IBM's Sell-off to HCL: 4 Take-aways
If you license one or more of these IBM platforms, you have good reason to feel a bit queasy right now....
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Excerpt from the IBM: Silverpop Engage evaluation:"Silverpop can collect basic data from public social channels and add them to your contact database. However, it does not..."
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If you license one or more of these IBM platforms, you have good reason to feel a bit queasy right now....
Myths are important because they allow us to share common stories. They often have a foundation in the truth, but in a commercial context, they can become disconnected from reality...
You won't find a single, dominant player. In fact, some of the larger vendors have proven slower to adopt software "consumerization" practices....
Despite many similarities, Liferay and IBM WebSphere are quite different different and suited for divergent use cases....
In this edition we now include a full-blown evaluation of Facebook Workplace against our strict criteria....
We just released an advisory paper "Contrasting the Major Marketing Clouds" for RSG research subscribers. This brief is an excellent way for marketing / technology executives to quickly gain a comparative understanding of the leading marketing clouds....
The trajectory a vendor tracks along the change vector shifts from year to year and has significant implications for you as a technology buyer....
What's new and improved? Updates to three vendor evaluations - Adobe, IBM Marketing Cloud, and Marketo. Plus updated descriptions of the strategic considerations....
The popularity of Slack, particularly on the user engagement front (it may not really be ready for large enterprise use) — a group chat tool developed with a mobile-first design ethos — underscores that mobile collaboration in the digital workplace remains an unmet need. Traditional collaboration vendors have lagged here but are scrambling to catch-up....
This move ostensibly takes Box one more step away from simple share-and-sync services towards more complex enterprise-level document management. Just remember that Relay is not a full fledged BPM or advanced workflow tool, even it it suits more workaday workflows that often went underappreciated in automation projects...
As with most other terms in technology marketplaces, there are many variations and meanings of decoupling. Let's look at two general variants:...
Both the tech press and the mainstream publications gush over this tool as if it were the next best thing since sliced bread, but Slack is unproven for enterprise use....
As a potential customer, understand that Google is signaling serious intent but that they are still in the early stages of that journey. Even for the mighty Google ambition does not automatically guarantee success...
Think of one of the great tennis rivalries of our time. Federer vs. Nadal. At the French Open, you'd bet on Nadal. But at the Wimbledon.....
This is a comprehensive overhaul to the report, not just in terms of content but also in structure and evaluation criteria...
Get a sneak peek of updated evaluations of Salesforce, Oracle, IBM Silverpop, Act-On, Infusionsoft, and Vuture...
For Red Hat customers who invested in EPP, this is bad news. Red Hat will support you until March 2018, but effectively, this is a dead product and you should start looking at alternatives. It's a lesson, too, that "open source" does not always mean more stable or durable...
So if you are already an IBM customer — meaning you have invested in IBM WebSphere Portal and WCM and have entitlements for MobileFirst— this is good news for you. But remember that while this combined solution can target a lot of scenarios, it remains a complex set of platforms...
When a vendor acquires another product and puts (vendors will say "integrate") that tool within an existing “suite,” it usually comes with a key side effect: overlapping features across multiple products within the suite...
Contrary to many observers, we find product evolution proceeding fairly rapidly in this space; the full paper explains more...
Portal technology continues to play an important role in many enterprise architectures. They are a better fit than other types of tools for enterprises that require...
Consult the report for detailed evaluations but here is a sneak peek of the updates....
Let me share a dirty little secret within the portal industry...
Oracle and Salesforce represent two very different vendors that share a vision of integrated digital marketing, but come to this space from very separate directions...
So if you want to do "end-to-end digital marketing", should you go with one of these suites or opt for point solutions?...
The name of the game for digital marketing vendors has been acquisitions and more acquisitions -- as you can perhaps gauge from the multiple product names across the vendors here....
In our last update to RSG's Marketing Automation and Social evaluations, we had mentioned that the company is a prime acquisition target as one of the few remaining major independent marketing automation vendors. All the big ones -- Oracle (Eloqua and Responsys), Salesforce.com (ExactTarget and Pardot) and Adobe (Neolane) have already been active in M&A in this marketplace and so in that sense, this wasn't a big surprise...
