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More portal news from Oracle OpenWorld 2008

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 13:04:00 -0400

In case you were not among the 43,000 delegates this year at Oracle OpenWorld 2008, Oracle did reveal interesting details on WebCenter adoption, progress on BEA integration, and also on their enterprise portal strategy and roadmap.

As readers of the Enterprise Portals Report know, WebCenter is an impressive offering for developers, but unfortunately offers very few out-of-the-box services for business users. According to Oracle, WebCenter adoption is growing, and many of the new projects include integration to the vendor's "UCM" (formerly Stellent) offering for content management. System integrators are now beginning to build practice areas around WebCenter, as they go through initial project cycles.

If any existing BEA customers thought that Oracle would rest on the portal laurels, they clearly were wrong. Since the updated portal strategy was announced a few months ago, ALUI became a part of WebCenter Suite. As of this week, WebLogic Portal is now also a part of WebCenter Suite, so that new customers can mix and match among the four portals in Oracle's offering. Oracle claims that most BEA engineers have been retained at Oracle, which now has more than 25,000 developers on the payroll.

On the roadmap is the delayed 11g release, which is now scheduled for H1, 2009. 11g is currently in an on-going customer beta program. Among the themes for 11g are social computing, collaboration enhancements, and better standards support. Later in 2009, Oracle expects to introduce support for IBM WebSphere as an application platform, perhaps in a move to help its sales force sell WebCenter into traditional Big Blue accounts.

Finally, while SharePoint is indeed changing the portal landscape, many customers here in San Francisco and the very large Oracle ecosystem reminded me that there is still a thriving enterprise portal market outside (above?) SharePoint. I even met some who decided not to go through the difficult upgrade from SharePoint 2003 to SharePoint 2007, but instead decided to shift to Oracle WebCenter.

Other customers, meanwhile, are headed in the other dirction; see for example my commentary from earlier this week: Questioning Oracle's Portal Leadership.

Questioning Oracle's Portal Leadership

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 14:47:00 -0400

Today finds me in San Francisco for the annual Oracle OpenWorld mega-conference. Oracle claims 43,000 delegates, representing a 5% increase from last year, although according to my report from last year, they also said 43,000 in 2007. But at that size who's counting?

With Oracle's acquisition of BEA, I was in particularly interested to hear about their latest enterprise portal developments. In the opening keynote by Charles Phillips, President and Chuck Rozwat, Executive Vice President, Product Development, they did make some relevant announcements:

A new beta release of the much-discussed but only marginally-deployed WebCenter Suite (which has seen several delays), as the product gets moved to Oracle WebLogic as the default application server
Fusion Middleware for Cloud Computing, based on Amazon Web Services
Oracle Beehive, a new product for enterprise collaboration, that Oracle has built from scratch with integrated security (via the SealedMedia acquisition). According to Oracle, Beehive has already been adopted by a few customers, including the European Space Agency

Enthusiastic Oracle managers also claimed market leadership in many areas, including enterprise portals, something that IBM has traditionally claimed. I don't know how they come up with this, but I do urge buyers not to put too much emphasis on any vendor claiming such a mantle.

While this week is indeed exciting for everybody in the large Oracle community, it still seems like very few customers have adopted WebCenter Suite, Oracle's strategic portal platform for the past year at least. It certainly can't be WebCenter Suite that's "leading the market."

Also, in my interviews with users of Oracle Portal (the "old" portal), it seems like quite a few are upgrading to Microsoft SharePoint, instead of going for Oracle. Interesting times indeed!

CMIS - the new Lingua Franca of ECM?

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 12:29:00 -0400

It's often said that the great thing about industry standards is that there are so many of them. Now we have one more.

A short while ago, three of the biggest behemoths of content management (namely IBM, Microsoft, and EMC) announced a new standard... one that, if it does indeed become an accepted standard, is supposed do for the content-management world what ODBC and SQL did for the database world. (We've heard that one before, but keep reading anyway.)

The Content Management Interoperability Services specification (soon to be submitted to OASIS) is a set of protocols, exposed via REST and Web Services definitions, for platform-independent interchange of repository 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.

