This is our sixth year in a row doing this humbling exercise. If you'd like to see how we've done previously, you can view past predictions here: 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, and 2007.

Here's our 2012 technology predictions:

1. Big data meets web marketing
Digital marketing systems -- from analytics, to adaptive personalization, to social media monitoring platforms -- generate huge amounts of data. The ability to extract and leverage meaningful nuggets from these vast stores of information represents a persistent but increasingly important challenge for marketing specialists. 2012 will see specialist (typically SaaS...see below) vendors pull away from the pack of integrated WCM suites and other adjacent technologies that implement e-marketing functionality as a simple, add-on service.



2. Enterprise search marketplace opens up...again
The major vendors in this space are undergoing substantial transformation: FAST is getting sucked into the SharePoint vortex; Autonomy is facing an unclear future under HP; and Endeca remains fitful and distracted. Look for upstart vendors to fill the void as they did earlier this decade when the market was more open. In particular, look for specific applications based on the open source platform, Lucene.



3. Social services get called on the carpet in SharePoint
SharePoint has seen stratospheric, often viral growth in enterprises around the world. Licensees are beginning to discover, however, that its lack of contemporary social networking services and polished collaboration applications are limiting its effectiveness and driving business units to self-provision other tools. 2012 will see the rise of a variety of SharePoint-specific, supplementary offerings, from new and existing vendors alike.



4. CRM and CMS on a collision course
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Content Management Systems (CMS) have long been central pieces in the digital marketing toolkit; however the lines between these two systems will continue to blur in 2012. More and more, marketers want to set content and interaction experiences based on customer interaction, so CMS vendors continue to add CRM features, while CRM systems add more web publishing features. In the long run, we think integration is more promising than convergence; in the meantime, expect some messy collisions.

5. Death of the intranet as we know it
Intranet managers still have a key role to play in enterprise collaboration and information management, but employee expectations and the role of the intranet have changed dramatically over the past few years. Savvy companies will focus on the broader employee experience in a mobile, "digital workplace." 2012 will see a significant reallocation of resources from corporate communications to more business-oriented functionality.

6. BPM springs back to life
Process still matters, and workflow applications continue to dominate enterprise document and records management efforts. 2012 will see a renewed interest in good, old-fashioned BPM, as enterprises seek to orchestrate activities across organizational boundaries, including partner and supplier systems.

7. Rich media goes mainstream in the enterprise
Video is no longer an emerging technology for the enterprise. New social initiatives in particular will bring more media into internal systems. To be sure, a gulf remains in production quality (between professional and amateur), and employees will continue to look for increasingly sophisticated capabilities as both media producers and consumers. In 2012, enterprises will respond with specific, rich-media initiatives.

8. Big data blows into the cloud
More and more information management systems are generating or leveraging "big data." Yet, many enterprises don't have the resources, capacity, or expertise to properly store and mine this data. Fortunately, "big data" characteristics (such as unpredictable data inflow rates and the need for elastic processing capacity) make it a natural fit for the cloud. As a result, data-rich applications -- such as social media monitoring -- will increasingly go to market with SaaS-only delivery models.

9. Pervasive mobile-only apps
2011's mantra could have been "mobile first." 2012 will see "mobile first and last," as enterprises develop mobile-only interfaces to certain internal applications without focusing any effort on traditional, web-based (desktop/laptop) UIs. Many of these mobile apps will consist of specialized mashups among existing systems. A key driver here is the inexorable rise of tablets. We'll also see interesting examples where enterprises will tweak business processes to leverage tablets (e.g., in-store tablet catalogs).

10. New job titles emerge
Major technical and operational changes are driving new roles -- often informal, hybrid roles -- within the enterprise. 2012 will see the formalization of some of these roles into broadly recognized job titles. Samples include:

• Marketing Technologist - to master the increasingly complex services around e-marketing at scale
• Social Media Monitor - to interpret, understand, learn from, and respond to the fire hose of relevant activity on public social networks
• Enterprise Community Facilitator - to support localized community managers and foster productive cross-silo interaction
• Enterprise Media Producer - to produce or edit high volumes of video for internal and external consumption
• Director or VP of Digital Assets / Digital Media Manager - formal DAM roles emerge to establish ownership -- not just of assets, but of the systems and metadata -- of DAM and MAM

11. Security fears rise: phones, tablets, portable drives, the cloud -- where is our content?
Nearly everyone is a mobile worker. The proliferation of smartphones and tablets means that employees are walking around with disk drives containing company information. A lost or stolen phone or tablet containing sensitive information will likely cause a backlash in enterprise security departments. We've already heard of some highly regulated enterprises banning enterprise access from employee phones. For many employees, 2012 will bring even more rules and regulations around how they can use their mobile devices and renewed enterprise interest in digital rights management applications.

