The CMS Watch List
Twenty to Watch in 2005
by Tony Byrne
15-Feb-2005 --
Welcome to our 3rd annual "PeopleWatch" list, where CMS Watch identifies 20 people who could make a difference on the CMS landscape in 2005 (see 2004, and 2003.). Some write columns or blogs. Others hold key positions in CMS vendors or projects for whom 2005 will represent a critical year in their impact on the industry as a whole. (Don't read too much into the numbering, the list is alpha sorted, by last name.)
We'll be watching, and maybe so should you...
- Stephen Ashley, Senior Vice President, Robert W. Baird
Since the content management software market is comparatively small and fractured, rare is the financial research analyst who understands it some detail. R.W. Baird's Stephen Ashley is one of those analysts. What does he think of the current crop of publicly-traded content management vendors? You'll have to ask him…
- Janus Boye, Founder, Boye IT
Formerly a FatWire wunderkind in Germany, Boye now runs his own IT consultancy and also recently founded the Danish Content Management Forum. A frequent contributor to CMS Watch last year, look for more of Boye in these pages this year…
- Rich Buchheim, Senior Director, Enterprise Content Management Strategy,
Oracle
Whither Oracle and content management? Given Oracle's global footprint it's an important question for the ECM marketplace. Luckily for Oracle's competitors, the company has not always had a very clear answer, even after it's ambitious but still-to-be-released ECM capabilities around 10g. A longtime industry veteran, Buchheim's challenge this year will be to put the various CM pieces at Oracle into a coherent whole...
- Bob Doyle, Editor, CMS Review
Several years ago, the person who invented the award-winning "Merlin" game (among other innovations) turned his entrepreneurial attention to the web content management space and founded CMS Review to chart and accelerate the growth of the CMS community. Along the way, Doyle helped found CM Professionals and serves as its founding Executive Director...
- Paul Everitt, Founder and Product Leader, Zope Europe
Paul Everitt left the familiar world of the Zope Corporation in the USA to found and head up the "Zope Europe Association" (ZEA), a federation of professional services firms in Europe that look to advance Zope as a content management platform. Like Kasper Skrhj (below), Everitt's challenge will be sustain contributions -- financial and otherwise -- from member firms...
- Dave Girouard, Enterprise General Manager, Google
Google is at a magic moment in time. Its enterprise search appliance (in the group that Girouard oversees) -- while a bit underpowered -- appears to be gaining market traction and improves with each new release. Meanwhile, Google is quietly making its presence felt in the blogging and browser marketplaces. Could hosted content management be far behind? From the technology buyer's perspective, a well-funded vendor with a strong engineering bent and a gift for making highly usable interfaces is a welcome addition to any marketplace...
- Peter Hinssen, Principal, Amplexor, and Chairman, Porthus
Peter Hinssen is Founder and Chairman of Porthus, a European application service provider. Formerly an Entrepreneur in Residence with McKinsey & Company, Hinssen is now an investor and principal in the Belgium-based ECM business consultancy, Amplexor. After working with a variety of major multinationals, Hinssen brings a particularly lucid perspective on the challenges of managing information at an enterprise level...
- Detlef Kamps, President, RedDot Solutions
Is there a case for "ECM" in the mid-market? Longtime Web CMS vendor RedDot is betting that the answer is "yes." Bolstered by strong marketshare in Germany and a decent footprint in North America, Red Dot could afford to expand its offerings. But Kamps is hedging his bets by licensing the new DM and collaboration technology from another German firm...
- Victor Lombardi, Principal, Management Innovation Group
A former information architect for various Fortune 500 companies Lombardi is now an independent consultant, working to bridge the worlds of information architecture and product design. In the meantime, he is heading AIfIA this year and also organizing a workshop on leadership at the 2005 IA Summit...
- The Managing Editor, Major Enterprise Near You
Behind quality large-scale web publishing operations frequently lies by a single individual who knows the technology, the content, and the design. She may not be in charge of all the contributors and does not participate in all workflows, but she sets standards, bridges disciplines, and makes sure the enterprise's interests are protected. She may be called "Content Manager," "Web Co-ordinator," or "New Media Director," but really, she's a kind of virtual Managing Editor. Look for her in your enteprise, find out what she does, then give her the tools and authority to do it better...