This week, we release a new Version 10 of our ECM research. It's a major release and you'll find a lot that's new. Below, I highlight the key changes...
Your enterprise salespeople are increasingly mobile. More than ever, they need access to collateral — brochures, presentations, contracts, pricing charts, and so forth — while on the move. How can you provide effective access to the latest documents for salespeople who aren’t tethered to your internal enterprise network?...
A common question keeps popping up among our subscribers: when to use built-in services within a portal technology platform, versus opting for a third-party solution. Sometimes this question arises in connection with workflow services...
The latest version 22.1 release of our Web Content and Experience Management report is now available....
These segments are increasingly overlapping, as Cloud-based File Sharing (CFS) vendors build better Document Management (DM) capabilities (such as library services) and DM vendors build (or acquire) cloud-based file-sharing, sync, and lightweight collaboration services...
The digital marketing technology world moves quickly. To keep up with the changes, we have just released a major update to our Digital Marketing Technology vendor evaluations...
Nearly all the tools in the marketplaces we cover claim to excel in "collaboration" services. Who could possibly not?
To some extent the vendors are justified, since collaboration has many flavors. For example, enterprises looking to create more collaborative digital environments often ask us if they should use their...
Where's the fine print? You can creatively define a category that eliminates everyone else and preside over a parallel universe in which only you reside....
Last week, we released Version 10 of our Enteprise Portals and Content Integration evaluation research...
As part of our ongoing evaluations of Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software vendors, we’ve updated our detailed chapters on Google Apps, IBM Connections, and NewsGator as well as added Moxie software to our line up...
Portal technology still plays a key role in many business scenarios, and as a result, portal vendors have not been sitting idle....
Enterprises will naturally question: since the functionality these cloud-based tools provide is really a subset of the larger problem document management tools like Documentum seek to solve, why not just use of the traditional ECM or Collaboration tools for file sharing instead of selecting a new set of tools?...
I continue to be amazed at the frequency of how often this question comes up: "Should we use a Portal platform to build out our Intranet / Customer Extranet / Fill in your scenario], or not?...
Organizations seeking to enable employees to access enterprise applications (HR, Intranet, Collaboration, ERP, etc.) via mobile devices must grapple with two broad alternatives:...
We just released version 21.1 of our Web Content and Experience Management (WCXM) Evaluation Stream today, in which we’ve updated several evaluations and added two new WCXM vendors to the list...
Today's marketers can chose from a myriad of technologies for their marketing toolkit. Among other things, Digital Marketing tools can provide...
In my last post about Oracle's Collective Intellect acquisition, I wrote:
... I suspect Oracle will make more acquisitions in this space and then package these multiple acquisitions as a platform...
Oracle did not disappoint...
In terms of buzzwords, digital marketing technology lies at the intersection of Cloud and Big Data and because of that, bigger infrastructure vendors are slowly building capabilities in this area...
In the good old days, when your firm's Enterprise Portal was a "gateway to the world," the thinking was that you needed to standardize on one single Portal platform, and perhaps even on single enterprise portal instance.
However, as we all know, that's not really very practical (both for technical and organizational reasons), and multiple portal platforms have always proliferated within organizations...
This is the most common question that my colleagues and I encounter from our customers who are in the process of evaluating options for building a web property.
The reason is not difficult to find....
We've just updated our Enterprise Portals research with updates to our reviews of IBM WebSphere and Liferay.
Within the Portals marketplace, IBM and Liferay seem to be the ones that most frequently appear on customer short lists...
Train and Metro networks around the world are perpetually under construction, with new lines getting added regularly and existing ones getting a makeover. We are also adding a new line called "Digital Marketing" to our own Vendor Map.
As I noted in this blog post, Digital Marketing can cover a panoply of different tools and technologies for Marketers. In our new research, we will cover vendors that focus on the following aspects of Digital Marketing...
