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Content management is about more than just delivering information via your web site.

May 21

Marketing + WCM=Competitive Advantage….Just ask Alterian or MediaSurface

Web Content Management is more than just a technology; utilized correctly, it can become the hub for all your digital content, an enabler to engage your customers in ways never before possible, if you are a marketer your WCM system could (and should) be the most valuable weapon in your arsenal for differentiation.

This has long been a belief of Molecular, but the recent acquisition of MediaSurface by Alterian is a good example of how WCM is being seen as a necessary component to any successful marketing offering

Here’s the first line of the Alterian press release, “Integrated marketing platform provider combines online and offline analytics with content and multi-channel execution to help marketers optimise customer experiences across the web”

A lot of marketing speak for sure, but I think Jason McNamara (Alterian CMO) is correct when he says “Analytics is the new measure of how well marketers understand their customers, but people react to content. And reaction and interaction with content creates new analytics. Unlike offline, these interactions are often inbound and real-time in nature, thus impossible to manage with manual processes….”

This is just one example of how technology companies are trying to combine, analytics, content management and campaign management to create offerings that speak better to marketing departments. Something they all feel they most do as they see the money (and decision making power) moving from IT to to the business.

Other recent examples include Interwoven’s acquisition of Optimost (A/B testing) and Vignette’s acquisition of Vidavee (video and analytics).

Will all this activity enable these companies to make the jump from selling technology to IT to selling solutions to marketing? In the future, maybe, but right now it’s just a good story with little “real” integration and few success stories. And as is always the case with technology, it’s usually not the product itself that makes you successful, it’s HOW your organization uses that technology that gives you the competitive advantage. If you don’t understand what you need the technology to do, just buying an integrated platform isn’t going to make you a success.

posted to: Content Management, Industry Trends | 1 Comment »

May 15

WCMS, Recession, What Recession?

by Bryant Shea

No matter how you get your news these days you can’t help being bombarded by the talk of a recession. With all the talk I thought I’d take a quick look at some of the WCM vendors and see how they were doing.

This is not an in depth financial analysis, but I think it is safe to say the WCM market is still strong and shows few signs of slowing down. The vast majoriy of vendors has posted records numbers, with (Vignette and MediaSurface being key exceptions, and seem to have positive outlooks for 2008.

Here’s is a summary of the most recent releases.

Interwoven
Interwoven reported total revenues of $61.5 million for the first quarter of 2008, an increase of 17% from total revenues of $52.7 million for the first quarter of 2007.

“Our first quarter performance provided an excellent start to 2008″, said Joe Cowan, CEO of Interwoven. “We posted a revenue increase of 17% over last year, while increasing earnings and cash flows. These results are a direct result of a strategy that is tuned to the needs of our customers.” Full Story (Interwoven)

OpenText
Total revenue for the third quarter was US$178.8 million, up 15% compared to US$156.1 million for the same period in the prior fiscal year. License revenue in the third quarter was US$51.5 million, up 20% compared to US$43.0 million in the third quarter of the prior fiscal year. Full Story (CIO)

Tridion
“SDL Tridion’s revenues hit a record USD 42M in 2007 driven by strong expansion in the US and UK markets as well as market share growth across Europe. With year-on-year revenuegrowth of 58% and license revenuegrowth of 67%, ….. Net profit also reached record levels in 2007 and net margin was a class leading 16% of revenues in spite of heavy investments in global expansion and incidental costs related to the acquisition by SDL” Full Story (Tridion)

Fatwire
Web Content Management Provider Achieves 21 Percent Increase in Year-Over-Year RevenueGrowth

FatWire Software…., announced that the company delivered its strongest year ever with record-breaking fourth quarter fiscal year 2007 results. FatWire achieved an exceptional 35 percent growth in total revenuefor the quarter which ended on December 31st, 2007, driven by a strong demand worldwide for its products and services.” Full Story (Fatwire)

Day Software
The Company reported a record first quarter, achieving a 15% growth in total revenue over the same period in 2007. Revenues for the first quarter totaled CHF 7.4 million, compared with revenues of CHF 6.4 million for the first quarter of 2007. License revenues increased by 39% over last year, totaling CHF 4.3 million, compared with license revenues of CHF 3.1 million for the same period last year.” Full Story (Day)

Clickability
Clickability, …… today announced the closing of $8 million in its second round of venture funding. Shasta Ventures led the round, with additional investment from Convergence Partners, which financed Clickability’s initial venture capital round. Full Story (Clickability)

Vignette Corporation
Vignette Corporation (NASDAQ: VIGN) today announced that total revenue for the first quarter 2008 was $44.8 million, a decrease of 6.0% from the first quarter of 2007.

“Our business remains volatile on a quarter by quarter basis,” said Mike Aviles, president and CEO of Vignette. “We need stronger focus and more consistent results from our sales and marketing efforts. License revenue in North America was particularly challenging for us in the first quarter; however, services were strong, and we continue to make good progress around our technology. Customer satisfaction and renewal rates are up. We announced several new products during the quarter and added integrated video content management capabilities with the acquisition of Vidavee.” Full Story (Vignette)

MediaSurface
“In recent years Mediasurface has grown — a bit haphazardly we thought — via acquisition, but evidently failed to control costs, and a surprise announcement (pdf) of losses late last year sent the stock tumbling from around 25p to languish at about 5p per share, at least until this latest courtship. You can track the stock price here.” Full Story (CMSWatch)

posted to: Content Management, Industry Trends, Technology | No Comments »

May 7

Percussion’s Personalization Solution

by Scott Simmons

The Molecular CM Team got a demo of Percussion’s new Personalization Solution the other day. Tying CM and Personalization is not a new concept and Percussion is not the first CM vendor to offer a solution like this, but their open implementation offers extensibility and simplified integration.

