CMS Experts

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) tried to beef up its Cisco Quad enterprise collaboration product this week by purchasing Versly, a small software vendor still in private beta. The Versly product, however, provides a way for users to collaborate at the document level inside Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Office, which was probably the appeal for Cisco.

Certainly Murali Sitaram, vice president and general manager of the Collaboration Software Group at Cisco saw it this way. “The integration with Versly will drive productivity improvements for organizations and their knowledge workers, many of whom are among the 600 million Microsoft Office users,” Sitaram said.

But given how early Versly is in product development, consultant Dan Keldsen from Information Architected sees this as more of a talent grab than a technology buy in the pure sense.

“As others are suggesting, the acquisition seems to be mostly a talent grab, since it is unlikely that Versly has much client traction, with the private beta only months old. In general, this rounds out the portfolio of collaboration tools for Cisco to compete with Jive, Salesforce, Microsoft, Adobe, VMWare, and to a smaller extent, Google,” he said.

In a statement, Ned Hooper, senior vice president and chief strategy officer at Cisco suggested this might indeed be the case. “With this acquisition we are gaining strong talent and innovative technology that builds on Cisco’s successful collaboration platform,” Hooper said.

Keldsen believes that Cisco may be doing this to speed Quad to market. “Cisco Quad and the related offerings need to ship pretty quick–the pre-announcement of last year is getting a bit long in the tooth at this point. This economy prizes speed over FUD, we’ll see if the Versly team adds some gas to the tank here,” Keldsen said. 

Whatever the reason, Cisco appears to be making a big push in enterprise collaboration and social software, and this purchase is meant to boost that to some degree.

For more information:
- see the Cisco press release

Related Articles:
Cisco aims to ease the distribution of video content 
EMC and Cisco join forces in collaboration-ECM partnership 
Cisco Quad could give SharePoint a run for its money

WASHINGTON, DC, Aug 30, 2011 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) –
Metalogix Software, the leading provider in content lifecycle
management (CLM) solutions for Microsoft(R) SharePoint(R),
Exchange(R), and legacy environments, today announced that it solves
key challenges for companies that are making big bets with SharePoint
as a top business critical application, as outlined in the new
Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) whitepaper, “Managing SharePoint as a
Business-critical Application.” The new research paper, authored by
ESG’s Brian Babineau and Bill Lundell, outlines how SharePoint
management should be an investment priority because today’s
considerations with SharePoint infrastructure management, security
and data migrations are only going to gain importance as usage
increases and the profile of users evolves.

According to the ESG study, which surveyed 3,129 IT professionals, 64
percent of North American and Western European organizations are
currently using SharePoint, while an additional 12 percent intend to
within the next 24 months. This overwhelmingly confirms that
SharePoint is now considered to be a top business application — 80
percent ranked it among their top 10 business applications — a
significant update since the March 2009 survey. This major shift in
enterprise content management direction is driven by the increasing
need for team and document collaboration as well as document
versioning and management with the SharePoint 2010 SP1 version.
However, the survey shows this rapid adoption of SharePoint and its
resulting business reliance comes with some significant management
gaps that ISVs are poised to fill.

“SharePoint optimization requires several different tracks, including
increased asset utilization, data mobility and movement and storage
management, all while maintaining satisfactory application
availability and response times,” said Babineau and Lundell in the
ESG paper. “Organizations must consider this process holistically in
order to avoid relying on one-off resolutions that don’t scale and
end up costing more money in the long run.”

Metalogix solutions for SharePoint delivers this holistic approach to
SharePoint management, providing users with the freedom to
consolidate, manage and optimize their enterprise content the way
their applications behave. Metalogix eliminates the out-of-the-box
operational constraints and enables organizations of all sizes to
optimize the SharePoint content infrastructure in order to
consolidate, scale and cost-effectively manage, migrate, store,
archive and protect enterprise content whether on-premise or in the
cloud. The following are the three key SharePoint management
challenges outlined by the ESG paper and how Metalogix solutions help
to resolve them:

        --  Storage and Infrastructure: In the area of SharePoint infrastructure,
            ESG reports that the most common issue IT departments report is
            performance and scalability, from many different perspectives. This is
            largely due to high data growth, which can cause difficulty in
            provisioning storage capacity, wide area network performance problems,
            poor application response times, lengthy content search times and slow
            backup and recovery processes.