Notably, CMIS leverages the Atom Publishing Protocol in its REST model (and indeed requires compliant repositories to honor APP, although they can optionally honor additional transfer representations, such as JSON). SOAP is written into the spec as well, for what that's worth.

The press releases around CMIS are loud and proud, trumpeting the spec's ability to enable platform-agnostic content mashups, easier cross-silo federation, rapid application development made possible by a common API, cleaner abstraction of content and content services from application logic, and so on.

We've heard these sorts of claims made before, of course. Proponents of the Java Content Repositories spec (originally JSR 170; now JSR 283) pushed JCR using exactly the same selling points. In fact, with just one exception, the originators of CMIS (IBM, EMC, Open Text, Oracle, SAP, Alfresco, and Microsoft) were the proponents of JCR: They were all, except for Microsoft, on the JSR 283 Expert Committee (and still are).

JCR achieved relatively little traction in the WCM and ECM worlds, though. Why should we expect CMIS to fare any better? After all, if JCR (with the same promoters as CMIS) floundered, why won't CMIS?

The answer could turn out to be quite simple. As I noted in an earlier blog, the main impediment to widespread adoption of JCR has always been the 'J': the dependency on Java. The whole world doesn't run on Java; therefore it was never realistic to think the world would embrace JCR. (Certainly Microsoft was never going to advance a Java standard.)

With CMIS (which is superficially quite similar to JCR and Apache Sling), there is no 'J' in the way. Does that mean CMIS will automatically enjoy the sort of uptake JCR never achieved? Of course not. There are many other potential obstacles to adoption, and even if the standard does gain traction, it's always possible for specific implementations to conflict in unexpected ways or be extended in nonstandard directions (as Microsoft tends to do with standards that it initially gets behind, but later hijacks or subverts in some way).

A short while before he posted his official reaction on dev.day.com, I asked JCR Spec Lead David Nuescheler (of Day Software) what he thought about the seeming collision between JCR (and Sling) and CMIS. His response was that just as the HTTP spec doesn't compete with the Java Servlet spec, JCR does not compete with CMIS. He sees no conflict. In fact, he welcomes the arrival of a high-level content protocol that transcends any one programming language. It's a net win for everybody.

I tend to agree. Here's hoping IBM, EMC, Microsoft, and the others will follow Alfresco's early lead and actually implement CMIS rather than (as they did with JCR) just issue press releases about it.

The ECM Suites Report 2009 released today

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:07:00 -0400

Today I'm proud to announce the release of the 2009 edition of The ECM Suites Report. Expanded out to over 400 pages, I believe this constitutes the most comprehensive ECM product evaluation report of its kind. In this edition we have added some new vendors, dropped some old, and revised all 30 product reviews.

This churn reflects a vibrant and extremely healthy global ECM market. As we note in today's press release, there probably has never been a better time for buyers, with a wide range of strong products to chose from, especially in the mid market.

If there is one thing in particular this latest research has shown us, it is that SharePoint did not (as many predicted) kill the ECM market, but rather the ECM market has embraced SharePoint -- and we are all the better for it.

Of course there are some stinkers out there, and as buyer you need to exercise caution, but we hope the advice, critiques, and "insider" detail we provide in this report will help mitigate your risks.

As always, if you're a subscription customer, you'll automatically receive your copy shortly.

The ECM Suites Report 2009 released today

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:07:00 -0400

As always, if you're a subscription customer, you'll automatically receive your copy shortly.

SAP looks to India for ECM?

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:23:00 -0400

Is SAP slowly moving into the ECM space? It's a question that has been asked so many times over the years that it has become something of a "chestnut," as we say in England. For if you are ever at a loss as to what to chat about with people in the ECM industry, SAP is a surefire conversation starter.

SAP was (allegedly) going to buy Open Text on many occasions, but as of today still have not. They were (allegedly) shocked when Open Text bought iXos ( a firm that focused almost exclusively on providing content and archiving software for SAP), but did nothing about it. They were (allegedly) going to buy German vendor Saperion, but didn't. Once Oracle moved in to the ECM space with their acquisition of Stellent, fine ECM minds asserted that SAP would be forced to respond, but they didn't.