I enjoyed an excellent day in Oxford last week speaking (and listening to the other speakers) at a CMS Expert Group round table event. Many topics of interest emerged, but the one that underlay several discussions -- and is also close to my heart -- was, "When is a Web Content Management project not a Web Content Management project?"...
Last week, IBM acquired erstwhile partner Worklight, an Israel-based vendor.
Worklight is a platform for developing mobile applications that enables you to build...
We've just released a major update (Version 4.0) to our Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software Report, which evaluates nineteen Enterprise 2.0 vendors. Our subscribers will see several new vendors under review as well as an overhauled set of evaluation criteria...
Recently I fulfilled a lifelong ambition to be an actor (minor parts - small films) and I finally came to understand the meaning of the thespian question, "What is my motivation?"
It is an important question that we probably don't ask enough, and buyers might want to ask the same of ECM (Enterprise Content Management) suppliers. Yes, seriously...
Perceptive Software, which was acquired by Lexmark a while back, has announced a new product for Document Output Management (DOM) called ModusOne. It is a separate product that can work with or without ImageNow, Perceptive's Document Management tool that we evaluate in our Document Management Report...
Content Acquisition (or Ingestion) is an important step in many business processes. A form is a common way to acquire content or information for these business processes. Forms are everywhere - you fill up a form to buy an insurance policy, apply for a visa or request a new home loan....
It's a discussion that reoccurs regularly enough with Real Story Group Document Management (ECM) subscribers -- how do I get skilled ECM staff? It's a tough question to answer...
There's a longstanding question about how effectively Big Blue can evolve Connections...
Capture + workflow = ECM.
It's a simple formula that works most of the time in enterprise environments. It works for the simple reason that most electronic documents that require organizational attention typically are captured and proceed down a structured workflow...
In Boston, USA for most of the month of May, I've been following with interest a local story about former Massachusetts Speaker of the House Sal DiMasi. A federal grand jury recently indicted the former Speaker and three of his associates on charges of conspiracy, wire fraud, and mail fraud, after DiMasi allegedly wielded his power to procure multimillion-dollar contracts for a software company, Cognos...
The initially meteoric rise of Second Life gave visibility to a (mostly) new crop of vendors looking to apply "immersive" or "virtual" experiences to enterprise collaboration...
This week, OpenText released version 8.1 of their WCM product. It features new media management capabilities, better support for mobile devices (result of their weComm acquisition) and some other enhancements. But more importantly, they...
This past week in Los Angeles I spent a little time talking with three well established ECM (Enterprise Content Management) integrators and resellers. All three had started out business more than ten years ago, and had initially specialized in building and implementing solutions for the likes of Documentum, FileNet, Hyland, and OpenText...
Unlike most acquisitions in the Content Technology Marketplaces that we cover, this one actually seems like one in which there is not much overlap between two vendors' offerings. Antenna Software, a provider of mobile applications mainly for enterprises, acquired Volantis Systems, a company focused on delivering content to mobile browsers, concentrated more on the consumer Internet...
We have released an update to our Portals and Content Integration Report. In this release, we've updated the following evaluations...
There is no more challenging an environment for true ECM (Enterprise Content Management) than that of healthcare...
We've just updated our evaluations of five Web CMS offerings, and added a new one (Atex Polopoly) to our report...
Today we published our analysis of the 2011 Document & Records Management marketplace, including our "Cross-Check" review of buyer risk...
Just as Microsoft has its own very distinctive approach and definition for ECM, so too does Oracle. In fact as time goes on, Oracle's approach to ECM is becoming more individual and distinctive...
Of late, many WCM as well as Portal vendors are touting their capabilities for more closely aligning content management and presentation management. Frankly, I wonder what took them so long. After all, what good is content if it cannot be delivered and consumed? In my opinion...
"Transactional document management" is a term not used often enough in my opinion. For it is, as the phrase goes, the "meat and potatoes" of ECM...