            Metalogix StoragePoint's BLOB externalization and archiving solution
            helps eliminate this critical SharePoint infrastructure challenge by
            enabling organizations to keep their unstructured binary large objects
            (BLOBs) out of SharePoint's content database and offloading them onto
            virtually any tier of NAS, SAN or Cloud storage platforms. Here, the
            BLOBs can be stored on less-expensive systems and SQL clusters can be
            right sized for optimal performance by consolidating and vastly
            reducing unnecessary content databases and thereby improve search,
            back up and archive performance times by as much as 95 percent.

        --  Content Migrations: The ESG report states that upon deploying a new
            SharePoint farm or site, organizations have to make a critical
            decision regarding their legacy content and files -- migrate it or
            portal the metadata content within SharePoint. Another challenge is
            often moving data between SharePoint -- either to a newer version or
            when moving existing on-premises SharePoint deployments to other
            servers, consolidating sites or moving some or all to the cloud.

        --  Security Implications: When it comes to application security
            management challenges experienced since deploying SharePoint, over
            half of the ESG study respondents said that managing the permissions
            of who has access to content was a key concern. Provisioning sites in
            accordance with internal security policies was also a significant
            concern.

            Metalogix Migration Manager helps to resolve this challenge through
            its built-in ongoing farm management capabilities by preserving all
            views, version chains, metadata and user-edit information when
            migrating between SharePoint sites. It can also map and migrate site
            permissions so that internal security policies can be easily enforced.

Regardless of an organization’s desired content lifecycle strategy,
Metalogix offers a migration solution to help. Metalogix migration
solutions migrate content into SharePoint from numerous sources or
legacy systems. Adoption of Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online
Suite (BPOS) and Office 365 is also simplified with easy-to-use, cost
effective and powerful migration solutions and Metalogix is the only
SharePoint migration product that has passed both the security and
performance criteria set by Microsoft to be approved for installation
on Office 365 dedicated servers.

“Clearly, SharePoint is rapidly coming of age now, and is becoming
one of the most critical content collaboration delivery platforms
that is driving this new era of mobile and social-based business
applications, and with it comes with some new management
responsibilities,” said CEO Steven Murphy. “At Metalogix, our team
has been solving SharePoint migration and management challenges for
more than 10 years. We take a standards-based approach to delivering
comprehensive content lifecycle management solutions that enable
organizations to increase the useability and performance of their
content applications while reducing the administrative, storage
costs, and operational risks associated with your growing Microsoft
content.”

To download a copy of the ESG whitepaper, “Managing SharePoint as a
Business-critical Application,” please visit:

http://www.metalogix.com/Freedom/Managing-SharePoint-ESG-White-Paper.aspx

Tweet this: @Metalogix Optimizes #SharePoint Deployments and Resolves
Key management Challenges as Outlined in New Enterprise Strategy
Group Whitepaper @ESG

Follow Metalogix at

http://www.twitter.com/metalogix

About Metalogix
Metalogix is the leading provider of content
lifecycle management solutions for Microsoft SharePoint, Exchange,
and legacy enterprise content environments. We enable organizations
to scale and cost-effectively manage, migrate, store, archive and
protect enterprise content whether on-premise or in the cloud. The
company is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, privately held, and
backed by Insight Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners.

Metalogix, and the Metalogix logo are trademarks of Metalogix
Software. All other product and company names herein may be
trademarks of their respective owners.

        Media Contact:
        Sabrina Sanchez
        Ventana Public Relations for Metalogix
        (540) 253-5060
        Email Contact

SOURCE: Metalogix

http://www2.marketwire.com/mw/emailprcntct?id=91FF3CBFC14468C0

Copyright 2011 Marketwire, Inc., All rights reserved.

CONCORD, Calif., Aug. 30, 2011 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ –
Formtek, Inc., a leading provider of document and content management solutions to industrial clients for over two decades, announced today that it had signed a Partnership Agreement with Ephesoft, Inc., developer of the only Open Source Document Capture Solution with enterprise support in the world.

