Whilst, I’m accustomed to change, in the last twenty two years (OK, I started young and didn’t get an education!) I’ve only worked for five different employers (and the first eight years was as a public servant) – every year has thrown up new opportunities and change. (I’ve written a little bit about the start of my career here).

But this is different, I am really excited about making a significant, possibly life changing move – having spent the last 15 years representing a vendor – I’m leaving the tribes and just maybe becoming a real boy.

I once was accused – probably disparagingly – as “the king of analogies” in the Twitter back channel of a presentation I was giving – so hopefully you’ll excuse me for melding together these two..

Yes – it’s tribal – I’ve been to the sales kick-off where I have seen people dressed as competitors, dragged onto a stage as slaves and whipped (a homage to the film Gladiators), I’ve seen the logos of competitors chain sawed in half, I’ve seen a failing vendor that was being beaten and ‘gapped’ by their competition disrespectfully accuse them of having ‘a big hat and no cattle’ and I’ve seen vendors obsessed with their competitors messaging and pricing hire ex-CIA agents or set-up bogus procurement processes to find out what they are saying.

Yep, seen it and I genuinely still have the t-shirts..

It’s not just the vendors I worked in – I’ve spoken to colleagues that were former competitors, have the same experiences, as they revel in telling stories of putting up billboards outside the offices I worked in and of handing out cookies at the local railway station to make a point to the prospective customers. Hmm.. difficult to explain that one without naming names..

Admittedly, I’ve used extreme examples, in bullish American (sorry, it’s true) vendors during different days, the exciting time at the turn of the century with a dim regard for their competitors and perhaps their industry in what turned out to be at the start of the end of the boom.

No, this isn’t about me suddenly thinking that vendors suck, not at all – I am just trying to make the point that inside a vendor, with all that propaganda, whether it’s as extreme as some of my examples, it isn’t always the best place to be to view an industry and I am delighted and privileged to be given that opportunity with Gilbane.

All that propaganda? Yes, but I don’t mean to be critical – that stuff is worn like armour by a sales team, they have to believe that their way is the way of the righteous and I fully support that – hell I’ll beat my chest and daub my face with purple/red/orange paint with the best of them – that’s the best bit.

But, I’ve just never been all that comfortable when the attention turns to the competitors rather than what YOU are doing that’s right, different and exciting. Who wants to watch a competitors tail lights?

Anyway, as ever, I’ve digressed – my point is if asked by a prospective customer about this, that or the other competitor – and sadly as a vendor you do get asked – I’ve said that I was the worst person to ask  (of course, I am hoping that that’s all going to change now!).  They, the prospect, had seen more of the competitors products than I had, they can talk to references – they can call the analysts.

I believe that web engagement is on the cusp of something exciting and of course WCM is in the centre of that, as it emerges from the IT and marketing teams to be on the ‘C’ level agenda. Especially as, in general the management of content, the strategy’s and tools for doing it now has an enterprise criticality to it. There is a lot of exciting stuff going on – but not a fluffy web buzzword-du-jour kind of way – real, understood business value.

The excitement for me is that I don’t need to meet every tweet, press release or anecdote that says xyz vendor or their customers is doing something cool with a twinge of outrage, defensiveness or maybe even jealousy. I am free to enjoy and explore the innovation of this industry, that I love, from whatever corner it comes from.

So, becoming a real boy?

That comes from a tweet I posted when I was turned away from an analysts on-line community for being ‘a vendor’ – I indignantly tweeted that I’m not a vendor, I’m a real boy.

People who work for software vendors have important things to say, experiences folks and their CMS projects can learn from – they are not all salivating, lying, cheating, sales beasts.. (not all anyways) and I for one am looking forward to meeting and learning from them and maybe my experience can help.

So, maybe now I’ve left the tribes I can say that now I’m a real boy – or as Irina Guseva of CMSWire put it -”WCM vendors change jobs to become analysts”.

Image of Native American Teepee “Unauthentic” by quinn.anya reproduced under creative commons license.

Lots of other vendors were soon in, having been tagged. This generated a lot of buzz on Twitter and the CMS blogging community, probably being best documented by Jon Marks on his blog “Jon on Tech”, Irina Guseva’s blog and Julian Wraith’s blog . Day also do a nice job of describing what the meme is all about.