Last week, Oracle announced its acquisition of Art Technology Group (ATG) for $ 1 Billion. At this price, it might appear smaller than other, better-known acquisitions such as those of Sun Microsystems ($ 7.4 B), BEA Systems ($ 8.5 B), and PeopleSoft ($ 10.5 B in 2004), yet it's an important acquisition, nevertheless...
I find traveling and speaking at industry events a huge opportunity to engage with people and get a feel for what is really going on in the broader user community. And in my third trip to Brazil for the ECMShow I can report with confidence that a whole lot is going on here...
In a new Advisory Briefing for our SharePoint and ECM subscribers, we evaluate how the CMIS connector targets different use cases where SharePoint needs to inter-operate or co-exist with other applications....
Today IBM announced the acquisition of Datacap. It was no surprise really as Big Blue has been talking for a while about enhancing their overall imaging offering, to better leverage advanced case management...
Yesterday morning I was reading through Oracle's recently updated price list (yes my Monday mornings really are that exciting). I was thinking that I have long valued the fact that I can access simple, clear and open prices from major vendors like Oracle, Microsoft and IBM. I might occasionally gasp at the prices listed...
I'm in the middle of reviewing feedback for a number of ECM product evaluations that I'm presently updating. The upgrade from minor version to minor version (1.7 to 1.8 etc) is usually heralded by loud marketing cries from the suppliers. Closer inspection though tends to reveal fixes and gaps plugged, rather than anything revolutionary...
IBM announced yesterday that it's acquiring web analytics vendor Coremetrics (dang: just after we last updated our vendor map...)...
Both IBM and now EMC have recently touted their improved Case Management capabilities, so I thought it timely to take a look at this area in a little more detail...
It seems to be acronym soup week, and though we can all be guilty of cooking this particular recipe at times, EMC is becoming a master chef...
This week I have been heads down reviewing RFP responses for a large ECM project. These vendor proposals could give readers the misimpression that the products in a complex suite of modules were all designed on the same drawing board...
Enterprise Mashups are becoming popular as a way to create new, dashboard style applications from existing, often disparate applications and data sources....
When Oracle acquired Stellent in 2006 I thought the best piece of technology they got their hands on was the imaging tools that Stellent had themselves previously acquired from Optika...
We wrote just the other week about the potential of using devices such as Apple's iPad for accessing enterprise documents. What seemed like good idea for the future turns out to be almost in the here and now...
For years now Google has played fast and loose with information confidentiality and privacy issues. As if further proof were needed...
Welcome to the Real Story Group! For my colleagues and I this is an exciting time, and part of a continuing adventure that I hope you will join....
Last week we released some significant updates to our Enterprise Portals Research. The latest research reflects significant changes among new versions of several portal platforms, as well as additional details for all the products we cover...
Yesterday we launched our most recent Enterprise Portals Research. This report critically evaluates 13 portal vendors and products, which we break up into 2 categories:...
Among the various categories of content technologies that we evaluate, Oracle has been very quiet over the past year. For the past two years, actually, Oracle has urged customers and partners to look forward to the "11g" series of upgrades across its various application sets...
This week we updated our collaboration and social computing vendor evaluations. Specifically, we updated the following reviews...
Last week, IBM announced the official release of Lotus Connections 2.5. For me, the main two updates in this social software tool are ...
The past year or so IBM has been promoting the concept of "Agile ECM" in its marketing for FileNet P8. It is an interesting concept both at a marketing and implementation level regardless of whether P8 itself really fits such a label itself...
We have had an interesting internal discussion at CMS Watch the past few days, surrounding the cost of storage for content technology systems. It is a discussion that too few buyers have before embarking on costly...
How can we best understand the broad social software and collaboration vendor marketplace? I'd just been pondering that question when...
IBM surprised Wall Street earlier this month with unexpectedly good Q2 financial results...
Self immolation is a rare, some may say mythical event. Yet in the world of content management it is more common than you might think...
In the past week two open source portal initiatives decided to merge efforts: going forward eXo will now be a part of the Red Hat JBoss Portal...
