Feature Article | Real Story Group

Twenty Leaders to Watch in 2004

By Tony Byrne at 2004-01-27 00:00:00 |

Welcome to our 2nd annual "PeopleWatch" list, where CMSWatch identifies 20 people who could make a difference on the CMS landscape in 2004. Some write columns that are closely watched by CMS analysts like us. Others hold key positions in software companies for whom 2004 will represent a critical year in their impact on the industry as a whole.

We'll be watching, and maybe so should you...

Mark Baker, Principal, Analecta Communications
A longtime Omnimark/Stilo specialist, Mark Baker has become one of the more perceptive commentators you'll find on managing structured content and the proper role of XML in an editorial environment. Though he has strong technical credentials, Baker's real gift is addressing issues from a writer's perspective. Check out his lucid presentation on content re-use vs. single sourcing...
"Re-use is Not Single Sourcing" (PDF)
Peter Brown, Head of Information Resources Management, European Parliament
Oh boy does the European Parliament have an Information Architecture problem: the different languages, the multivariate legislation, the record-keeping requirements, and so on... Who better to solve it than the author of Information Architecture with XML? Here is one of the first real test cases of the semantic web -- Brown's team is mapping new relationships in previously uncharted areas...
Read More About Their Journey
Mark Fasciano, President and CEO, FatWire
FatWire was a smallish CMS vendor when it stumbled upon a windfall. divine's bankruptcy put a longstanding (and well-respected) CMS product, Content Server, on the auction block, and FatWire (with additonal VC backing) pounced. A risky move, perhaps, because FatWire already peddled a similar, Java-based CMS. But with Content Server, FatWire now offers a much more robust platform. Fasciano's challenge in 2004 will be to persuade the installed customer base to upgrade, and prove FatWire's corporate credibility to an increasingly diligent marketplace...
Check out FatWire
Frank Gilbane, CEO Bluebill Advisors
Every truly worthy community boasts a genuine eminence grise. For the content management analyst community, that person is surely Frank Gilbane. From his perch at Bluebill Advisors, Frank publishes the Gilbane Report, organizes the Gilbane Conference on Content Management conferences, and serves as advisor to the XML & e-business Integration Forum and Documation events in France. Look for an interview with Gilbane in these pages later this year...
Read the Gilbane Report
Dana Hallman, Content Management Program Lead, OCSC/FirstGov, U.S. General Services Administration
No one knows how many public-facing web pages the U.S. federal government publishes today. Estimates range from 60-80 million, just for the civilian sector. Uncle Sam clearly has a serious web content management challenge. Fortunately, a growing cadre of civil servants is beginning to tackle the problem, working agency by agency to improve the way electronic information is disseminated to citizens. One emerging leader in the group is Dana Hallman of FirstGov.gov, who coordinates a cross-agency effort to improve web content management practices...
Peruse FirstGov
Erik M. Hartman, CEO, Hartman Communicatie BV
If you want to understand the CMS scene in Europe, talk to Erik Hartman. As a consultant, analyst, and publisher Hartman tracks the European CMS landscape from his company's offices in Zaltbommel. Hartman is working with Dutch government on CMS strategies for public sites, and his portal on CMS topics is very well-regarded (among those who speak Dutch -- Erik promises an English version of the CMS Overview shortly)...
Check Out Hartmann's CMS Portal (in Dutch)
Jim Howard, CEO, CrownPeak Technologies
For hosted CMS vendors like CrownPeak, it is the best of times and the toughest of times. The best of times because CMS buyers are turning to ASP solutions in droves. The toughest of times because those same customers are looking for interactive tools and capabilities far beyond basic web content management, and they want those other features outsourced too. This puts big pressure on hosted providers to build partner networks to provide holistic solutions. Jim Howard at CrownPeak has been especially aggressive in lining up other ASPs to work together for big customers...
Visit CrownPeak
Vernon Imrich, CTO, Percussion Software
As a self-described "pure" XML vendor and early adopter of Web Services, Percussion Software necessarily must undertake more than its share of evangelizing. Chief proselytizing duties fall to CTO Imrich. He does a good job of connecting Percussion's technical prowess to broader industry trends. His challenge -- and Percussion's -- is to make a stronger case for re-use in a world drowning in unstructured content...
Check out Percussion Rythmyx
The In-house Guru, at a Major Enterprise Near You
Enterprises everywhere are trying to consolidate their CMS projects and deliver integrated content management, often as a central service. But this is actually quite hard. More than reliable or scalable software, it requires CMS-specific expertise close at hand. Behind every successful "ECM" project, we almost always see an experienced in-house guru, because while it's one thing to extend an enterprise-wide FileNet or Interwoven license to three new departments, it's entirely a different matter for those departments to obtain real value from what will surely comprise a significant implementation and learning curve. That's where in-house gurus all over the world are stepping up to provide project templates, content inventory and modeling tools, and migration advice. There might be one at your company; perhaps you should find her before you begin a new CMS project...
John Mancini, President, AIIM
Does "ECM" actually mean anything? AIIM, the grand old imaging association now reborn as the "Enterprise Content Management Association," seems to think so. AIIM helpfully points out that ECM does not represent a technology but rather, a set of inter-related professional disciplines. We agree. Mancini will have to work hard to keep the organization's focus on propagating best practices at a time when software vendors increasingly dominate industry messaging...
Consider Joining AIIM
Jane McConnell, senior consultant, NetStrategyJmc
