Ian’s Blog on Open Source Marketing

There is a common phrase “a camel is a horse designed by a committee”. Well if that is the case an ECM camel is a suite built through acquisition. The problem is that you get an extra hump you don’t need or worse still two humps that do the same thing and one hump has to go.

On a more serious note the last decade has shown us that when ECM companies expand their suite, new products either take a long time to get integrated or never do. Overlapping products become orphan children starved of resource and left to wither.

When companies pay large amounts for an acquisition they need to get a return on their investment and it is the customer (existing or new) that pays. The customers typically suffers either through:

• Higher license prices
• Higher maintenance costs
• Higher integration costs
• Lower customer service as key people leave
• or paying for support and maintenance on a product that is on life support with little investment

This is in contrast to an ECM industry that is going through:

• Commoditization - Driven primarily by Open Source in the ECM space
• Standardization - Driven by new standards such as CMIS
• Consumerization - Driven by simple mass market social computing interfaces
• Dramatic Cost Reduction - Publicly verifiable figures show this to be in the range of 89% to 96%

As I have previously written,  the open source model operates at a dramatically lower cost and thrives in blue oceans where vendors such as Interwoven have been too complex and expensive. Websites don’t live forever. Many of our customers are existing Interwoven and Vignette customers who have chosen to build new sites on Alfresco and gradually move away from the legacy proprietary vendor. The new world is a heterogeneous one where users choose what is most appropriate for each project.

In acquisition situations such as this customers are taking a big risk staying with an ECM Camel. What products will exist in 6 to 12 months time. Which will be on life-support. Which ones will be in the process of being integrated. Even those that are being integrated come at a cost. A focus in integration means a long wait and a new version with no new functionality that is often less stable than the old version.

Interwoven was a good product in its day and to keep using the analogy a racehorse. Customers need to think about if they want a camel or to move to a modern racehorse that is very different to the one of the 1990’s.

Autonomy adding Interwoven for Governance and Risk Compliance makes sense when adding the WorkSite product which is strong in the legal sector. But what about the Digital Asset Management and Web Content Management humps? Also, what about the two humps of WorkSite and Meridio.

The Credit Crunch and acquisitions such as this make people stand back and think as opposed to just doing business as usual.

The blue ocean just got bigger and the flood gates are opening.

Welcome to a world of:

• Choice
• No Tie-In
• Standards
• Simplicity
• Dramatically Lower Cost

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The Year of the Compliance – I can’t afford not to be compliant but how can I afford to be compliant

With every new year comes a look back at last year. The current monetary crisis will reignite regulation, governance and compliance concerns. What this crisis has taught us is that markets are global and local regulations cannot protect global markets. New global regulations will come into place and need to be enforced globally. From a content management perspective this means:

• Audit everything and everybody in everything they do in every region
• Audit not just documents but also email, instant messages and also social networking when it relates to business
• Audit not just additions or changes but also access
• Enable rapid searching and eDiscovery across not one but all repositories of all types that a person may have accessed
• Make it simple to show the process and rules you have been using and the change control in your systems including your websites

This will require open standards and architectures to support these new requirements and avoid costly highly damaging eDiscovery requests. This “mass” compliance will require systems that are:

• Low cost
• Simple for all users to use
• Simple to rollout on a large scale
• Based on open standards for integration

Then you can address the question in a rational way:

“Can I afford not to be compliant and also how can I afford to be compliant

Prediction for 2009: 2009 will see a resurgence of compliance and an audit everything approach from a content management perspective. This will further drive open standards adoption to enable cross repository access and analysis offering commoditization driving down the cost of content compliance.

The Year of the Consumerization of Buying Enterprise Software – Discover, Try, Buy - with the Wisdom of Crowds

In the 1990’s there was a lack of freely available product information and the only way to access and try an enterprise product was through the sales division of that company. The world has changed and the internet has made:

• Information on a product freely available
• A product download freely available
• Advice on that product freely available
• The opinions of masses of users freely available

The credit crunch is forcing companies to look for value – not just in the cost of software but in the way they evaluate software. Today, to discover a product you go to Google. To get opinion and information you rely on the wisdom of crowds. People are turning away from “the complexity machine” and rewarding simplicity, value and transparency. Tools such as Google trends show in real-time market trends. Masses of blogs offer up-to-date information. Ranking and access allows good information to rise to the top. This is what has driven the success of Wikipedia vs. Encyclopedia Britannica.