With this partnership, Formtek® adds the Ephesoft(TM) Enterprise Edition to its existing product portfolio, which includes Formtek | Orion(TM), Alfresco® Enterprise, and the Formtek Engineering Data Management (EDM) Solution for Alfresco.

Formtek chose to partner with Ephesoft because Ephesoft Enterprise Edition provides a feature set equivalent to that of the current industry leaders, using the latest tool sets, in a 100% web-based Open Source solution, and at a much lower total cost of ownership. Ephesoft advanced features include high performance automatic classification and separation technology based on content and layout, learning of documents, and meta-data extraction technologies using bar-code, regular expression, and phrases.

Formtek is also an Alfresco Gold SI Partner, and Ephesoft seamlessly interfaces to Alfresco through CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services). This allows Formtek to offer a single integrated solution that includes both advanced scan/capture, based on Ephesoft, and enterprise content management, based on Alfresco.

With the addition of the Formtek Engineering Data Management (EDM) solution for Alfresco, including the Formtek EDM Connector for AutoCAD®, Formtek is positioned to provide the market with the only pre-packaged, installation-ready, minimal services solution that combines enterprise scan/capture, content management, records management, and engineering data management, on an Open Source content platform, and without expensive license fees.

“We welcome Formtek as an Ephesoft Platinum Partner,” said David Talarico, Ephesoft Senior Vice President Sales Marketing – Americas. “Formtek brings over twenty years of experience in scan/capture, imaging, and document management to our Partner Program, as well as a unique domain expertise in engineering and other industrial markets.”

“Formtek has a long and very successful history of providing mission-critical content management solutions to some of the most demanding organizations in the world,” said Dennis M. Scanlon, Formtek’s President and COO. “With the addition of Ephesoft to our product portfolio, we now offer our clients a state-of the-art, Open Source alternative for advanced document and data capture to complement our existing document management, records management, and engineering data management solutions.”

Additional information on Formtek’s products, including access to datasheets, can be found at

http://www.formtek.com/products/products.shtml

About Formtek

For over two decades, Formtek has been providing mission-critical Enterprise Document and Content Management solutions and services to some of the most demanding industrial operations in the world. Our capabilities and experience have helped both small organizations as well as large global enterprises manage their most important information assets. Formtek solutions address real, day-to-day engineering data management, document management, content management, records management, and secure collaboration requirements for worldwide customers in manufacturing, aerospace, defense, telecommunication, utility, and government. To learn more about Formtek, visit
http://www.formtek.com/ .

About Ephesoft

Ephesoft, Inc., based in Irvine, CA, has developed an intelligent document capture system designed to improve the automation of “mailroom” processes through classifying, sorting and separating incoming documents, and extracting pertinent information from these business documents for distribution and processing. Our mission is to have this technology available to enterprises of all sizes and enable them to process business documents efficiently and effectively in an integrated fashion. To learn more about Ephesoft, visit
http://www.ephesoft.com/ .

Formtek is a registered trademark, and Formtek | Orion is a trademark, of Formtek, Inc.

Ephesoft is a trademark of Ephesoft, Inc. in the United States, the European Union and other countries.

Alfresco is a registered trademark of Alfresco Software, Inc. in the USA and other countries.

AutoCAD is a registered trademark or trademark of Autodesk, Inc., in the USA and other countries.

Media Contact:

Mr. Victor MalespinaFormtek, Inc.904-829-9251 (USA)vmalespina@formtek.com

This press release was issued through eReleases(R). For more information, visit eReleases Press Release Distribution at
http://www.ereleases.com .

SOURCE Formtek, Inc.

Copyright (C) 2011 PR Newswire. All rights reserved

Guest post by Tony White

The web content management (WCM) market began circa 1995, as it emerged as a separate space from document management (DM). The early significant players in the market were companies such as Vignette, Interwoven, ATG, BroadVision, Stellent, Net Perceptions, Future Tense, RedDot, Percussion, Ektron, Mediasurface, PaperThin, Day Software and others. A few of the early players still exist. Some are defunct. Many were acquired.

