bought Sun Microsystems.

Anyways..I'll leave other analysts to comment on hardware/storage/cloud computing and other areas. I am more interested to speculate the future of software products from Sun, example Sun Portal, Access Manager, Directory Server, and other open source projects. Here is my take in that -

Oracle already have five portals under its belt, out of with they have clearly indicated of taking Webcenter, Aqualogic and Weblogic forward.

With this buy out, Oracle might dispose Sun Portal, as this product from Sun is not doing great from last few years, even after Sun made heavy investments and revamped its portal suite during '06-07. Sun failed to generate more ROI and is now supporting only its top 100 customers.

I also fear that it might be a dead end for all open source initiatives from Sun, as Oracle has never shown any interest in the Open Source arena. This might badly affect project Websynergy and Webspace (Liferay-Sun combo Prj), NetBeans IDE, PostgresSQL etc.

I think, Liferay is becoming more vulnerable for acquisition by Oracle as Sun had an interest initially and still have few ongoing projects with Liferay.

On the greener side, Oracle will get benefited with Sun's IDM suite as Access Manager & Directory Server are widely used and now Oracle will have a reply to IBM's Tivoli suite.

Let’s wait and watch what next will come under Oracle's Business Process Management tag.

All in one: ECM vendors tale

Just read Russ’s blog. It’s a nice post that made me think if there is a single ECM vendor who really managed to make their customer happy with full-fledged ECM requirements.

I think its not only mergers and acquisitions that led the large or mid size, organization to have various sub-ECM products from different vendors but it’s the piling of softwares that grows during the period. The reasons may be a not-so future oriented solution from service providers or a highly effective sale person or a customer with no or very less IT experience.
There are numerous cases where customers have enough ECM softwares and do not know what to do. E.g. I have come across with customer with Sharepoint already in place and looking for Livelink as DMS or customers with Livelink as DMS and Fatwire as WCM in place and then looking for integration.

The problem is on the other side as well. A few genuine ECM vendors really cater to “custom” ers requirements. Therefore, before going for any ECM establishment, customers should check the integration points with their existing WCM/ DMS/RM/BI etc infrastructure and at the same time ask the Service providers to show some kind of proof of concepts (POC) to validate the integrations

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Interwoven to be Acquired by Autonomy

It was a mixed feeling for me when I read about Autonomy acquiring Interwoven. Yes, it is a surprise move as quoted by cmswatch, but some of the industry observers see it as a pending acquisition. Both Interwoven and Autonomy are niche and big market players in their area. Where Autonomy has a huge customer base for its Infrastructure and Intelligent Search solution, Interwoven on the other hand is a well-known ECM provider.

I think that it is more than good for Interwoven in many ways. Interwoven will have a strategic advantage of getting more customer base. A direct access to more than 20,000 Autonomy clients.
The Intelligent search from Autonomy can be embedded within Interwoven’s CMS, DMS, and Collaboration tools as Interwoven uses Vivisimo as a search engine for most of its product line, but now with Autonomy coming in, the search will eventually get impacted because Autonomy will push for Verity(Interwoven dropped Verity).

Though Autonomy has its own solutions for BPM, Search, and Record Management, it will be a challenge to manage the same offerings from Interwoven as well under the same hood.

With recession on the go, is this acquisition a fall in number of ECM player or a rise of one more CMS vendor to compete with Vignette or Fatwire WCM.

Let's get SharePoint Integrated

I’m currently seeing a new trend these days, it’s about portals and content management systems going above and beyond their technologies, language and platform to get integration with SharePoint. I have put my views on how Content Management Systems (Fatwire and Immediacy WCMs 6.1) are tending towards integrating with SharePoint. Now, it’s the open source portal which will come up with a similar kind of integration with SharePoint.

Integration with Sharepoint from a non-open source Java based portal is not new. IBM Websphere uses WSRP for communication with Sharepoint, while Sun Portal Server 7.2 integrates with Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 which provides a set of portlets to get deployed over Sun portal.

Latest in this area is about open source portal Liferay 5.2 which is about to get release soon is coming up with a feature to integrate with SharePoint. The Implementation of the SharePoint protocol will allow saving documents to Liferay as if it were a SharePoint server.
Except WCM, most of the customers feel that SharePoint has more “admin” friendly document collaboration features, document categorization, roles based document access and defining document types on the fly. Altogether it provides better DMS capabilities.

As neither Fatwire nor Liferay has their own full fledge document management system. Enterprises with existing SharePoint investments and who are looking for a portal or WCM solutions can look for these connectors/portlets.

Anyways, the thought around these integration approaches is to have “seamless access” to SharePoint’s repositories without leaving the actual Interface of either portal or web CMS.
As far as cost is concerned, I am not sure if the “SharePoint integration” will be a part of Liferay Community Release or if there is any additional commercial involved in its Enterprise Edition. On the other hand Fatwire-SharePoint Integrator costs tens of thousands $$$ for each Sharepoint deployment.

I will constantly look in this area of integration and will provide more information as soon as community version of Liferay is released.