12. Lines blur between commercial and open source technologies
In the WCM and portal marketplaces, major open source projects are "commercializing" fairly rapidly, while many (though certainly not all) commercial vendors are adopting more open development and support models. This means that in 2012, customers will see increasingly less distinction between commercial vendors and "commercial open source" suppliers. The bigger gulf -- though it remains largely one of licensing -- is emerging between commercially-oriented open source projects and community-oriented projects across the WCM and portal landscapes.

Here is RSG's Alan Pelz-Sharpe to shed some more light on our predictions:

The side of the story that's glossed over on the show, though, is why someone abandoned the storage units in the first place. Were they unable to pay their storage rental bills due to hardship? forgetfullness? death? Surely, the original owners never expected a stranger to buy their posessions (prized or otherwise), let alone for it to happen on a television show.

I couldn't help but think of the parallels between physical storage space and the seemlingly limitless digital space available in "the cloud." I'm sure most of us think that we'll be the only ones who will ever have access to our photos on Facebook, our contacts in LinkedIn, our e-mails in Gmail, our files in Dropbox or Box.net or Office 365.

Much attention has been paid the security of the cloud from hackers - and rightly so - but users of cloud storage providers should get clear agreements in place that clearly states what happens if for some reason we stop paying our storage bills. Who owns the content? Is the content transferable to another owner? Is it transferable to another system? Does the content ever get destroyed?

The producers of Storage Wars are not likely to be thinking of a digital version of the show; but on TV or not, I doubt any of us would want our content to simply go to the highest bidder.

I bring up the Rangers not because they are alive and well in the 2011 baseball playoffs while the Yankees and Red Sox are sitting at home, but because I was reminded of this moment with the recent Box news that they have received yet another round of VC funding. This round of $81 million brings the funding total to $162 million.   Not long ago, many were scoffing at Box as being just another California start-up foolishly comparing themselves to the SharePoint behemoth.  Box did not (and still doesn't) offer nearly as much functionality as SharePoint.  However, with $162 million in funding, they cannot be ignored as a contender.

Of course, money doesn't guarantee victory (as a die-hard Red Sox fan, I know). Box will need strong management and products that meets the needs of buyers, not just investors.  But one thing is certain, many of the collaboration and file-sharing mainstays are taking notice. Buyers likely will too.

Luckily, intranet managers have another option. For the sixth year, NetJMC will be conducting their "Digital Workplace Trends Survey." Last year over 440 organizations from around the world participated and they all received a free copy of "Global Intranet Trends for 2011" (commercial value $750 US).

Interested candidates can apply to participate by sending an email to "info@digital-workplace-trends.com" with the information requested on this page:
http://www.digital-workplace-trends.com/sign-up-for-the-2011-12-intranet-trends-survey/join-the-survey

You can read what 2010 participants say about the report:
http://www.digital-workplace-trends.com/reviews-of-2010-report/reviews-by-intranet-managers

Key topics this year are:
    Mobile Strategies & Approaches
    Collaborative & Social Aspects
    Search
    Governance & Management
    Business Value
    Future Scenarios

Here's 5 things that you should be considering:

1. What recourse do you have if your private or confidential content is leaked?
2. Is it explicitly stated who can see your content? Obviously you don't want the public or your competitors to get access, but is it OK if employees from your Cloud vendor can get access to all your information?
3. How will your pricing change if you need to scale your services up? And down?
4. What should you expect from your Cloud vendor if you want to move your content somewhere else?
5. What happens if the vendor goes out of business? Is there is adequate and acceptable provisions for migrating your information either back to you, or to another Cloud environment?

We continue to evaluate several SaaS options for Web Content Management, Document Management, Digital Asset Management, and Enterprise Collaboration in our research reports.

We're all learning more and more about the benefits and pitfalls of a Cloud model – unfortunately many of these negative lessons are coming at the expense of real companies. If you are considering playing in the cloud, make sure you have a proper parachute.

Sure, customer demand has caused the Web CMS marketplace to react, and several vendors have responded accordingly. However, much remains to be done.

If mobile is a part of your Web Content Management strategy (if it isn't, it probably should be), then you'll want to investigate Web CMS vendors' capabilities in supporting HTML5 and understand how their mobile experience translates to your content creators and editors.