- Peter Morville, Founder and President, Semantic Studios
In a field of information architecture that already boasts many leading lights, Peter Morville shines especially bright. The co-author (with Lou Rosenfeld) of O'Reilly's Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Morville also co-founded the information architecture association, AIfIA. His latest passion, "findability," sounds simple, but is actually excruciatingly hard. One key, says Morville, is baking findability in: designing information systems from the outset so that they help people find what they need...
- David Nuescheler. CTO, Day Software
Nuescheler is an energetic polymath who co-founded Web CMS vendor Day Software -- itself an energetic, if somewhat quirky, company. Nuescheler may be best known for his instigation and passionate advocacy for the JSR-170 standard, which seeks to specify standard APIs for accessing content repositories in Java. The spec, which is in final draft state, should help promote more services-oriented content architectures by separating traditional repository services from particular applications and middleware implementations. This is precisely why some vendors with proprietary architectures here may not happily adopt the standard, although all the big ECM players have at least nominally joined the effort and IBM has voiced official support. If JSR-170 becomes widely adopted, we may have Neuscheler to thank for it...
- Leif Pedersen, Vice President of Worldwide Marketing and Market Strategy,
Vignette.
Like other ECM vendors, Vignette has a challenge to craft and explain some sort of unified whole from the disparate parts it obtained via acquisitions. The company's current emphasis on productivity -- as the "e:fficiency experts" -- rings true for many content management use cases (especially around imaging and business process management), but less for publishing scenarios, where effectiveness and revenue generation are higher priorities. Pedersen is an affable speaker and intelligent observer. He will need all of those powers in 2005...
- Theresa Regli, Principal Consultant, Molecular, Inc.
Regli is presently the Principal Consultant of the Content Management Practice of Molecular, Inc., a Boston-based technology consulting firm. She has implemented numerous different content management systems, and has quite a bit to say about the various technologies, but her real forte is information design and taxonomy development. Look for some of her expertise in these pages later this year...
- Nathan Rawlins, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Serena Software
Rawlins oversees Serena's "Collage" web content management product. Collage has always been a kind of odd-ball product within the SCM companies that marketed it -- most recently Serena. After having to explain web content change management to its traditional clientele of software development managers, Serena (in the form of Rawlins) finally wrote a nifty little handbook, Web Content Management for Dummies. Smart move...
- Howard Shao, EVP, Chief Technology Officer, Founder, Documentum Division
of EMC
Well, if you think Shao's title is a mouthful, check out his job: stitching together dozens of products (many with their own repositories and workflow frameworks) into some sort of coherent whole, or at least interoperable pieces. EMC/Documentum has put a lot of energy into broadening the company's reach; now Shao et. al. need to make everything hang together -- and separately. That's a tough job for 2005...
- Kasper Skårhøj, Chairman, TYPO3 Association
Oftentimes, serious open-source projects find a need to coalesce around some sort of institutional body (see Paul Everitt, above). We think it's a measure of project maturity, albeit a difficult (and inevetiably contentious) one. The disparate but fast-growing TYPO3 community -- led by longtime contributor Kasper Skårhøj and others -- formed the TYPO3 Association last November. The new structure will essentially "speak" for the project, but member dues will also fund further development of the core product. For that to work, a critical mass of TYPO3 consultants will need to join...
- David Sify, Founder and CEO of Technorati
Technorati has made the Web in general and blogosphere in particular much more conversational. And technorati tags will arguably make them more semantic as well. But in the meantime, let's just celebrate the birth of some fine new content technology...
- Joel Spolsky, Founder, Fog Creek Software
A former Microsoft developer, Spolsky founded and leads Fog Creek Software. Fog Creek developed and sells a desktop-based CMS for individual or small-group publishing, called "CityDesk." The company is probably better known for its "FogBugz" bug-tracking cum project- and case-management tool, and Spolsky himself is perhaps best known for his closely-followed "Joel on Software" blog, which serves essentially as an ongoing primer on practical software development...
- Phil Windley, Associate Professor of Computer Science, Brigham Young
University
Phil Windley is the ex-CIO for the Utah State Government (USA) and previously directed product development at Excite@Home. You should check out his blog, though, because Windley covers two topics near and dear to the hearts of enterprise content management enthusiasts: service-oriented architectures (which everyone talks about but few companies do at much depth) and identity management (which few people talk about, but bedevils all enterprise applications)...