Forrester and Enterprise Content Management
December 9, 2009
I remember working at a company paying $55,000 per year for technology information from Forrester. The outfit changed direction, and I wandered off. That number sticks with me because certain consulting firms are in several different businesses. That’s fine with me. I steer clear of the azure chip crowd. Follow through, timely action, and nitty gritty research attract me. The absence of these qualities cause the addled goose to flap away.
I read “Forrester report names four leading vendors in ECM space” and quacked happily. First, none of the four vendors hit doubles or even triples for me. In fact, EMC, IBM, Open Text, and Oracle face some serious challenges in my opinion. Here is my take, and I don’t sell anything to these outfits and i don’t have much, if any, interaction with their employees or PR mavens.
EMC is a storage company that bought software to perform content tricks. So far these software tools are not tightly integrated with one another and the company had been kicking the tires of Lucene and other search systems. before buying a low profile eDiscovery outfit. Lots of work ahead for this company.
IBM has more technologies, products, and partners than any other company I follow. The firm owns iPhrase, which was a content processing company. IBM owns FileNet and IBM offers myriad Omnifind products. The search system does not work too well. I have documented this issue in this Web log. Just search for IBM, the company that wrote me a letter saying that IBM knows all about the Google. Yep, righto.
Open Text is not one cohesive software product. The company has many different content processing systems, and it is working to convince some people that Vignette is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Okay, what about RedDot’s stability or juicing up that mainframe standard, BRS search?
And Oracle. Rumors about Oracle are thicker than bats in the caves near Shanghai in the spring. Oracle SES 10g is not exactly a speedster. The company is attacking Mark Logic by asserting Oracle’s aging data management system is a better XML repository. Yawn.
These are the four companies, according to the article by Veronica Silva are:
The four leaders in the ECM market offer a mix of solutions to help information and knowledge management professionals manage, secure, and retain content, the Forrester report stated. “Their offerings include a mix of data management, business intelligence, content integration support, and content-centric application support. All four offer the promise of end-to-end ECM functionality from a single vendor,” the report added.
A mix or hash?
Stephen Arnold, December 9, 2009
Oyez, oyez. I want to report to the GSA kitchen that i was not paid to make this reference to a hash. I would not each has in a GSA commissary either.
Comments
3 Responses to “Forrester and Enterprise Content Management”
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
I assume your take is that Forrester, as well as the others, are marketing, rather than analyzing. I hope so. Because if they are trying to analyze and they come up with results like these *at whatever the cost* to them or to us – the significance is that they are not succeeding in getting even “good enough” results.
Or is this a case of the freebie that doesn’t contain enough meat to whet the appetite of the potential purchaser of the $1749 report? For instance, *eight* vendors are mentioned discussing the same report at:
http://www.contentmanagement.net/ibm-oracle-open-text-dominate-a-recent-enterprise-content-manahement-report-released-by-forrester-research.php
This is more informative than Forrester’s own listing
http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/wave%26trade%3B_enterprise_content_management_suites%2C_q4_2009/q/id/48033/t/2
So, is this not good enough PR for a not good enough report? Or not good enough PR for a good enough report?
How nice it would be to have an Overflight service comparing industry market research reports – oh… – maybe it already *replaces* them.
What I find interesting is that 3 of 4 of the above mentioned companies use Lucene under their hood.
* ECM uses Lucene (or Solr?) in their Documentum(?) product
* IBM uses Lucene in one of the OmniFind editions
* Oracle uses Lucene through its purchase of TripleHop several years ago (http://www.oracle.com/triplehop/index.html)
I don’t know about Open Text, but I would not be surprised if they, too, used Lucene or something free and Lucene-like under the hood.
it would be insightful for you to read the following:
http://hakanakbas.blogspot.com/2009/08/consolidation-in-enterprise-content_574.html