This finding came from the latest major release of The Real Story Group's Web Content Management Evaluation Report. The new Version 20.0 represents its 10th year of publication. Originally launched as a review of 12 Web CMS vendors in 2001, the Web Content Management Evaluation Report now evaluates 43 web content management vendors head-to-head.

You can read more in today's press release.

• Lots of guessing
• Favoritism to the teams/vendors you know
• Limited research
• A mix of predictability and surprises
• Untold amounts of money changing hands
• Madness

At the Real Story Group, we have helped thousands of enterprises across the world make this process a lot less maddening. Our vendor evaluation reports help you get to an appropriate short-list – an Elite Eight or Final Four, if you will. We specialize in winnowing down your choices from an entire marketplace to the vendors and products that could best fit for your needs. 

Thus, we thought it could be useful to provide a Content Technology Bracket to help you get started in your quest to "cut down the nets" with a successful content technology solution.

You can download a clickable bracket PDF here.

Some disclaimers: There's no such thing as a "best" software vendor. Thus, this depiction of the content technology landscape is not indicative of any seedings; rather it is a simple grouping of 64 of the more significant content technology vendors that we cover. The 64 chosen were done so randomly since we actually cover more than 150 vendors (you can see the full list here.) And we chose to depict only four of the seven market areas that we cover simply because in the NCAA bracket, there are four regions, not seven.

Good luck!

Oh, and we'll be presenting on a number of topics at the conference itself. Please join us as we share some of our latest research findings. You can view the session schedule here.

If you'd like to join us and haven't registered yet, you can sign-up here. Enter E211G before March 11th at checkout to receive $300 off registration. After March 11th, enter C211G for $200 off registration.

We are looking forward to meeting and talking with you!

You can follow us on Twitter:

@realstorygroup

Or follow the Twitter feeds of the individual Real Story Group analysts:

@TonyByrne
@TheresaRegli
@AlanPelzSharpe
@jarrodgingras
@adriaanbloem
@apoorv
@irina_guseva

We also have a relatively new Facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Real-Story-Group/291045735568

Still use that fancy feed-reader? Here's the RSS:

http://www.realstorygroup.com/Blog/Feed/realstorygroup-feed.xml

Of course the best way to get updates is to become a subscriber where we'll notify you immediately when we release an update to one of our seven reports, advisory papers, or market analyses.

Whatever your preference, thanks for following us and please keep the feedback coming...

Recently, I’ve seen numerous organizations churning out massive amounts of content using faux-CMS methods such as:

Content entry: Word-based forms
Workflow: E-mail and phone calls
Content reuse: server-side include files tracked via spreadsheets
Collaboration: shared network drives
Versioning: multiple versions stored on shared network drives
Archiving: PDFs in shared network drives
Deployment: Simple FTP

To their credit, these organizations have done an impressive job of cobbling together a variety of tools and processes to mimic the functionality that comes with most content management systems. In most cases, these homegrown solutions have served these organizations well -- thusfar.

However, the changing demands of content consumers are putting stress on these methods. With increased content demands, more and more production departments are hitting their breaking points and becoming bottlenecks for publishing important content.

Is your organization one of these?  The good news is that in 2011 there are more options than ever for a Web CMS buyer – we cover 44 of the most significant. All 44 of these commercial products and open-source projects have been around for years and have matured to the point where their base functionality could provide operational wins for you. Your challenge will be to find the right partner to support your visions for the next three years and beyond.

Title: The Document & Records Management Overview 2011
Date: Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Time: 12:00 PM - 12:30 PM EST

This is a 30-minute presentation that will conclude with a short Q&A session, so bring your own questions.

You can register here:

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/764688329

• Vendors - of all sizes - can be bought and sold, merged, or shut down completely
• Employees get hired and fired - bringing new ideas and taking their ideas elsewhere
• Open source projects merge, fork, or stop innovating
• Products can be updated rapidly, occasionally, or not at all
• Updates can be minor, major, or complete overhauls

When purchasing new technology, you should always assess the risk of the product or project and vendor partner from which you are purchasing. We've redesigned our Cross-Check chart to make it even easier for you to make this risk assessment.

Ultimately you need to find a vendor that is a good fit for your needs in terms of usability, technical capability, and price. Beyond that, you need to assess the vendor itself, and consider where it's going. You also need to know about pending changes to any specific tool, which can have an enormous impact on your implementation.

