CMS Watch Mediasurface Feed

Mediasurface acquired by Alterian

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Sun, 18 May 2008 11:58:00 -0400

We recently pointed out that UK-based Web CMS vendor Mediasurface was being courted, and now the suitor has revealed themselves: Alterian.

Alterian is a marketing automation software vendor (also UK-based) that's twice the size of Mediasurface (revenue-wise) but much more profitable. Both companies will talk about "synergies," but I'll remain a bit skeptical. Yes, many website scenarios are marketing-oriented, but not as many as analysts often think. Perhaps more importantly, the history of diversified software vendors taking on a Web CMS tool to cross-sell to their existing base is not one marked with great success (c.f., WebSideStory's fatal embrace of Atomz and those products' subsequent journey into oblivion). This will be complicated by the fact that Mediasurface sells no less than three Web CMS offerings.

If there is a silver lining, it is that Mediasurface joins a company with a much more solid history of generating earnings, perhaps an indication of a more disciplined or experienced management team. We'll be watching.

Mediasurface for sale?

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Tue, 6 May 2008 00:32:00 -0400

I've been hearing various rumors recently about mid-market Web CMS vendors up for sale. If true, you could imagine all sort of marketplace shifts (both good and bad) causing ownership stakes to start moving. Certainly one toolset in play is Serena Collage. Almost all these vendors are privately traded, so such rumors are...just that.

But one WCM vendor, UK-based Mediasurface, trades publicly (on the "alternative investment market" of LSX), and quietly had to explain a recent stock bump. I say "quietly" because we only got wind via an investor-blogger, who first mentioned a company communication (pdf) -- a statement that remains more or less hidden in the investor-relations area of the Mediasurface website. In the short memo, Mediasurface "...notes the recent share price and announces that it has received a preliminary approach, which may or may not lead to an offer for the Company."

In recent years Mediasurface has grown -- a bit haphazardly we thought -- via acquisition, but evidently failed to control costs, and a surprise announcement (pdf) of losses late last year sent the stock tumbling from around 25p to languish at about 5p per share, at least until this latest courtship. You can track the stock price here.

If consummated, a match with "a UK company that does not compete directly with Mediasurface" might not be a bad thing for the vendor's customers. Like direct competitor Tridion (sold to SDL earlier this year), Mediasurface has global ambitions, and sometimes global reach, but struggled a bit beyond its regional base. As Web CMS Report 2008 readers know, Mediasurface's flagship Morello product suffers from a rather dated back-end, but the company has innovated enough on features to keep it interesting even for larger buyers. Things may start to get even more interesting soon.

The challenge of multi-site web content management

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Thu, 6 Sep 2007 13:22:00 -0400

Our customers tell us they are increasingly managing multiple websites. They typically want a platform that recognizes their (inevitably) unique approaches to centralization and distributed management. Many Web CMS tools can now "clone" websites, but this usually entails just copying a set of content, structural elements, vocabularies, and templates -- it does not address the problem of ongoing management of those assets.

Ongoing multi-site management typically requires some sort of object-oriented structure where you have central components that may or may not yield local (i.e., website-specific) derivatives or variants, depending on your rules. If you make a change to your standard corporate footer, you may want that to cascade down to all your web properties; if you change a navigation element on your "main" public site, you may not want that change inherited by all your other microsites.

As Web CMS Report readers know, there's a fairly clean divide in the industry between vendors who can do this and those who can't. Ironically, this is one of the many areas where most of the so-called "enterprise" tier vendors remain a year or more behind their more focused competitors.

Note, however, that there are few standard industry norms about how to organize multi-site management. Some products (e.g., Mediasurface Morello) allow you to maintain a central store of template, content, workflow, and other components separate from the actual website representations, and then you can build sites by drawing from this palette. I suspect this approach works well for media companies in particular, who want to share information across multiple properties without encumbering them too tightly from a structural standpoint.

Other tools assume a kind of "master" website, from which you can derive and manage local variants. This is particularly handy for multinational corporations who need to balance global and local communications across multiple properties under a single brand. The way that SDL Tridion controls variants is quite advanced in this regard, since you can create a master domain above your web properties that isn't actually a working website (i.e., your "main" website becomes a child as well). Of course, with power comes complexity, and Tridion customers sometimes report that it takes them some time and effort to fully grasp the concepts here.

But the bigger issue, as always, is one of governance. What kind of specific relationships do you want to create among your web properties? Issuing an RFP that just says "must integrate multiple websites" leaves you open to selecting a tool that doesn't let you standardize and experiment in the ways you want. We'll be watching this much more closely in the coming months...

Mediasurface and The Three Bears

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 17:15:00 -0400

UK-based Web CMS vendor Mediasurface announced today its intention to acquire smaller UK competitor Immediacy. This follows a 2005 acquisition of a hosted Dutch solution that Mediasurface renamed "Pepperio," to target small businesses. I wasn't sanguine at the time about one vendor selling two products and I don't see how three offerings makes the company any stronger, even if it gets bigger.

