Comments for Big Men On Content

Comment on Open Text Buys Document Viewer by Lee Dallas

Lee Dallas — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 22:29:39 +0000

I suspected as much but I nevertheless think they would better serve their customer if they just bought one of the vendors and made it a part of the product - Oh but wait - didn’t EMC buy one already- Pix Tools - part of the Captiva acquisition - strange that didn’t make it in- or maybe it did and I just missed it in the 250 page tutorial I went through - doesn’t do office formats though - just images but embedding that would still be better than treating it as just another 3rd party.

Comment on Open Text Buys Document Viewer by Pie

Pie — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 18:00:17 +0000

To answer a question for Lee, there were contractual issues around getting Informative Graphics’ Brava! into TaskSpace. While I have no specifics I can guess, having been through the process before on a different product, that the price that IG was going to get per license was most likely too low based upon the volume expectations.

There I times I miss being a product manager, and then there are times I don’t.

-Pie

Comment on Open Text Buys Document Viewer by msillanp

msillanp — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:30:25 +0000

While some of the extension can be very powerful the problem is that it’s all tied into the generic viewing capabilities of multiple file formats. See one of the often missed components that Oracle acquired with Stellent was the intellectual property of the Mastersoft filters. The little secret is that there’s only one vendor of content transformation filters and anyone that wants access to them now talks to Oracle. So while Open Text may get some interesting technology, they me be at the mercy of Oracle when they go to use it. That’s why most ECM vendors are happy to let the smaller vendors manage the relationship with Oracle or better still just work with the Adobe PDF format.

Comment on Oracle’s ECM Vertical Acquisitions by Lee Dallas

Lee Dallas — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 01:31:51 +0000

Interesting idea - that the reason for the complexity is to discourage defections to other products. Kind of like holding their customers for ransom. More than one commentator though has referred to Oracle’s pricing model as highway robbery.So maybe this is a case of choosing which crime you want to be a victim of, kidnapping or robbery.

Comment on Oracle’s ECM Vertical Acquisitions by msillanp

msillanp — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 14:01:17 +0000

I’m not sure I would call Skywire a CEVA acquisition. It seems more to be a Siebel play that happens to have content management. That means that Oracle will still need to figure out how to integrate Skywire’s content management components in theirs.

But the real point I like is why Oracle can do this, I’d say why no one else can. If you look at how Oracle dominated the market it was by creating an open standard ODMA. They pushed the standard and made every other vendor look like a fool if they didn’t get on board. Oracle knew their product was the best and made sure that it was easy for anyone to develop solutions on their platform or anyone else’s by making relational database development a standardized approach. Basically leveling the playing field.

So as a VAR spent time trying to work with competing vendor, Oracle would push to make sure they were following standards. Then once the VAR realized that Oracle was better it was an easy transition to the platform as a standard had been followed.

No one in the ECM space is willing to do this because they don’t believe in their own products. They’re too afraid that customers and VARs will want to change over that they make their platforms incredibly complex to make sure that migration costs are extremely high. “I know we have problems but are you sure you want to spend x millions to go to Vendor B?”

Standards in the ECM field seem to last only a few years. That’s not something you build your product’s future on.

Comment on The ROI on ECM - Calculating Cost of Content by msillanp

msillanp — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:37:41 +0000

Hey Tom,
Things are going well. To bad you weren’t able to make EMC World, it would have been great to catch up.

To come up with the tipping point (development payback), what I do is calculate the total cost of content before development and what the expected cost of content will be after development. This will tell you the cost savings the development effort will bring. When the cost of development is divided by the annual savings you will find when you will hit payback.

Of course the other thing is to look at when calculating payback is the life of the developed solution. If you look at the cost savings from the development and find that it will take 5 years to achieve development savings, I would question the effort. Very few applications have 5 year lives these days.

Cost of content is also valid for other metrics as well. I used this with some search metrics I was able to develop (more in another post) for a customer self-service center where we found that poor search capabilities were causing a significant amount of duplicate messages. The number of messages duplicated was not significant for management. But when I took the number of messages re-written and multiplied this by the average cost of content, we came up with a number, really a dollar figure, that everyone could understand.

Comment on The ROI on ECM - Calculating Cost of Content by rouset1

rouset1 — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 01:51:31 +0000

Interesting concept…Now what is the tipping point for “cost of content” versus the weighted cost of deployment? The cost of deployment can be amortized, somewhat…Have you been successful in developing metrics and protocols in measuring the productivity increase for a deployed system?

And, BTW, how you doing?

Comment on Crowd Humor and the Internet by Pie

Pie — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 20:48:29 +0000

“The first time I downloaded a picture to the printer over this cable, the bits moved so fast the printer collapsed into a naked singularity, right there in my office.”

Love it.

-Pie

Comment on Adobe Out In the Open with Alfresco by Lee Dallas

Lee Dallas — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 12:55:32 +0000

I agree. Without the CMS, LiveCycle was always an incomplete picture. I’m curious as to why they waited until now to take this on apart from wanting to play nicely with everyone and not over commit to a single CMS Vendor. I suppose Alfresco is the least offensive choice to Adobe’s other partners because they can embed it, brand it and treat it as an open source adoption instead of a true vendor/oem relationship. .

Comment on Adobe Out In the Open with Alfresco by Pie

Pie — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:45:34 +0000

Good post. From the Adobe perspective, it potentially makes their LiveCycle product a solid stand-alone solution. They’ve always claimed that, but to be fair, without an ECM system to dump everything into, it limited their scale. For Alfresco, great exposure to those that always looked at them crossways for being new and open source.

Oh, and thanks for the standards plug.

-Pie