At CMS Watch we evaluate an awful lot of products, and making sense of all this research can be a challenge....
DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) was originated within IBM, and later adopted by OASIS, yet until now...
The Wall Street Journal reports that IBM is in discussions to buy Sun Microsystems...
Over the years I have heard of many enterprise software customers being audited by enterprise content management (ECM) vendors...
Last week, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office made public a new Microsoft patent application titled "Content Management System and External Data Storage System Data Synchronization."...
Today Autonomy announced that they intend to buy Interwoven....
Since HP acquired Tower Software almost a year ago, I thought it about time to review progress to date...
The ECM world is dominated by EMC, Open Text, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle -- all big vendors with equally big publicity machines to keep their brands and "story" right...
Earlier this year in June, I argued that JSR 286 might be the last portlet standard, mainly due to the lack of attention to the updated specification...
One of the words that makes me most cringe when I hear or see it in vendor marketing is the word scalable...
I'm hearing a lot of chatter among social software cognoscenti about how the looming recession will impact...
SharePoint has been on my mind a lot recently, not least because we have been undertaking...
Today I'm proud to announce the release of the 2009 edition of The ECM Suites Report...
It's often said that the great thing about industry standards is that there are so many of them. Now we have one more...
In a thoughtful post at JavaLobby, developer Ali Loghmani poses a simple but important question: Why is Web UI development so slow?...
I recently had a long and wide-ranging interview with IT Business Edge on the topic of Social Software technologies...
The final release of the updated portlet specification, JSR 286, which came out earlier this month, marked the end of a long process...
Oracle keeps moving down ECM trail with two new acquisitions to add to their growing portfolio....
The full name is actually Enterprise Social Software Report 2008: Networking & Collaboration Within and Beyond the Enterprise...
This morning at the Enterprise 2.0 conference we were treated to a series of semi-structured Social Software demos pitting IBM (Connections) against Microsoft (SharePoint)...
As an "Enterprise-focused" content management analyst, I am asked two basic questions on a regular basis...
A couple recent news items find SAP and IBM both in a bit of legal hot water...
So HP finally made a move into the world of ECM by acquiring Tower Software of Australia...
Blink and you would have missed it -- for lost in the all the headlines of...
Today we released the Enterprise Portals Report 2008, evaluating 16 Enterprise Portal products. Our first take: there is some good news...
At the Gilbane Conference keynote today, execs from ECM vendors Alfresco, Oracle, IBM, and Adobe focussed on -- perhaps inevitably -- Enterprise 2.0...
Our latest web content management technology research suggests that Big Blue is falling behind its major competitors in the Web CMS marketplace...
According to the Danish financial newspaper Børsen, enterprise search vendor Mondosoft is now in liquidation (via Version2)...
People often ask me about new trends beyond simply product roadmaps and flashy functionality. Like everything else in enterprise software, portals are indeed evolving....
Sometimes a relationship ends, only to be rekindled later with the time is riper. Such is the case with Web Content Management (WCM) vendor Day Software and FileNet...
EMC|Documentum's long awaited "D6" was officially announced last week -- though of course it has actually been announced by the firm many times this year at different conferences. Although this official release fills in some of the blanks, there are few surprises. That's not to say this is not a significant event for the sometime market leader - it's a very big event for them - only in the past what Documentum did was a signal for all to follow. The tide has turned somewhat, and Documentum under the ownership of EMC finds itself as much a follower as a leader these days....
According to a recent study by research firm IDC, IBM is leading the Enterprise Portal market in license and maintenance revenue for the 5th consecutive year. Even CNN picked up the news, which illustrates how the media is enthralled with marketshare numbers. We take a somewhat more prosaic view....
Alan Pelz-Sharpe recently cited a brewing backlash against SOA in the enterprise content management world. In the portal market I'm certainly hearing growing concerns about SOA from the user community....
Transactional document management (high-volume throughput of relatively static documents) has long been dominated by IBM and FileNet. EMC today announced that it too wants to compete in this lucrative market. Hence as part of its forthcoming Documentum D6 release, they have announced "TCM" (Transactional Content Management)....