As with all products I’m holding my final opinion until I work with it at least once.

posted to: Content Management, Technology | No Comments »

May 5

The Green Consultant

by Bryant Shea

After reading a blog posting on CMS Watch the other day about how SaaS Content Management vendors are trying to position themselves as the “Green” solution to Content Management I thought it would be a good time to write about my desire to be a “green consultant”.

I’ve started my journey with the following initiatives:

Commute – Although it would be great to move closer to the office and reduce my one hour (each way) commute time, I really like my neighborhood and my current residence, so I looked for innovative ways to better utilize my commuting time. My first initiative was to purchase carbon-offset certificates to ensure I was compensating for the CO2 my drive time was putting into the atmosphere. I choose to purchase my certificate through RenewableChoice.com, but there a plenty of sites available (Carbonfund.org is another good one). My second initiative was to take advantage of the energy my car was producing while I was driving. I decided to use the two hours per day I sit in the car to charge my electronic devices. Using a variety of gadgets I’m able to charge my Blackberry, Bluetooth headset, digital camera, laptop and iPod with just the energy from my 12v car outlets during my commute! This was good, but I wanted to go one step further. Wouldn’t it be great if I could run my laptop all day using my commute as the energy source? Thanks to some innovative technology from Batterygeek.net this was a real possibility. Batterygeek offers lightweight external ‘Green Lithium’ batteries that can produce 9+ hours of laptop operation, and thanks to an available 130w inverter you can charge the battery from your car. I’m still waiting for my Portable Power Station from Batterygeek, but I’m optimistic this will enable me to operate all day without drawing any additional power from the office. I’m also assuming that I might need more than my commute time to charge the batter, but no worries, I just pre-registered with NSTAR Green to make sure 100% of my home energy is delivered via a wind farm in upstate NY.

Laptop – To get through a full day on battery power there are few things you can do to your laptop to help conserve energy. 1) Don’t use an external monitor 2) Decrease the brightness on your laptop LCD screen 3) Maximize your power setting (for Windows machines you can do this under ‘Power Options’ in the control panel) 4) Use an Ethernet cable instead of wireless and make sure your wireless adapter is off

Lights – The best way to reduce the energy you use for lighting is to utilize natural sun light. If that’s not possible the second best option is to use an LED desk lamp and if that’s not in the cards the last resort is to buy a CFL lamp or bulb. I good source for LED and CFL lighting is www.eco-lights.com.

Printing – This is simple. I try not to do it. If I absolutely need to print a document I print on both sides of the paper. Printing on recycled paper is another step.

Office Supplies – I try to use recycled products as much a possible Staples has an “Eco Easy” section of their site that offers a great selection of products.

I’ve got a long way to go before I can claim to be a green consultant. I should be bringing filtered tap water instead of grabbing bottled water at work, bringing local foods for lunch instead of grabbing packaged food from the vending machines and should probably look harder for earth friendly clothing (Bollorganic has great organic cotton dress shirts) but for now I’m happy I’m just moving in the right direction.

posted to: Content Management, Molecular News, Technology | 10 Comments »

May 1

QA Process Design

by Camila Carvalho

This month I have been interviewing some of our colleagues and researching tools for a bug tracking system to be adopted as our standard. What became salient is that the tools are important but irrelevant if we don’t have the necessary processes and disciplines to support it.

Coincidentally this week I was reading the Harvard Business School Working Knowledge newsletter and came across a very interesting article, which made me think about the other incredible important factor on this equation: human resources! We can have the best tools, the best processes and methodologies, but finding testers is still very challenging, and that is because people are challenged by novelty and can’t stand doing the same task over and over again. It is common knowledge that after a while testers get burned out and start making mistakes.

According to the article – summary and link below – a Danish company found the perfect fit for the function. It employs people with a form of autism, that have the characteristics needed for the testing process: high intelligence, precision-oriented skills, deep concentration, and patience to be checking and rechecking outcomes, documenting test plans, and maintaining follow-through.

I think one of the lessons here is that when thinking about QA we need to think about documentation, stress the need of having very detailed test plans to be able to rotate testers and to outsource parts of the process.

Executive Summary:

Software analysts and programmers live to innovate—but hate to run tests. Yet top-notch testing saves many a company money when bugs are caught early. A new case coauthored by HBS professor Robert D. Austin describes the secret behind a Danish consultancy’s success: The majority of its testers have Asperger syndrome or a form of autism spectrum disorder. Key concepts include:

Techies tend to be idiosyncratically talented. The case “Specialisterne: Sense & Details” is about putting diverse talent where it will be most effective.
Software testing requires superb powers of concentration combined with tolerance (even preference) for routine tasks.
Seventy-five percent of the software consultants in the Specialisterne case have Asperger syndrome or some form of autism spectrum disorder.
Some software testing may be offshored, but mission-critical testing must be done near the client.

For the whole article: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5869.html

posted to: Content Management, Project Management | No Comments »