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.

Content Integration Platform and Content Interoperability

Few days back Fatwire Introduced Microsoft SharePoint Connector as part of its Content integration platform. This new connector enables Fatwire CMS users to seamlessly access SharePoint content to use on the web. The Content Integration platform provides web-services-based, peer-to-peer content sharing capabilities that gives CMS users access to content stored across the enterprise without ever leaving the Content Server interface, and publish it to their public sites, intranets and extranets.

Enterprise content which are spread and stored in various content management systems and across platforms, the integration and seamless access of the content is still a challenge. Efforts are being made to overcome to manage content across multi-vendor, multi-repository content management environments. Recently talked CMIS is another such effort which defines a set of protocols, exposed via REST and Web Services definitions, for platform-independent interchange of content.

“…….Using CMIS-defined HTTP calls, you will be able to do standard CRUD operations (create, read, update, delete) against any compliant repository, regardless of the underlying repository architecture “

Though there are couple of valid questions which still need to be answered around the concurrent operations across content repositories, but it seems like that various CMS vendors or specification authorities are going to use “common web services” as their technology to move forward.We will definitely look forward for the success of content integration platforms or CMIS as it’s hard to find projects that were successful where vendors

took JCR170 as their selling point, nevermind you still find sales guys talking about JSR 283 in their product presentations :-)