But now SAP does appear to be doing something: they are considering buying a 15% stake in Indian ECM vendor NewGen. Could this be a prelude to a full acquisition? Well it could be and it wouldn't be a bad choice, though it may take Euro- and US-centric observers by surprise. At CMS Watch we always try to take a very global view of things and have been following NewGen since the birth of the ECM Suites Report. It's a product that would potentially be a good fit for SAP -- and one that could likely compete well against the likes of IBM and Oracle with the marketing and sales push that SAP could give it.

But who knows...a 15% stake sounds a lot, but to SAP 15% of NewGen is small change. (SAP's venture arm has also invested in search vendor Endeca and open source ECM supplier Alfresco.) What we do know is that it keeps the rumor mill busy - and reminds us that from the outside SAP may appear to doing nothing in the ECM space, but they clearly are aware of ECM, and they probably do have plans for the future, even if they haven't shared them yet.

As a buyer of an ECM system to handle content and archiving loads from SAP, it's not as if you are short of options; almost every major ECM vendor can provide relatively out of the box integrations with SAP, and some even have dedicated groups to support such integrations. So an entry by SAP into the ECM market will likely not present a sea change for buyers, but it will certainly be interesting fodder for industry observers.

Oracle doesn't eat its own blog food

apoorvdurga@gmail.com(Apoorv Durga) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:52:00 -0400

Via numerous acquisitions, Oracle has built up a formidable collection of products that they sell for Portals, Content Management, Web 2.0, and other content technologies. As a result, customers find considerable overlap in functionality and often there are multiple options for doing same things. Consider blog services:

Oracle WebCenter page lists "...services such as wikis, blogs, discussions..." as one of the benefits

BEA AquaLogic Pages (now part of Oracle) touts "Drag-and-drop simplicity for creating wikis, blogs and basic Web applications"

Stellent had a blog module even before it got acquired by Oracle

So its perhaps a bit surprising that when it came to their own blogs, Oracle chose to migrate to Six Apart's Movable Type.

We had cautioned about lack of a decent blog functionality in Oracle stack in our recently released Enterprise Social Software Report 2008. Well to be fair to Oracle, they are not the only ones -- many other product vendors use 3rd-party blog and wiki products for specific functionality. Blog migrations are never easy, but Oracle seems to have pulled it off successfully.

So if you are a buyer of similar technologies, remember that:

If a product vendor is selling you a suite that claims to do everything, be very cautious and ask for real life examples and demos
A product suite might not be the best option; keep your options open and consider point solutions for specific requirements

It's quite possible that Oracle uses one of its own blog packages behind its firewall. But when ECM vendors put their trust in best-of-breed tools for high-profile, publicly-facing sites, perhaps there's a lesson there.

When portal platforms aren't true SOA

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 12:38:00 -0400

In our Enterprise Portals Report evaluations, we point out that vendors who tightly couple their portal offerings to other pieces of their underlying platforms can't call themselves truly Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) -ready. This has been a problem for the MOI (Microsoft, Oracle, IBM) portal offerings in particular, which have historically seen dependencies at multiple tiers: appserver (all three), database (Oracle Portal -- now deprecated), and even operating system (SharePoint).

As you might expect, MOI portal product managers sent us testy responses. Suggesting a portal product is less than "fully SOA-enabled" evidently touches a raw nerve with vendors. We replied in turn that savvy customers believe SOA is more about the flexibility and opportunities that loose coupling affords, and less about, say, available WSDL files.

Thankfully, now we can just point them to this handy posting by ZDNet blogger Joe McKendrick, "Ten ways to tell it's not SOA." (Hat-tip to Dion Hinchcliffe.) In particular, check out #8, and this commenter's useful extension of the notion of "platform."

Portals can indeed play an important role in your SOA strategy, but only when they don't make you lock in to other proprietary platforms.

Open Text continues acquisition trail, gobbling up MAM vendor

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 10:38:00 -0400

On the heels of my colleague Alan's report of Open Text's purchase of Spicer, the next sign along the company's acquisition trail was posted yesterday with the acquisition of media asset management vendor eMotion.

eMotion's prior caretaker was Corbis, famous for their massive image library. eMotion, a hosted MAM service, was a natural compliment to Corbis' offering, allowing publishers, image and video production managers to host both their own assets, as well as pointers to ones licensed from Corbis, in one place.