For example, If a vendor is due to release a major upgrade to its product (and the product itself is a relatively small portion of the vendor's business), and at the same time the vendor is in acquisition negotiations, this would represent a high risk to you, the buyer. However, that's only a presumption; deeper investigation could reveal that the upgrade is a relatively smooth and productive one, and that the pending acquisition may in fact enhance both focus and R&D investment into this particular product.

Starting this week we'll be releasing new market analyses, complete with the new Cross-Checks in all of our technology areas. In each of these releases we'll explain what we're seeing in the market and why we place each vendor in a particular risk area. As always, there's no "magic" or "leading" segment.  You'll want to find the right fit for your needs. Our evaluations can help.

Subscribers, you will get the new Market Analyses included as part of your subscription.

But beyond technical differentiations, a vendor's ability to thrive within the environment of a particular industry vertical does sometimes matter. The higher education space is one such sector where the ability to navigate that particular environment can become as important as the technical solution.

Colleges and universities are generally characterized by:

• Many departments, operating independently, with mountains of unstructured content that they almost never need to share with other departments
• Some modest structured content that does span departments, like faculty bios, course descriptions, and campus events
• A central communications department tasked with maintaining school-wide brand consistency
• Processes, content types, and skill-sets that vary greatly from department to department
• High turnover among content contributors, as students often get tasked with updating content
• Smallish IT service departments tasked with maintaining many other critical systems including identity, security, course, admissions, as well as the other typical back-office functions like accounting
• A somewhat higher-than-average level of politicking, albeit with a cultural bias towards consensus-based decision-making (read: high ratio of discussion to action)

The good news for higher education buyers is that there are several companies in the Web CMS space who excel at working within this sort of environment.  To be sure, this is partly due to those vendors developing sales and marketing acumen in higher education. But in some measure those vendors can also claim relevant implementation competency as well.

In each of our vendor and product evaluations we are careful to address the areas where we see the products fitting best, both technically and experientially. If you are in the higher education space, you should already know that it pays to do your homework...

Often the most influential stakeholder is the person who holds the most power within the enterprise. And most times this directly correlates to the person responsible for the budget. I have seen first-hand stakeholder votes effectively ending in a 5 to 1 tie where the person in the minority holds the purse strings. 

In fact, it's very common for product selection stakeholder teams to be comprised solely of high-level management folks, none of whom will ever actually use the system.

A project's ultimate success is going to be determined by whether or not content managers and web marketing specialists can effectively use the CMS to do their jobs. When assembling your team of stakeholders who will be making any selection decision, make sure you include the folks at the lower ends of the org charts who will actually be using the system, creating an environment where their voices are heard.

To be sure, not all stakeholders are created equal, and thus they need to be managed differently.  Still, the best stakeholder teams are those with a representative blend of management and system users.

I thought I'd share our answer for those who might be wondering the same:

1. First, we talk to customers like you. Your experiences with vendors and technologies form the bedrock of our research and analysis.
2. We debrief consultants and systems integrators who work with multiple competing offerings. They are typically in an excellent position to contrast different vendor approaches.
3. We do real, in-depth demos with vendors, and not just PowerPoint-fueled "briefings." Where it makes sense and adds value, we will test tools hands-on ourselves.
4. We track the same customers, integrators, and vendors for years at a time. This gives us a unique longitudinal perspective on trends and tendencies.
5. We rotate analysts covering a particular tool from time to time, to bring fresh perspectives to vendors and platforms.

If you are a customer, consultant, or systems integrator of one of the more than 150 content technology vendors and products we cover and would like to share your experiences, we'd love to talk to you. Just contact us for details.

This is our fifth year in a row trying to read the future (our first since we changed the company name from CMS Watch to Real Story Group). If you'd like to see how we've done previously, you can view past predictions here: 2010, 2009, 2008, and 2007.

We think 2011 will be characterized by enterprises pushing back against vendor lock-in, as we describe in today's press release.

1) "Bring Your Own Device" policies will push HTML5 adoption for mobile access to enterprise applications
Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) policies will challenge the device-specific enterprise app marketplace and push critical mass behind HTML5 adoption. This will have significant impact on WCM (publishing) and ECM (document access) in particular.

2) Content-rich customers will rebel against Web CMS marketing spins
While Web Content Management vendors will focus on newer and sexier marketing spins (such as WEM), content-rich customers will rebel against marketing spins and demand that attention be paid to traditional publishing-oriented challenges such as multi-site management and standards-based authoring.