However, in the time since the mid-1990s, WCM has remained a robust stand-alone technology and independent market space, even with some overlap with markets such as digital asset management, records management, portals, enterprise information management, collaboration and search. Relative to the rest of the technology market, WCM has been a particularly strong performer over the last 15 years. In approximately 2005, when the market realized that the overblown scope of ECM made it an impossible strategy to implement, buyers returned to the more realistic, tactical objectives of WCM. 

By 2005-2007, however, WCM products had reached full maturity, and they began to experience the effects of commoditization. In about 2007, we began to see a bifurcation in the WCM market. There was downward pricing pressure on pure-play WCM vendors, and products which had been selling relatively well at the $70k-80k price range began to be so discounted heavily so that they were actually selling in the $40-50k price range.

Simultaneously, former pure-play WCM vendors who were able to supplement their product lines with compelling value-added layers – often focused around enhanced online marketing capabilities–were able to increase their prices. The average sales prices for these products moved up from the $70-80k mid-market to the $100-125k range.

Current pricing trends in the WCM market

Since the beginning of this simultaneous downward and upward pricing momentum, WCM had continued to evolve into late maturity as a technology. While WCM has been a mature product type since 2007, some vendors (and even new market entrants) continue to occasionally add features and functions to their core CMS feature-functionality lists. But this continued evolution is occurring at a much slower pace, and the effects of commoditization have only strengthened in the period from 2008 to 2011.

This leads us to an interesting point in the market. WCM as a pure-play, stand-alone application, is reaching the end of its lifespan. Right now, we have:

• Pure-play WCM vendors competing at the $40k price point. Without significant additions to their product lines, prices will continue to fall over the next few years.
• Former pure-play vendors who have been able to enhance their product lines with marketing-centric modules. These vendors now tend to compete in the $50-150k price range. These vendors will remain a competitive force in content-technology markets for the next few years, given continued enhancement to their marketing-centric modules.

Enterprise, cross-platform, experience management vendors have also emerged. Their products include WCM, but their primary value rests in holistic marketing capabilities, such as managing customer and partner interactions across multiple enterprise applications, devices, channels, sites, etc. These vendors are competing in the $250k+ range. The few vendors who are currently able to compete in the enterprise marketing management (EMM) or customer experience management (CEM) markets commonly have license sales of $400-500k.

Product development opportunities and market Leaders

Our advice to technology vendors in these areas looking to evolve their product lines or to launch new ones is to exploit the readiness in the market for applications that excel at:

• Mobile marketing;
• Multi-site, multi-channel, multi-device capabilities based on an understanding of customer behaviors and needs across channels;
• Comprehensive enterprise brand- and marketing-management; and
• Customer experience management.

It is in these areas where the opportunity to make the most compelling value proposition exists. Existing CMS vendors who don’t focus on these or closely-related areas will only get forced further down-market over the next 2-3 years. Those who successfully address pent-up and growing demand for these capabilities–all related to cross-channel marketing and the ability to manage customer interactions–stand to grow quickly and to secure meaningful market traction in these nascent spaces.

As the market currently stands, we believe that Adobe, Open Text and SDL are in the best positions to make a compelling value proposition to prospective clients. Their product lines already contain many of the components required for EMM or CEM, though only Adobe has assembled the components into a unified, cohesive CEM product offering (very recently). Open Text’s and SDL’s offerings still require considerable assembly and customization to function effectively as CEM or EMM solutions.

Aside from these three vendors, there are only two or three others whose products could be assembled and customized in this way–possibly Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL), HP (NYSE: HPQ) and IBM (NYSE: IBM)–but doing so would require a Herculean, risky effort.

Emerging markets and conclusions

As for prospective entrants to this emerging market, we see the pure-play WCM vendors who are currently adding marketing-oriented, multi-site, cross-channel, analytics-based feature-functionality as the ones with the best chance of success. All of the core feature-functionality in WCM applications can be leveraged in these new product types. Entrants from non-WCM backgrounds would have significant work to do in filling in the missing WCM functionality. That said, WCM vendors will still need to supplement their products considerably.