There's several interesting things about this acquisition. First is that Open Text already owns a rather sizable DAM software offering, Artesia. This reminds me a bit of when Microsoft acquired FAST -- many asked why Redmond needed another search tool, when they already had several of their own. It comes back to scenarios and specific capabilities. Just as searching a public website vs. a SharePoint repository vs. your firewall-protected Oracle databases call for very different types of search technologies, so does managing digital imagery vs. time-based assets. Like Microsoft, Open Text wants to dominate more of those niches.

DAM and MAM used to be quite separate, and different vendors "grew up" focusing on one domain or the other. As we learned in our research for The Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008, there's few vendors that do well managing both images and video. Artesia's MAM capabilities are quite strong, compared to other vendors that grew up on the DAM side of the equation. Still, pure-play MAM companies like Blue Order, for now, continue to get the bigger share of the broadcast company MAM pie. Open Text's latest acquisition blurs the line between MAM and DAM even more, and shows they'd like to reach futher into both their core client base of marketers and advertising agencies as well as to the snazzy movie studios in Hollywood and beyond. Whether that can happen with two very separate technologies, Artesia and eMotion, will be interesting to see.

Also of note is that eMotion is a hosted or "On Demand" solution, whereas Artesia is strictly licensed softare. Several other DAM / MAM vendors have recently debuted hosted offerings as well. We've written in the past about the ambiguities of what a vendor is really offering when they say "On Demand", so proceed with caution. Open Text already markets a mish-mash of disjointed and loosely integrated ECM tools. This latest purchase is another reason for you, the buyer, to remain meticulous about understanding what each part of the pie really does.

How Fast is Attivio?

bloem@radagio.com(Adriaan Bloem) — Sat, 5 Jul 2008 09:55:00 -0400

The Fast Search & Transfer news continues to keep me on my toes. The Norwegian business weekly Dagens Næringsliv seems to have come up with some decent evidence (English translation) of many things everybody already suspected -- and a couple of new ones.

It covers the Convera acquisition and the "separate" but surprisingly coincidental deal where Convera bought several million's worth of Fast software it didn't need. Or as rival Autonomy (which was also in the running for buying Convera) has pointed out, Fast pumped up its revenues for that quarter with part of the money it paid for Convera, then got back for licenses. The DN article also covers a few other very suspicious deals, and some outright fraud. It's now even getting to the point where calling Fast "the Enron of Norway" is getting long in the tooth.

While that train wreck was unfolding before my eyes in slow motion, my fellow analyst Theresa Regli pinged me last February about a new enterprise search company called Attivio. Information Today raved about their new product AIE, with analysts quoted as saying things like "they are moving rapidly to develop tools that will eliminate many of the practical barriers to easily and efficiently deploy robust enterprise search solutions," with the unique selling point of "data integration plus search and content processing," a "hot niche for the next few years."

Since I'm always interested to find out more about robust enterprise search tools to fill hot niches for the next few years, I scrolled down to read what the Attivio CTO would explain about how the product would achieve what "should have been solved by the integration of text search and XML into relational database managers such as Oracle." As it turns out, it is based on a "mash-up" of open source Apache Lucene and "licensed commercial software."

As described in our Enterprise Search Report and on this blog, Lucene itself is just a Java text search API. To be able to actually gather, convert, and query content you need many more components. It is perfectly feasible to put together a working enterprise search product around the core Lucene JAR (as demonstrated by IBM's Omnifind Yahoo! Edition). But in order to get there, and to have Lucene index, for instance, Office documents and PDFs, you will have to first convert those documents to text. The filters to perform that conversion can be bought from other vendors, based on open source such as pdftohtml, or you'll have to build them yourself, which is a lot of work. There aren't too many vendors building their own filters, or even just modifying open source to do so. So if you do build the filters needed to use Lucene yourself, you'd probably like to mention this as an advantage, and as Attivio states, "we developed our own Microsoft Office, WordPerfect, and PDF connectors to improve performance and reach deeper into the files than the conventional converters."