3) Microsoft will turn to partners to fix SharePoint shortcomings
As shortcomings in the platform emerge, Microsoft will shift its SharePoint strategy to push the ISV partner channel strongly since Microsoft can't fix these issues until SharePoint 2013.

4) The top end of the Web CMS market will be redefined
The top end of the WCM market will get redefined, as vendors such as Adobe and Tridion (and a host of European vendors) move up, and IBM, Open Text, EMC, and Autonomy will move down - and out.

5) Intranet community managers will adopt public social functionality
Intranet community managers will explore the adoption of public social media community features, including badges, laddering, and specialized forum applications.

6) SaaS vendors will try to separate from "The Cloud"
SaaS vendors will struggle to crawl out from under "cloud" confusion. By prematurely associating themselves with PaaS and IaaS vendors to try to gain marketing sheen from the "cloud" term, they have confused prospects, especially those that were skeptical about apps (as opposed to infrastructure) in the cloud.

7) Buyers will have a greater acceptance of newer standards
Buyers will have a greater appetite for certain newer standards, such as OpenSocial, Activitystrea.ms, CMIS, and HTML5. At the same time, DoD 5015 and MoReq will become increasingly irrelevant.

8) Case Management will become the leading application from high-end ECM vendors
Case Management will predominate in the high end of the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) market with the rapid introduction of advanced analytics added into the equation.

9) Digital Asset Management vendors will greatly expand video management capabilities
Digital Asset Management (DAM) vendors will greatly expand video management capabilities. The functionality for managing audio and video within the browser is growing, and will continue to proliferate in 2011.

10) E-mail will remain the world's de-facto enterprise document repository and workflow system
The vendor community will gradually accept that email remains the world's de-facto enterprise document repository and workflow system, and will start to develop solutions to embrace that paradigm.

11) Portal software will increasingly produce services for other portals
As organizations start to have multiple portals (as opposed to having one, single portal in the past), portal software will need to expose its own services to other portals in the same way that it expects other software to expose their services.

12) Specialized talent around managing content will begin to migrate out of large corporations
Specialized talent around managing content will begin to migrate out of large corporations and into vendor or integrator professional services, or it will move to specialized vertical offerings - like electronic health records - or horizontal, like business process management.

It's very easy to get caught up in the hype....

"Web CMS is dead."

"Websites as we’ve known them are no longer relevant - all visitors want to engage with you."

"You must have social elements on your site."

"All companies are looking for tools to learn from their website visitors."

"Web content should be coming from several integrated systems, not one Web CMS."

Now don't get me wrong – I think these are all worthy goals and some organizations are doing these things successfully.  However, in the real world most organizations are simply grappling with the more basic problem of gaining some control of their content, and empowering their employees to manage this content in responsible ways.

Over the last year, I've helped numerous research customers select new content technologies and as a rule, I begin each interaction by asking the project stakeholders, what their criteria is for success. It may be alarming to hear, but answers are almost invariably along the lines of:

"I just want Mary in the Marketing department to be able to make a change on the pages she owns without having to call us."

"I just want to be able to edit the home page without doing any HTML coding."

"I want to be able to know which content I can archive or delete."

"I need an audit trail of who modified each piece of content."

"I want to be able to cut and paste from Word and not get crappy code inserted on my pages."

Webmasters still exist and they are plentiful. WYSIWYG editors are still really important (and frustrating!). Companies typically rely heavily on the person (or two) who knows some HTML.

Just like anyone else I find  it is easy to get caught up in the sexy demos from Ektron, SDL Tridion, CoreMedia, or other Web CMS vendors, but as an analyst and advisor I can't lose sight of the fact that many buyers are not ready to do anything more than the basics. The fact is, they may never be ready, as many are simply looking for the fundamental tools that allow them to execute on core business functions.  And very often, basic is far from simple.

To paraphrase... "Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before. Does a CMS need all this stuff? What if good a CMS, perhaps, just a little means enough."

In addition to this, today we reached something of a milestone with more than 4000 people coming to download the ECM Maturity Model, a truly remarkable figure when you stop to think about it. The decision to make the original model completely open source and free was definitely the right one, as public and private sector alike have been able to simply download the free PDF without charge or obstacle, and they have definitely done in style!

All of us here at Real Story Group have been practitioners in our own right prior to becoming analysts, and our work is centered solely on helping buyers and end users so the maturity model makes perfect sense. ECM is complex and bewildering at times, and we have seen an enormous need for a tool that quickly helps you get a grip on where you are now and where you need to go in the future.

