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.

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.

Oracle-Bea, Portals,Portals everywhere !!

Is the portal market going to see another acquisition by Oracle? Though Bea has denied the deal of $6.66 bn as “too low”, but as we know Oracle has a history of acquiring BIG companies and maintaining multiple products of same line. BEA and Oracle own two Portal products each (Aqualogic and Weblogic) and (Oracle Portal and webcenter), respectively.

If in case, the acquisition happens then in my view it will be relatively hard for Oracle to maintain and sell these portal products as Oracle is concentrating and investing huge in its webcenter suite and has a roadmap of releasing the next version i.e. Webcenter 11g very soon.With so many like products and no clear
feature demarcations of which product will cater to which type of customer its going to be a big challange for the sales team.

Looking from another perspective, Oracle surely will have business benefits with this acquisition as -
1) Oracle will eliminate a very big competitor.
2) Oracle portal is quite old and is in the edge of retirement and Oracle Webcenter is new in the portal market and is more developer centric. Oracle will revive with having aqualogic and weblogic in its main portal product stream
3) With Aqualogic and Weblogic from BEA, Oracle surely will have more and better products to sell.
4) As BEA Weblogic application server leads the middleware market and Oracle standalone application server lags far behind. Selling Bea appserver is going to add huge $$$ in Oracle’s account.
5) Oracle will also get boost to its SOA strategies, as both the companies have invested heavily on the SOA paradigm.

Apart from the above stated products, Oracle will rethink in supporting the other Bea products and suites as they may lag behind when compared to Oracle’s home grown products for example, BPEL solution and Presence Solution

Lets wait another leap that Oracle going to make and keep eye in the next quarter results.

RedHat to acquire JBoss

The JBoss war has finally take a not so expected turn when Red Hat announced to acquire JBoss. Red Hat and JBoss have been recognized as open source leaders in their respective domains. The large and vibrant communities around Linux and JBoss prove that the open source development model creates innovative, quality software, while providing a flexible and low cost model for customers. This acquisition is expected to accelerate enterprise adoption of open source infrastructure, and broaden the entire market opportunity for existing and new Red Hat and JBoss partners who are building
value-added enterprise solutions.

RedHat have already tried its hands on middle ware front (Jonas as application server),and much of the R&D was on portal and CMS with no success. With this acquisition RedHat will get a powerful web stack and the customer will get a product with more performance ,security and the branded and well respected support with a low –price.

As far as my speculation, I don’t think that RedHat will offer any support for Windows Version, rather it may stop JBoss’s windows version, because that will effect its own Linux distribution.

Anyways “All well that ends Well” --- OpenSource to OpenSource” :)

Enterprising the open source

The cloud thickens on the strategy of the open source vendors….“The enterprise fraternity” are keen on acquiring smaller rival companies with open sourced software and after acquisition, only unveil a part of the software that remained open sourced before, Then doesn’t the whole idea of open source get flouted? Another heating debate could be on the possible reasons for acquiring such firms that are open sourced. Typically, an open sourced company is learnt to be earning from the product’s maintenance, installation and support unlike, their product counterparts that derive from the licensed product copies as well. So, there seems to be a basic clash on the ideals of the two entities. Is this strategy a result of the fear in the biggies that the smaller ones could eventually overtake them as they gather more supporters for open sourced version.

A historical data on some such developments on this front that testify this:-

Oracle acquired Innobase an open source software company and a developer of transactional database technology, the software was distributed under the GNU GPL open-source license and was bundled with MySQL. Currently, it is reportedly in talks to acquire three open-source companies to expand its customer base .In return, it announced a free, low-end version of its database software thus, letting the world know about their commitment to opensource. Oracle also plans to buy Jboss Inc ,another opensource company and a leader in the application server market .

IBM last year bought Gluecode Software,which offers an application server based on apache Geronimo project. The give and take business is not new as IBM bundles with WebSphere, and it contributed an embedded database called Derby to Apache.
Bea Systems open sourced a version of its relational database mapping tool “Kodo” under an Apache license, while continues to offer BEA Kodo under a closed source license.
Sun Microsystems looked at open source community to revive itself , open sourced Solaris and JES.

At some point this may be a good deal for the customer as now they have a quality, open, and a low-priced(a bit more) product which is now backed ie supported by a branded company. So I think the product which was originally “true open source software” turns to have only source open.

My concern is that people who contribute to the open source software (apart from the employees of the open source company) is a vast community of developers, architects, designers who believe in sharing knowledge much to the relief of the smaller firms or developers that cannot afford licensed copies. However, with such moves industry wide, would this give enough leverage & credit to the people who contribute to this wealth of information or who use this information. Wouldn’t then the trend to contribute and share knowledge, then discouraged if this trend of acquiring smaller open sourced cos by the big giants continue?