Since, like most enterprise search products, Lucene isn't based on a database and couldn't even connect to such content without help, it isn't surprising Attivio had to develop a "unique RDBMS data loader" which "indexes the tables individually." This, again, is presented as a major advantage -- remember, converting documents and integrating structured and unstructured data are "a hot niche."

I remember seeing a vendor at a conference a few years back, with banners jokingly stating its product was "buzzword compliant!" Attivio certainly seems to have that skill down. The engineering effort is marketed as a "technology mashup," "breaking down silos" between "open source and commercial software." "We have lived with the challenge of having to choose between the precision of databases and the richness of search for a long time, but no longer" sounds great, but I don't see Oracle and Thunderstone's RDBMS-based solutions breaking out in a sweat just yet.

Maybe my over-exposure to marketing materials and flashy demos has turned me into a cynic, and Attivio's downloadable trial version will have to do at least a decent job to convince me of the product's added value. Fortunately, that free download is "coming soon!" Yes, I'm sorry, I'm finding it increasingly hard to turn off that cynicism, especially when I turn back to the DN article about Fast Search & Transfer. Attivio was founded by former Fast employees and the Attivio CTO is Sid Probstein, formerly vice president of technology at FAST. More importantly, Attivio's CEO is Ali Riaz, who was COO at Fast but unexpectedly left the company in late 2006. Well, in hindsight, perhaps not so unexpectedly, though DN quotes him as saying "I had nothing to gain from manipulation of the accounts. I had no shares in the company. I wanted shares and quit because I didn't get any. If you want to find out what's wrong with the accounts, you need to look at those who could gain from it. And it wasn't me."

Dagens Næringsliv doesn't appear to agree with Riaz, however; if you want the full analysis of the what and why, I suggest you read the article. I myself find it surprising that the CEO of a technology startup backed by $6.2 million in venture capital would drive an Audi R8, but that doesn't mean anything (other than that I'm envious of his car). I also find it surprising a former Fast COO would be co-owner of a company reselling Fast licenses, but walking like an Enron duck and quacking like an Enron duck doesn't necessarily mean that it's really anything like Enron. And Attivio's clouding the core technology in marketing hyperboles and buzzword compliance is slightly disconcerting, but many renowned companies engage in the same practice.

DN quotes Riaz as saying "you should be much better at praising the people who have success, instead of pushing them down." And I would certainly love to be proven wrong by Attivio's software; as soon as I get my hands on the trial download I requested, I will let you know if it lives up to the high expectations. As one of my teachers in school once told me, "I'm known for being cynical, or even sarcastic -- myself, I prefer to call it healthy skepticism and mild irony."

Being a cynic isn't a lot of fun -- but for now, I would advise you to be at least healthily skeptical of what Attivio has to offer.

Bam, WAM, thank you, DAM!

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Wed, 9 Jul 2008 15:36:00 -0400

Late last month I had the pleasure of attending the Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management Symposium in London, UK, where I presented a summary of our research recently published in The Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008. It was interesting to contrast this event with Henry Stewart's other recent DAM event, in New York City, held in early May. While many of the challenges faced by digital asset managers on both sides of the Atlantic are similar, few vendors find success on both continents. Though most of the vendors in our report claim customers "worldwide," a true presence (meaning more than a sales person) beyond the headquarters is usually lacking -- oftentimes, the software is simply pushed by resellers abroad, with minimal success.

Unlike last year, Canadian vendors North Plains and Nstein had their footprint on the London show floor, while Artesia ( who was there last year) was notably missing. Otherwise, ADAM, Vyre and other smaller UK and Europe-based vendors continued to fulfill the need of their local markets, and look to expand. As I noted along with my colleague Alan at Internet World UK back in April, there's no shortage of small to medium-sized WCM vendors doing well in the UK market, either, and many have yet to venture even into continental Europe. For every vendor that's acquired an gobbled up, two or three new ones seem to emerge, fulfilling ever more specific micro-niches. Perhaps the "Go Local" trend isn't just about food anymore, but technology suppliers as well.