Since 1997, McConnell has commuted monthly from her home in southern France to Paris, where she hosts "Executive Working Breakfasts" for website decision-makers from major French corporations. Over baguettes and good coffee, they discuss the challenges of running large, distributed intranets and public sites, many of them pan-European and multilingual. McConnell, not surprisingly, has become something of an expert in the management of multinational portals and intranets. She also has a thing or two to say (in French or English) about the CMS marketplace in France...
Check out McConnell's Work
Conleith O'Connell, CTO, Vignette
Like most of its peers, CMS vendor Vignette shrunk dramatically during the dot-com bust. The company is growing again, largely through acquisitions. This creates a two-fold engineering challenge: integrating new products and development teams, while back-filling Vignette's ambitious V7 web content management solution. The latter represented a complete code overhaul from V6, but, not surprisingly, was quite undercooked at initial release and remains a bit too pink in the middle for our liking. CTO Conleith O'Connell -- one of Vignette's original developers -- represents the company on various standards bodies and speaks frequently to external audiences. We think in 2004 he'll have his work cut out for him at home...
Visit Vignette
Michael Olson, President and CEO, Sleepycat Software
Sleepycat Software supports Berkeley DB, a nearly ubiquitous embeddable database. Under Olson, the company has aggressively expanded into related opportunities, and the Sleepycat's vaunted engineering team recently released an embeddable XML database. In a world where many ECM vendors (and some open-source CMS packages) ship with their own proprietary "object store" repositories, we applaud the advent of a robust, open-source, embeddable XML data store. Nevertheless, adoption of native XML databases for CMS implementations has been slow -- it will be up to Olson and others to make the case for the benefits of native XML repositories...
Check out Berkeley DB XML
Rob Page, CEO, Zope Corporation
Sometimes open-source guys wear suits. For Rob Page, ex-U.S. Marine and head of Zope Corporation (founders of the open-source Zope platform), 2004 will likely be "all business" as the company sheds some of its extraneous Python R&D work to focus on content management modules. While much of the global Zope community's CMS development energy shifts to the lighterweight (but quite usable) Plone spin-off, Zope Corporation is placing a big bet on semi-commercial software add-ons -- under "visible source" licensing terms -- targeted for specific industries, like media and higher education. Software, unlike professional services, promises real equity valuations, which should please Zope's VC backers. Page will have to balance Zope.org's openness, quality, and growing cachet with Zope.com pitches to CMS prospects to shell out hard cash for value-add license fees...
Read about the Zope Corp.'s Products
Brendan Quinn, Technical Architect, BBC New Media Applications
When the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) began a major CMS project, it reached half-way around the world for help. BBC tapped Australian Brendan Quinn (note the cricket-watcher's tan), an early CMS guru with particular experience implementing big packages at major news media outlets. Quinn joined a team that is currently implementing a complex, multichannel CMS project which may become nearly unprecedented in scope. Quinn and others from the BBC team will be traveling over the next couple of years to talk about it. Try to see them...
Check out the breadth of BBC online properties
Charlie Reitzel, Project Administrator, HTML Tidy
Charlie Reitzel is part of a small community of developers that manage "HTML tidy" -- an open-source utility for tidying up HTML and converting it to XHTML. Run as a client, Tidy parses and cleans all your HTML -- making the tool an essential adjunct to any serious Web content migration. Then operating on your server, it can help keep your new content nice and... well...tidy. You can buy books and read scores of white papers about how to get more value from your content in an organized repository, but this little tool from Reitzel and his collaborators could save you even more time and money down the road...
The Tidy Project Page at SourceForge
Lou Rosenfeld, Information Architecture Guru
Along with noted IA guru Peter Morville, Rosenfeld wrote the award-winning "Polar Bear" book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. But now Lou is working on a new and perhaps more ambitious publishing project centered around "Enterprise Information Architecture." We're not sure exactly what that phrase means yet, but Rosenfeld's answer could have a sizable impact on the success rate of nascent ECM projects everywhere...
Find out more about Rosenfeld's EIA Seminars
Dan Ryan, Senior Vice President, Marketing and Business Development, Stellent
Stellent seems to cultivate an earnest, engineering-oriented culture, sometimes to a fault. Despite being a marketing guy, Dan Ryan fits right into the Stellent mold: he talks straight and levels directly. Ryan's challenge in 2004 will be to better communicate and differentiate his company's offerings, without coming off like some of Stellent's slicker competitors...
Visit Stellent
Jon Udell, "Strategic Developer" Columnist, InfoWorld
Although not explicitly his beat, few columnists cover content management with the technical depth and breadth that John Udell applies. He typically doesn't analyze specific CMS vendors, but rather, takes a hard look at the underlying tools and approaches that are changing the way organizations collaborate and publish across a variety of different software platforms. Udell's presentation at OSCOM 3, "CMS Lessons from Grade School," could become a classic...
Read Udell's Grade School Presentation

Michael Wechner, CEO, Wyona, and Co-founder, OSCOM
Michael Wechner scored a coup of sorts when he and Swiss compatriot Gregor Rothfuss converted a smallish XML publishing system, "Wyona," into an Apache subproject called Lenya. Lenya is chugging along, but Wechner's more important work, perhaps, has come in the form of evangelizing open-source CMS solutions more generally. He has been an effective and articulate spokesperson for the Open Source Content Management association, OSCOM, that Wechner co-founded with several other CMS project leaders...
Visit Oscom