Prediction for 2009: Enterprise software acquisition will be consumerized. Companies will “Search” the web, trusted blogs and forums, “Try” the software via download or in the cloud, and ‘Buy” if they like it, typically through a subscription model.

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7. The Year of Consumerization of Enterprise Software

Enterprise software has often been very successful “shelf-ware”, being expensive, difficult to rollout, expensive to scale and difficult for users to learn and want to use. The consumer market and Web 2.0 has shown the way in a number of areas including:

• Simple and intuitive to learn with no training course
• A system that users want to use as opposed to being forced to use
• Low-cost, massive scalability

A study for CIO magazine entitled “Nine out of 10 users said they could work better if they could bring their home computer into work,” points to users finding the web and web 2.0 applications easier to use and more productive than legacy enterprise applications. The iPhone, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, Twitter, Google, WordPress, delicious, Slideshare and Friendfeed will influence enterprise software and expectations as much as they have the internet. Enterprise software will become consumerized, changing the trend of enterprise software funding the consumer market irreversibly. In the 1980s and 1990s enterprises and the military set the pace for technology innovation. Consumer technologies are now increasingly driving technology innovation and IT adoption.

The Consumerization of Enterprise Software

Prediction for 2009: ECM software will become consumerized and as much at home in the home office as the head office. Just like you don’t say software is object-oriented you won’t say software is Web 2.0. It will just be there, inside and outside the enterprise. Interfaces will move to Rich Internet Interfaces such as AJAX, Flex and standards such as RSS, REST, RSS, ATOM, JSON, OpenSearch will become as taken for granted as http and HTML.

8. The Year of the Lean Software – The Development Diet

Every new year has “New Year’s Resolutions” and a diet is often on the list. This year the diet will be in software development. The 1990’s was to software, what junk food is to a weight-loss plan. Bloatware and obesity went hand-in-hand. This century has seen core technology such as Java remain at the server level but lightweight scripting and rapid development become the norm for application development and the antidote to bloated vendors, products and applications. Lightweight development focuses on:

• Simplicity and rapid development
• Lightweight scripting using such as PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, Perl and Python vs. J2EE and .NET
• REST vs. SOAP
• Web scalable vs. Enterprise scalable
• Mashing up internal and external content vs. content from one system

Prediction for 2009: Loosely-coupled scale-out, REST architectures will form the foundation of new systems with web applications developed in lightweight scripting languages delivering mashed-up content into a RIA will be the way forwards in 2009.

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The wiki analysis, similarly to the blog analysis, shows a strong preference for “other” at 60%.

Again, the probable conclusion is that an ECM user, working in an ECM environment, will use the integrated wiki software. This is also reflected in SharePoint wiki usage in a SharePoint environment.

In summary, for the majority of the time the user will prefer the integrated wiki software but if they have a preference they will choose the leading open source Web 2.0 Wiki software – MediaWiki, which powers Wikipedia.

The blog analysis shows a strong preference for “Other” at 63%.

From this data it is possible to draw one of two conclusions. Either “Other” represents a hosted blog being used on the web. The more probable conclusion is that an ECM user, working in an ECM environment, will use the integrated blog software. This is more likely and reflected in SharePoint blog usage in a SharePoint environment.

In summary, for the majority of the time the user will prefer the integrated blog software, but if they have a preference they will choose the leading open source Web 2.0 blog software – WordPress.

Web 2.0 has had a major impact on how users create and access content, particularly from an ease-of-use perspective. One of the goals of the survey was to examine the influence of Enterprise 2.0 technology such as wikis, blogs and portals  on ECM.

The browser or portal analysis shows a strong preference for Browser access at 66%. Open Source ECM users want to recreate the external web experience with either simple browser access or browser access with AJAX or Flex components. If users have a preference for a portal they go for open source leaders such as JBoss or Liferay or a segment of SharePoint portal users want an alternative server and repository.

This week I saw one of the best customer webinars I have ever seen by Neil Armstrong and Tim Bergeron of Activision Inc.

When you say Activision people think of blockbuster games such as “Call of Duty” , “Guitar Hero” and “Marvel Ultimate Alliance”. For a change when I came home my kids were interested in what I had to say.

One of the things I found fascinating was how Activision had chosen to make the web site a strategic part of their marketing, creating product-oriented micro-sites supported by the company brand, but even more-so by the community of followers of the game. Five of the top twenty five software companies are now games companies and their sites represent the future of the corporate website with great, fresh, engaging, community oriented content.