But talk in the conference rooms was more about the business challenges of broadcasters, designers, marketers, and publishers than it was about the tools and vendors themselves. What echoed most frequently at both conferences was the idea of DAM not just as an asset repository, but a set of workflows leading to an end product (be it a brochure, catalog, or 60-minute broadcast). Each step along the workflow should add value, be it metadata enrichment or some artistic or editorial improvement. And yet, as we've pointed out before, most tools fall short of allowing licensees to truly automate and expedite the often complex publishing processes required by typical DAM scenarios.

It's in this spirit that Chris Glynne, who recently started his own consultancy called Bold Visions, pitched the concept of WAM, or Workflow Asset Management. While the last thing we all need is another acronym, if we're going to take DAM beyond the concept of a digital library, focusing on workflow, and the automation of steps along the typical DAM path is one key way of making that happen.

Digital asset managers asked me a lot of questions about non-pure-play DAM vendors' DAM capabilities. From Alfresco to Microsoft to Oracle, conference delegates wanted to know if they really needed a pure-play DAM tool if they already had SharePoint or Oracle's UCM. That question is not easily answered without delving deeper and understanding your needs and business scenarios. Do you have digital assets that are larger than 5 MB? Do your assets require you to manage both individual and composite assets, such as an product image, and then a brochure where the image might be used, and subsequently a 250-page product catalog where it might be applied as well? Do you need to manage and use the same asset at various resolutions, for both the Web and print? Then SharePoint sure as heck won't do the trick, and you'd be stretching other non-DAM-specific tools. Specialized DAM vendors raison d'être is to fulfill needs like these.

I'll share more leanings from these two DAM events as the summer continues; feel free to email me with any DAM or MAM questions you may have as well, as we continue our research into this fast-changing technology.

Oracle trims portals in consolidation strategy

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Mon, 7 Jul 2008 05:42:00 -0400

Almost 6 months after Oracle announced a definitive agreement to acquire BEA, the company definitively stated its direction on the future of its four different enterprise portal products. Previously, the frequently-issued official statement indicated that all four enterprise portals would be kept. Now WebCenter is more clearly emerging as the portal of the future.

Combined under a new Oracle-specific definition of Enterprise 2.0, I'll highlight these two statements:

Oracle WebCenter Suite and Oracle WebCenter Services are Oracle's strategic solutions for developing Enterprise 2.0 enabled portals, composite, and web applications.
Oracle plans to continue to develop and support Oracle WebLogic Portal and Oracle Portal, and expects to converge these products with Oracle's strategic solutions over time

The former enterprise portals from BEA have now been renamed as Oracle WebLogic Portal and Oracle WebCenter Interaction (previously known as ALUI). For now Oracle Portal, WebLogic Portal and AquaLogic Portal are officially categorized as "continue and converge," which means that new customers are not steered in this direction, but support is maintained for 9 years.

Despite an apparent flip-flop from Oracle, the news comes as little surprise. Back in May 2007 I cautioned buyers that Oracle was shifting portals and placing WebCenter at the forefront with Oracle Portal edging retirement. Now that Oracle is being more open about the future of their portal products, new prospective Oracle customers should consider WebCenter, while existing licensees of the other three portals should already now build migration -- in some cases really outright replacement -- into their project plans and budgets.

[Update, July 9th: Clarified positioning of portal products, including ALUI)

ECM buying tips from the experts

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:35:00 -0400

This past week I had the pleasure of keynoting at the DocTrain event in Indianapolis (held at the truly magnificent Union Station venue), and also running a small session on "How to procure Content Technologies." I have been running these small sessions for a long while now and they tend to prove very popular, and though I have been doing this for years, there are always new tricks to be added to the bag.

At the end of this particular session I chatted with the head of a leading US ECM integrator (who wishes for good reason to remain anonymous!) who said he liked the session but would have added two key points.

Never buy at the end of a quarter

Avoid ELA's (Enterprise License Agreements)

And he is quite right -- and anyone who attends these sessions in future will be sure to be reminded of these key lessons.