AIIM Expo and Conference 2007, Boston...what a week for CMS Watch! ...
In an attempt to deliver more value out-of-the-box, IBM recently announced 5 new portal accelerators as a part of a new minor release and re-packaging of the WebSphere Portal product....
Although the hype around enterprise portals seems to have subsided, I believe genuine interest remains high. ...
It almost felt like a royal wedding, when news came out that these two big vendors would work together. ...
Yesterday IBM clarified its ECM intentions via a series of analyst briefings. ...
Janus offers a short review of WebSphere Portal in Intelligent Enterprise magazine....
This morning finds me in Orlando, Florida at IBM Lotusphere, a five-day conference with nearly 7,000 attendees, where IBM's main announcement was industry's first business-ready social software, a new platform called Connections, built on...good ol' Lotus. ...
EMC has begun to share publicly some information about the long-awaited Documentum 6, due out in Q3 of this year. Promises of a "....new, streamlined user experience" ought to give you some hint for what it's like to work in Documentum today....
They could, if your website engages in the following practices for which IBM claims U.S. patent [via Tim Bray]....
It's still branded Workplace, but the new version 6.0 of IBM's WWCM is even more tightly linked to WebSphere Portal. ...
Simple question, with not-so-simple answers. Janus and I offered some advice in a recent EDoc Magazine article....
Quietly IBM last month released version 6 of their WebSphere Portal Server. ...
The new Portlet Specification 2.0, aka JSR 286 was just released as first public draft. ...
In news from a joint-venture between SAP and Microsoft, the two companies will launch what they call Duet next month. ...
Ending months of speculation, Linux distributor RedHat will acquire the open source Java company JBoss. ...
Earlier this week IBM shared some high-level details about the upcoming version 6 of the IBM WebSphere Portal Server, due out this summer. ...
In a move to try to win a bigger share in the collaboration market, Microsoft has announced a series of free tools to help customers switch from Lotus Notes/Domino to Exchange and SharePoint....
The best place to find them is on the bulletin boards run by an independent consultant, Pete Raleigh, an indie consultant for IBM Workplace Web Content Management (WWCM) projects....
Longtime readers know that an upgrade from Vignette's V6 to V7 CMS is really a complete product swap that has tempted many licensees to consider alternate packages....
Both IBM and Microsoft are investing heavily in major new releases to their content management and portal product offerings due out next year. ...
IBM is citing an IDC study that posits WebSphere as the marketshare leader among enterprise portals. ...
In How IBM Conned My Execs Out Of Millions, a former project manager at a major U.S. defense contractor details how a mid-sized contract with IBM turned into a nearly bottomless pit of software and services. ...
Kapow Technologies (headquartered in Denmark, but with a big USA presence) today announced version 6.0 of their RoboSuite integration product. ...
IBM DeveloperWorks has published a useful piece on integrating Lotus Domino and IBM Lotus Workplace Web Content Management (ILWWCM). ...
In a continuing series of CMS-related acquisitions, IBM has bought content integration (CI) vendor Venetica....
IBM reportedly plans to support draft Java standard JSR-170 across all its systems....
Much has been made of IBM's acquisition of boutique CMS vendor, Aptrix....
Enterprise Content Integration (ECI) vendor ContextMedia announced a partnership today with IBM to integrate with the latter's DB2 Content Manager product....
IBM's recent announcement that it was finally integrating it's Content Manager application (an established collection of mostly DM and imaging tools) with its WebSphere portal offering prompted some observers to claim that Big Blue was finally staking a claim in the Web Content Management space....
As content production and pubishing product offerings continue to separate in the marketplace, Enterprise Portal and CM vendors are beginning to collaborate more closely. ...
CMSWatch has noted IBM's strategy of pushing its enterprise CM products while partnering with other Web CM vendors to push DB2 and WebSpehere licenses. ...
Unlike Microsoft and Oracle, IBM is trying to avoid competing with its technology partners in the Web CM space (though Enterprise CM is another story...)....