When you look at these types of sites it interesting to think about “a day in the life” of the content that powers these sites:

1. Create Game Information Behind the Firewall - Create videos, stories, images, ratings etc
2. Review and Approve Behind the Firewall
3. Stage the New Website Behind the Firewall - Content is now ready for the public site
4. Deploy the New Website - Intelligently deploy content to a web server, media streaming server and content management system
5. Publish across Multiple Channels - Use simple templates to provide variety, flexibility and an intuitive user experience
6. Manage Digital Assets and Publish across Multiple Channels - Low-resolution Flash for website, High-resolution Quick Time for downloads, Automatic transformations for mobile devices - iPod, CellPhone, PSP
7. Manage Ratings and Publish to Appropriate Channels - Use rating information to match channels to the appropriate population or age range
8. Make it Scale for Millions of Users - Use load balancing, replication and clustering
9. Use Open Source - Like the leading Web 2.0 sites use Linux, MySQL, Alfresco, Tomcat and JBoss AS

Given all of this what are the benefits

• Dramatically Reduced Ad Spend
• Great successes like Call of Duty, Guitar Hero and Marvel Ultimate Alliance

Interestingly today I read an overview of “New report Cautions on Using SharePoint for Public Websites”

Given the strategic importance of this next generation site the world should remember it needs an open source alternative to SharePoint.

Web 2.0 sites have proven that next generation websites are built on open source.

When there is a pure technical innovation/discontinuity customers often don’t understand the technology. So it needs to be explained in industry terms. It’s not a “virtual document” it is a “drug submission.” In “Main Street” everyone knows what the technology does. Therefore there is no need to micro-market to a specific vertical, user and application and pray you will cross the chasm to the riches of the tornado. What is needed is to maximize your “Blue Ocean”.

Alfresco targeted, the “Blue Ocean” of non-ECM users who were “Knowledge Workers” who used a shared drive. The S:/drive population. This is the majority of desktop users and much larger than the traditional ECM market. These users want to collaborate and publish to websites easily using their standard tools.

What is important is to integrate into the environment the knowledge worker lives in on a day-to-day basis to make it easier for them to do their job “better”. This has driven Alfresco to ECM-enable the mass usage tools that knowledge workers use in the Global 2000. This has evolved as follows:

• ECM enable the shared drive
• ECM enable MS-Office
• ECM enable forms and Office for simple website contribution (with Virtualization and Sandboxes)

An audience is a audience is an audience and that audience may be customers, partners, prospects or employees. Enterprises are beginning to realize that a Social Computing Tool is reaching an audience of customers, partners and prospects as much as a website. To drive this we evolved to offer:

• ECM enable publishing to leading Blogs – WordPress and TypePad
• ECM enable publishing to leading Social Networking tools - Facebook

In all of these environments ECM is critical, but must be provided as a service (”Content-as-a-Service”) from the mass usage tool the knowledge worker is using as opposed to a specialist ECM tool that is part of and monolithic ECM suite. As I wrote in my previous post, innovation is focused on ease-of-use making it simple and often transparent for for knowledge workers to get access to ECM. The suite approach stems from the 1990’s when ECM vendors went on a spending spree buying up companies at bargain prices after the .com bubble. This strategy says we have all of the tools you want - they may not be what you use in your daily work, they may not be what you want to use, you may need to get trained on how to use them, they may not be integrated, they may use separate architectures - but hey look at how many tools we have in our suite. We have everything you could possibly ever (read probably never for the majority of users) need.That’s why ECM enabling existing mass usage tools with Content-as-a-service is the way forward.
Kyle McNabb in a very interesting blog wrote:

http://blogs.forrester.com/information_management/2007/11/facebook-alfres.html

“And we’re just starting to tap into the persuasive power of content as organizations try to use content, across multiple channels (not just the Web site) to improve the customer experience. And there’s a mountain of content stuck on network file shares that need to be put to use to help improve how information workers get their jobs done more effectively. My contention: You can’t put this content to use if you don’t manage it. You need to manage this content to ensure you’ve got a single source of the truth, that you have the right content ready for use, and that you know where to get it…

But organizations, and information & knowledge management professionals, will want a way to define and enforce how this information gets managed, how it gets retained, and MOST IMPORTANTLY, how it will be used, regardless of where it physically lives — Facebook, Microsoft SharePoint, or on my dreaded C: drive (I can never find anything on it).

The Blue Ocean is being ECM enabled.