So the question arises, “Why are existing pure-play WCM vendors in a better position to capture this market than, for example, CRM lead management vendors?” The answer is that WCM feature-functionality is a major component of EMM and CEM solutions, and it is a component that requires a lot of development time. The leading CRM lead management vendors such as Aprimo, Eloqua and Marketo would need 25+ man years of development time to create the feature-functionality of the current WCM offerings on the market. Comparatively, the existing pure-play WCM vendors would need only 4-5 man years to develop the supplemental features required for respectable EMM.

The second reason is that vendors such as Aprimo, Eloqua and Marketo have relatively immature products. That is, their solutions don’t add all that much to stand-alone CRM products such as Salesforce.com (and the missing pieces can be added by Salesforce’s AppExchange partners). Relative to existing WCM products, they really have no advantage in being able to supply multi-channel, multi-application EMM solutions.

In sum, any technology vendor with a complete set of core WCM functionality and 5 or more years of discretionary developer time that can be devoted to multi-channel online marketing requirements stands a good chance of assuming a competitive role in EMM.

Tony White is Founder of Ars Logica, a vendor-neutral analyst firm that helps companies evaluate their web content management requirements and select suitable WCM software. Ars Logica also assists software vendors in analyzing the market and planning their product roadmaps. Prior to founding Ars Logica, Tony ran the WCM Practice at the Gilbane Group; he was an analyst at the Yankee Group and Giga Information Group; and he served in senior marketing roles at Interwoven and BroadVision.

Related Articles: 
Analytics: The latest hot ticket for WCM vendors  
Forrester report: Customer experience management defines WCM today  
Open source, content management and the cloud 
Open source WCM needs more than geek appeal to succeed in the enterprise 

Written By Tom Wentworth

Tom Wentworth: Keep it all in context.

Web content management is at the most significant inflection point in its 15-year history. It’s now all about the context.

By 2013, Gartner contends, 40% of large companies will have context-aware computing projects on the way. Context is driving content and intelligent customer interactions, delivering Web experiences that will engage site visitors and deliver better business results.

For example, in the case of the mobile Web browsing, the context is that visitors are accessing the Web from a mobile device, usually with a specific task in mind. These visitors don’t need – in most cases don’t want – the same experience presented from a desktop browser or on their iPad.  Not only must Websites be mobile-friendly (meaning they render correctly on a wide range of mobile devices), but the experience also must fit the purpose of the device.

Or consider the difference between a visitor looking at the Hewlett-Packard home page and their viewing an HP product page on Amazon.com. The context is different, and likely so is the visitor’s intention. A visitor may be on the HP site to research products – or to find a job. Amazon visitors are almost certainly shopping.

Context defines a visitor’s Web experience. If a visitor has come to a site through a search, he doesn’t want to click through multiple, slow-loading, hard-to-read pages to find a single piece of information.  If visitors are on your site to make a purchase, it is imperative they experience the same level of checkout/shopping cart convenience that they would in the brick-and-mortar world. If a prospect has arrived on a landing page via an e-mail marketing campaign, Sales and Marketing definitely wants that page to display correctly on any device the prospect is using.

“Delighting customers doesn’t build loyalty,” note the authors of a recent Harvard Business Review article. “Reducing their effort — the work they must do to get their problem solved — does.”  Showing an understanding for the customer and respecting the manner they want to interact breeds loyalty.

Context, the Future of Web Content Management

Content management systems have long played an important role in helping companies align their business strategies to the Web. Today, however, the core capabilities of content management have evolved to help global enterprises deliver better business results. Web content management systems are being used to create sites localized for multiple languages with content tailored to meet the unique cultural needs of each country while also enabling these same organizations to publish thousands of daily updates without relying on IT intervention and manual processes. Enterprises are also managing hundreds and sometimes thousands of sites on a single platform, providing significant operational efficiency improvements.

It’s often said that “content is king.” The ability to create high-quality content that attracts, engages, retains and converts visitors is still an important objective for every website. Content is indeed still the heart and soul of every site. But if content is king, context is its queen; and together they will rule the kingdom of audience engagement and of the corporate Web site experience.

Why Context Matters

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