To its credit, Mediasurface has dispensed with the usual bromides about "synergies" and offers a fairly straightforward rationale for adding a mid-range solution to it's current high / low set: Mediasurface salespeople can now sell Goldilocks a small, medium, or large solution. As Web CMS Report readers know, Immediacy's underlying technology differs quite substantially from Mediasurface's flagship Morello tool. The two companies also exhibit quite distinct cultures, although I think Mediasurface will absorb its new family member quite quickly.

Because you see, the acquisition was pretty much an all-cash deal (£5.6m), to be paid by a Mediasurface supplemental stock offering (pdf). Seems like Immediacy's owners are cashing out rather than hanging in. So to the extent there are any risks here, I suspect they will fall to Immediacy customers and Mediasurface stockholders. Too early to tell if those two groups will find themselves brothers grim. For you the prospective customer, you'll need to decide whether getting a tool that's "just right" for your size is worth the downside of working with a vendor that must enhance and support three different products.

AJAX for Document Management

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 12:45:00 -0400

A UK reseller of FileNet document management systems called Altien has developed a nice, AJAX-based web interface atop the P8 repository (see 14-minute screencast). Document management consultants rightly criticize web-based interfaces as frequently less functional than client-server architectures for managing office and imaged documents -- "where's the drag-and-drop?" Well, here it is. AJAX is far from perfect; for example, the "back-button" problem that can bedevil standard web apps gets worse under AJAX, which is perhaps why Altien recommends turning off toolbars. Nevertheless one interesting thing about Altien's interface is that it seems to do most of what Mediasurface's thick client for web editing ("Morello") does. Mediasurface has won some big deals on the strength of Morello's familiarity for Windows users. So perhaps it's time to ask your content management vendor when they will provide a rich web interface. Don't hold your breath. FileNet and other ECM vendors can boast solid engineering teams, but little core competency in UI design. Maybe resellers will pick up the slack.

Hosted CMS, Search Expanding in Europe

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Fri, 9 Jun 2006 12:37:00 -0400

US-based web analytics company WebSideStory recently announched the launch of its Active Marketing Suite in Europe. The company has had an office in Europe for a while, but mostly sold their flagship Hitbox analytics package there. Now they intend to sell their broader "suite" -- which includes the former Atomz website search and web content management services -- on a hosted basis in Europe. The SaaS market here remains quite open, and while WebSideStory is a lesser known brand than some other plausible big players, they do have a broad market focus, unlike many current European services. Meanwhile, UK vendor Mediasurface has relaunched the hosted CMS service it acquired last year, now called "Pepperio."

Decoupling content management services revisited

apoorvdurga@gmail.com(Apoorv Durga) — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 18:53:00 -0500

Mediasurface, Stellent, Documentum and many other vendors have successfully decoupled their repository search capabilities from their underlying CMS. Other observers have asked for decoupling of other services like security, and I have often seen customers asking if they can use their own choice of workflow software, version management software, and so on, instead of using features embedded in the CMS. Using best-of-breed products to build a system is good in theory. For it to work though is quite difficult using today's products. Most of them have proprietary and tightly coupled ways of doing things, either due to legacy architectures or competitive differentiation. To allow decoupling (or even loose coupling) of services, most of them would need to re-architect their products. Also, for decoupling to work, standards play a very important role -- not just CMS products but the whole ecosystem. So if a CMS supports decoupled version management then 3rd-party version management systems also have to adhere to standards. Until this happens, you need to take a balanced approach to deciding what should be decoupled. If you require many 3rd-party services, most packaged products probably won't right fit for you.

Major consolidation of UK gov't websites

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 00:46:00 -0500

The UK government CIO has just announced an audacious plan to collapse more than 551 (out of 951) government websites down to 26. The other 400 will come under review too. Doubtless this will save on hardware and software, and perhaps fulfill the long-desired (but rarely realized) dream of Web CMS as a shared service. In my experience, publishing processes are harder to standardize than more operational processes, and this puts a premium on the flexibility of any common platform to satisfy diverse use-cases. (I've argued separately that CMS tools typically excel at only a handful of scenarios.) Nevertheless, at the end of the day you have to justify consolidation in terms of value to the customer. The key issue here is metadata normalization, and the UK is ahead of most other governments in this regard. Not surprisingly, CMS vendors are positioning themselves among the favored list of government suppliers in what has now become a higher-stakes marketplace. Mediasurface has already pinged me with its own take... [Update: AIIM's Atle Skjekkeland says that Norway has taken this a step further.]