Progressing the model further remains a challenge though. We have not always be great at following up with the community as we would have liked. For those willing to roll up their sleeves and help, we do welcome you. Frankly the model is not going to progress much further by our efforts alone. That being said, it's in a pretty good state at the moment, and compared to others out there we can be fairly bold in stating that we believe it to be the deepest and most comprehensive available, and we plan to keep it that way - and keep it free.

So, with your help, a more comprehensive Version 3.0 update will come in time. But for now we will have a little celebration at the milestone, and look forward to hearing more of your stories and feedback regarding your use of the model with anticipation.

Here at the Real Story Group, we are constantly trying to cut through sales and marketing hype so that you, the CM technology buyer can make the right choice for your enterprise. Our evaluation research is based primarily through one-on-one interviews of CM technology buyers, users, and implementers. We get great insight through these qualitative interviews, but we recognize that it is also good to get a view of the big-picture trends and challenges facing content management professionals.

This year, CM Pros (http://cmprofessionals.org/), the international content management community of practice, is doing a quantitative survey to try to capture the pulse of the community. I encourage you to take five minutes to complete the survey here: http://cmstate.com/. The results will be released at next week's CM Pros Summit in San Francisco.

One of the challenges that we know face web-focused CM Pros on a daily basis, is the question of "How do I know if it is time for a new Web CMS?" Tomorrow, Tony Byrne will be conducting a free webinar that addresses this issue with advice on good reasons to make a switch, and some reasons you should never use to justify a switch.

There is still time to join us by registering here:

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/450336320

In addition to asking questions during the webinar, you can participate in the discussion via the back-channel on Twitter by using the hashtag: #RSGwebinar

We'll be reprising the session at this year's Info360: AIIM Expo and Conference in Philadelphia, PA on Tuesday April 20 from 4:05-4:50 PM.

This session -- based loosely on ESPN's Pardon the Interruption -- will be a fast-paced debate exploring a variety of controversial ECM-related issues and trends. We'll have our own list of topics, but we encourage you to bring some of your own to the session too.

I'll be hosting the debate and the IQ Business Group's Dan Elam has graciously agreed to join The Real Story Group's own Alan Pelz-Sharpe once again as debaters.

If you are attending Info360, this session is the perfect way to end Day One. I assure you that it will be unlike any other session you attend. Don't worry, there is still time to register. Hope to see you there!

For those of you unfamiliar with this format, the concept is simple. Audience members bring their toughest, thorniest, most intractable content technology conundrum or content management project challenge to the session. A team of experienced consultants will compete to offer you the best advice in 2 minutes or less. The twist, though, is that we'll use noise-canceling headphones to make sure the consultants cannot hear the answers that the other consultants give. So we'll hear clever, insightful, likely controversial, and sometimes entertaining answers to your questions.

The real winner of the session is the audience members. Not only do you get some great consulting advice, the attendee who is deemed to have submitted the toughest problem will win a prize.

This year, we have a new crop of brave consultants to take on our own Alan Pelz-Sharpe. This year, Alan will be joined by:

• Laurence Hart: Director of Technology Solutions for Washington Consulting, Inc.
• Greg Clark: Founding Principal of C3 Associates Inc

We hope you will join us at this session. In the meantime, you can follow Laurence (@piewords), Greg (@GregClarkC3), and Alan (@eiwatch) on Twitter. Feel free to send them some tough questions/challenges as practice!

As we continue to grow globally, we're looking for an account executive in the UK or Europe to help manage new and existing customer relationships in the region. (BTW, for us, "customers" mean you the technology buyer and implementer, never vendors.)

You can read more about this opportunity here.

"So, what is the best system out there?"

This of course leads to a long discussion about how -- when it comes to selecting a Web CMS, ECMS, Document Management system, Enterprise Portal, DAM system, or Search and Information Access system -- there is no best vendor or product. As readers of our head-to-head evaluation research know, we never declare a best product; rather we rank products on their suitability to address the needs of specific scenarios.

Explaining this approach to people who expect to find a best-in-class for everything can be challenging. Over the years we've come up with a multitude of metaphors to help us explain. My colleague, Theresa Regli, recently recorded this video using one of her favorite analogies.

Selecting the right enterprise software is a lot like selecting the right wine to have with dinner.

If you need help selecting the right content technology for your enterprise, check out our research, download a free sample, or give us a call. If you need help selecting the right wine with dinner, you'll have to contact Theresa directly!