The news of OpenText planning to gobble up Vignette and the recent Interwoven acquisition by Autonomy sees a new chapter for these grandees of content management and I think is further evidence in the shifts that have been occurring in this market around Enterprise Content Management and what organisations really want to do.

I’ve often described ECM as turning your organisation into a filing system, a necessary activity that keeps everything neat, ordered and regulatory compliant. It brings operational efficiencies and it can even help save the planet as you de-dupe and remove all that redundant server room kit.

The functionality and products of an ECM suite are all about that business function of keeping stuff ordered, records management, document management, asset management etc. Over the past 5 years this is the path that both Interwoven and Vignette set themselves strategically on, mainly through acquisition.

This was the path to becoming the new SAP or IBM and to becoming the System Integrators friend through alignment with big business change and major IT projects. Documentum, arguably the ECM pioneer was swallowed up by a storage company EMC (which kinda emphasises the point).

In the meantime, specialised Web Content Management vendors had stuck to their knitting, detected the shift toward agile solutions for business users and away from big IT projects. Technically organisations started to go “small IT” to bet their on-line business on Open Source, SaaS, Microsoft and away from the traditional platform of the web (Sun/Oracle).

Many vendors have prospered in a vibrant space that Vignette and Interwoven originally helped shape, driven by new business focused mantras of “ease of use” and “quick time to value” – of engaging the marketer, the communicator or anyone outside IT who has a message to deliver over the web.

These are things that I have always considered as delivering on the promise of content management software – yes you need the IT stuff to work, yes you need governance, but to truly deliver it’s about democratizing the contribution and user adoption. The web site as a business tool.

To put it very simply, you have a divergence of ECM and WCM – but I don’t identify myself with you as a brand because you have a neat and tidy warehouse or you are Sarbanes-Oxley complaint – it’s good to know, but it’s not what I like about you.

The challenge to the marketer is not about simply publishing content, it’s about what our websites are for – the audience – or more specifically the websites role in persuading, encouraging, educating, communicating – engaging the audience to act.

This is a trend that really came through at Internet World this year in London, with vendors and speakers talking engagement (some based solely on a screenshot of Google Analytics).  

So, what interests me about the two acquisitions (so far, it’s still early) is that the OpenText path appears to be doggedly ECM (with a bit of social media), whilst Autonomy is talking the language of engaging with the visitor making the Interwoven acquisition look far more interesting.

Also published on our corporate blog.

It would seem from this article that Guichelaar started her first job from high school and although I don’t know whether it will still be possible to work your way to ‘C’ level without a degree in todays employment market – I really think this is a great story for anyone embarking on an IT career, however humble it’s beginnings. As this exerpt From the article says:

Jacqueline Guichelaar, who joined the company only a few months earlier straight from high school, is keeping the show on the road. She had been hired by financial services company AMP (see panel, CV: Jacqueline Guichelaar) as a tape operator, about as humble as it got in the IT world in those far-off days. But she is sure as hell determined that she is not going to remain a tape operator.

My IT career started as a public servant working for the Metropolitan Police Service in London, like Guichelaar I was loading tapes and sorting printouts and also like her I decided to improve my lot by learning on the job.

In Guichelaar’s case, this took her to a role at IBM, where the article states she attended over 50 training courses! In my case, it got me on a project where IBM were the primary contractor and access to some AIX UNIX training and the skills to take me into my first role out of the civil service and into a commercial software business (Manugistics – now JBA). 

Unsurprisingly, the parallels stop there as Guichelaar spends 7 years at IBM, emerging as an account executive, moves to CSC, Germany and then back to Australia with the Australian National Bank – according to the article – her dream job – until last year when she was headhunted by Deutsche Bank.

I am wildly summarising here, I think it’s a great story and of course it touches on the difficulties she faced as a woman in our male dominated industry. So, I recommend to take a look at the original article here.