First, when it gets close to the end of the quarter, vendors sales staff are desperate to boost and close any outstanding deals. Theoretically this puts you the buyer into a strong position. Theoretically you have maximum leverage. But theory is not the same as practice. Just as I would not go into the ring against Mike Tyson, you should likewise recognize that against an experienced account executive from EMC, IBM, Oracle, or any other ECM vendor, you are way out of your league. The great deal you negotiate -- for example the 300 extra seats you got for the price of 150 -- may not seem such a bargain in the long term. When prices drop, the next major upgrade is announced or you simply find them sitting on the shelf racking up maintenance costs. Buy what you need, no more, and stay away from Account Execs when they are trying to close out the quarter.

Likewise my friend makes a very good point about ELA's (particularly popular in large ECM and Archiving deals). These license schemes have been driven in part by the demand of large enterprise who in the past have bought modular licenses and found themselves stiffed when they need yet more modules at every turn. "Oh no madam, you don't have workflow as part of that deal....or frankly anything you need to make that system I bought you operable, you will have to buy more appropriate licenses from me." ELAs seem to make a great deal of sense, since you get everything for a single price.

But they bite in two unexpected ways. One, the ELA almost certainly excludes some vital component that you will only find in the fine print once it's too late. Secondly and potentially more serious: once you have signed an ELA, no matter how big the deal, you are no longer of any interest to the vendor sales team, who have moved on to the next client. I can personally attest to watching a deal worth over $20 Million US get signed -- and watching the account exec leaving the building within 30 minutes, even though they were scheduled to remain for the next two days. Once you have signed an ELA you have lost any and all leverage with the vendor. Think hard about whether you want to be in that situation...

ECM buying tips from the experts

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:35:00 -0400

Never buy at the end of a quarter

Avoid ELA's (Enterprise License Agreements)

And he is quite right -- and anyone who attends these sessions in future will be sure to be reminded of these key lessons.

Legal ruling shakes up E-mail Archiving and Management Sector

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 11:49:00 -0400

The whole issue of (E-mail Archiving and Management) EAM has come under the spotlight recently - triggered by a ruling by the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco - a ruling that touches on the Fourth Amendment "Protection from unreasonable search and seizure." In this particular case, plaintiffs argued that when employers read the content of text messages sent by their employees, text messages that were held by a hosted vendor (Arch Wireless), that the employees' fourth amendment privileges were breached. In other words that even though the employees were using company-paid messaging systems, that the employer should still respect their privacy and the confidential nature of personal message exchanges.

It's a ruling that could have a huge impact on the EAM market and in particular on vendors like Fortiva, Dell MessageOne and Google Postini, that all offer hosted SaaS EAM solutions. Why SaaS options in particular? Well the ruling states that employers (when using "outside" third-party text or e-mail services) cannot get access to employees' content without their permission first. The ruling is a bit hazy -- and may or may not apply if the mail and text servers are located on-premise. But regardless of whether this just applies to SaaS or both on and off premise solutions, just think the implications through for a moment -- the impact is potentially huge.

Since the ruling, the story has been picked up widely in the press - and as a result the popular verdict is clear - workplace mail is (for the time being at least) confidential. So how does this impact firms that are using EAM software to check up (snoop and breach confidentiality) on what employees are saying to one another? Where does it leave any employer when it comes to accessing employee messages in potentially legitimate business situations? Currently it leaves them between a rock and a hard place. There will likely be some exceptions to this for example those subject to FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act), i.e., potential terrorists. But for the average employee without murderous intent for now at least the law seems to be quite clear: in the United States your employer cannot assume access to your messages without your permission. And for EAM vendors they are in an even more invidious position -- rather like those shops at the mall that sell drug paraphernalia -- perfectly legal to possess, but use them as designed and you are in big trouble

It's clearly an area that will be debated ad-nauseum over the coming months. But regardless of the ultimate outcome, this ruling is a reminder to us all that technology and vendors do not set law, and are not exempt from it. EAM vendors cannot sell you a compliant system; there is no such thing. It's you the employer and buyer who either is or is not compliant with laws and regulations. And just because technology appears to have run ahead of itself here does not mean that the law will have to run to catch up. Rather it will be you the user and buyer who will have to control and adjust your usage of the technologies.

Legal ruling shakes up E-mail Archiving and Management Sector

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 11:49:00 -0400