Mediasurface to webify Morello

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 07:49:00 -0500

UK-based CMS vendor Mediasurface has made a fair bit of noise (and sales) on the back of its novel thick Windows client called "Morello." But with the growing sophistication of AJAX-based interfaces, I wondered if the window was closing on desktop editors. Well, the company has just announced an browser-based version of Morello (built on AJAX) to be released in 2006. Mediasurface says the browser version is "almost indistinguishable" from its desktop progenitor. It did indeed look slick in an early beta demo I saw. But the browser can be a finicky and unpredictable container, so we'll have to wait for real field experience before we know how well it really works.

Mediasurface acquires a second CMS

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Fri, 8 Apr 2005 00:00:00 -0400

UK-based Mediasurface has purchased Silverbullet, a small CMS vendor in Holland that offers a hosted solution for small businesses. The company says, "There is no conflict of interest between our Morello product and Silverbullet." We say Mediasurface might have had a hole in their pocket after going public last year. The history of these sorts acquisitions is not promising (c.f. divine); the technologies and sales models don't overlap, and customers get annoyed when there isn't an easy upgrade path after all. But the CMS market remains young, and so we will keep an open mind...

Mediasurface lands some big ones

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Fri, 1 Apr 2005 00:00:00 -0500

As the Web content management industry moves downmarket and even large companies buy in smaller increments, big deals have become scarcer. But they have not disappeared. UK-based CMS Vendor Mediasurface recently announced some large contracts: for example, one with Citigroup for a Corporate and Investment Banking intranet across EMEA that the company is "worth in excess of £500,000 will contribute over £400,000 in this financial year." And project of similar financial size with the UK Home Office. Don't count all those pounds yet, folks: big CMS projects have an unfortunate tendency to implode before completion. But still, sometimes even the smaller (~75 employees) players can land some big ones...

Speaking of hosted solutions...

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Fri, 10 Dec 2004 00:00:00 -0500

Content management as a service continues to gain traction. One measure of its growing popularity is the high percentage of start-up CMS vendors electing to go the hosted route. Established players also continue to experiment with hosted offerings. In some cases market reaction has been underwhelming -- Stellent and RedDot's hosted content management services have not taken off. Recently PaperThin and MediaSurface have announced hosted Web CMS offerings. They too will face challenges: it can be hard to run software as a service that wasn't built that way from the ground up, and both companies risk alienating integration partners. Nevertheless, for buyers this experimentation means more choices, and choice is good...
PaperThin's Hosted Edition
Mediasurface Plans (See Trend #7)

Mediasurface Floats

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 00:00:00 -0400

U.K. CMS vendor Mediasurface has become a publicly traded company on the "Alternative Investment Market" (AIM) of the London Stock Exchange (ticker: MSR). Like other lightly-regulated markets, AIM allows small companies to raise modest funds and trade as a security. Sometimes these become known as "penny stocks," and indeed, Mediasurface began trading at 12p. A small post-launch price pop was not quite Googlish, but Mediasurface now has a valuation of about £10m. This is doubtless much smaller than the company's VCs wanted, but at least they can spread the risk a bit. More importantly, the offering allowed Mediasurface to raise £2m -- badly-needed cash in an increasingly competitive European marketplace. We'll say it again: smaller CMS vendors are not going away...
Mediasurface Floatation Quote

MediaSurface Buys Reef

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Mon, 28 Oct 2002 01:00:00 -0500

Really just the bones of Reef -- out of receivership. We hope they didn't pay a lot. The Reef codebase is theoretically interesting to MediaSurface, as it contains collaboration and commerce widgets, and is written in Java. Reef's client base also extends MediaSurface toeholds in Benelux and the USA. Reef had some interesting concepts, but highly suspect software, so it may take some time for MediaSurface to extract and clean up the truly valuable bits...
Review the MediaSurface Press Release

Reef, R.I.P.

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Tue, 16 Jul 2002 00:00:00 -0400

Well, just when you thought consolidation was on hold, here is a CMS vendor out cold. Belgium-based Reef declared bankruptcy today. Evidently 30 staff managed to burn through 85 million Euros. Here's a quickie post-mortem. Reef had three problems: lightweight technical execution (though elegant architecture, conceptually); funky business model that relied overly on channel commitments; lack of a particular niche (real killer for a company its size)...
Read the Official Death Notice

Mediasurface Resurfaces

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Tue, 2 Mar 2004 00:00:00 -0500

After a quick and noisy start during the Boom, Mediasurface went rather quiet for what seemed like quite a long time to us. Recently the UK-based company entered a new phase with a substantial rework of its product, now in version 5. Let's call the 3rd part to this trilogy "Return of the Client," as Mediasurface unveils a Windows client module designed for non-technical business users. We're not keen on thick clients, but we think their return represents perhaps one measure of the ongoing dissatisfaction with existing browser-based interfaces in many CMS products...
Find out more about Mediasurface 5