So, I’ll avoid a commentary of what has happened and urge you to visit these blogs for the full story. I share some of the concerns of some of the other vendors – in that basically to describe the CMS software industry as a “broad church” is an understatement and so to try and get a picture of this industry through a few short questions is not going to suit everyone. Vignette put this very well:

It would be great if this meme could start to help all customers understand the broad range of solutions in the big space of WCM applications, and which ones best meet their Web experience needs.

The focus of the questions is on procurement and install, which in our experience (a sentiment shared by plenty of the vendors tagged) is only a small part of why an organisation would choose a vendor. Kas’s original article seems to me, to be focusing on this software as a commodity as a simple service or product who’s procurement should be accessible through the web, he suggests that the web software vendors are out of step with the world in which we sell.

I like Kas’ blog and that has a certain ring to it – but the truth is that implementation of a CMS system is not always about the end result – the website – but actually demands cultural and business process change that does require a much more consultative, solution – in person – sales process and sophisticated post implementation support that may involve multiple parties.

Splitting between the best vendor to fit your CMS needs also takes some thought. As Forrester comment, there is a gap that needs to be bridged between the technical tool set, marketing and the folks that they define as “knowledge and information professionals” – the people that know the stuff you want to get to your audience.

So, user adoption would feature much higher in most projects than how simple the install or software procurement process is.

This business vs technical debate interestingly manifested itself in the decision of where best to respond to this meme, I chose here as I am guessing this audience is more CMS technical focused – but it could have been our new official blog at http://www.this-is-marketing.com. But what would the marketing audience there make of all this techniness? Anyway, I have, as ever digressed…

In agreement with those that have gone before me – to get involved with something like this is a good thing – so, first off, I guess I ought to apologise for our tardiness (a week is a long time in Twitter) and lets get on with the games.

Let me also point out to those that don’t know us – we have two Content Management products aimed at two different markets – detailed here – and our Content Management functionality came by way of the acquisition of Mediasurface (detailed here) and I am going to answer for both products, or editions as we call them.

1. Our software comes with an installer program.

Yes it does.

2. Installing or uninstalling our software does not require a reboot of your machine.

I think I’d join the others that have answered this with a ‘why is this important’ – but in the spirit of it all – it might not. That would depend on the product and platform you have chosen. If you are implementing our Enterprise edition product for Java delivery on a UNIX box – probably not – if you are implementing on Windows then the pre-requisite software definitely will. If your organization has concerns about rebooting boxes, we or one of partners can host the whole thing for you.

3. You can choose your locale and language at install time, and never have to see English again after that.

As a content contributor yes, although some technical administrative functions have not been translated in either product (yet).

4. Eval versions of the latest edition(s) of our software are always available for download from the company website.

No, although partners do have access to demonstration software and we are pretty reasonable when folks ask for a hosted demo or a POC.

5. Our WCM software comes with a fully templated “sample web site” and sample workflows, which work out-of-the-box.

Yes

6. We ship a tutorial.

Both products have detailed in-context help for using the product, for developers we have developer documentation with examples, as well as the example sites.

7. You can raise a support issue via a button, link, or menu command in our administrative interface.

No, but that seems pretty neat – the slight problem would be that often first line support is offered by our partners or with an internal team. In the Enterprise product we do have chat functionality, so that you can quickly raise issues with a more experienced user or site administrator.

8. All help files and documentation for the product are laid down as part of the install.

Yes.

9. We run our entire company website using the latest version of our own WCM products.

Yes, we are also implementing an integrated web application using to the rest of the Alterian platform – not just the WCM products – to include email and marketing analytics.

10. Our salespeople understand how our products work.

Yes, we have pretty mature, well established WCM sales channel who understand this space, many of our engagements are driven by partners who can also call upon years of experience with both our products and with CMS products in general. The recent acquisition means that we have a whole bunch of new folks to turn into CMS evangelists, but these guys are backed by an incredibly knowledgeable business consulting / pre-sales team.

11. Our software does what we say it does.

Yes – I thought Sitecore’s response to this was interesting – in that if you have a vibrant implementation channel, the onus is on the vendor to stay honest.

12. We don’t charge extra for our SDK.

No, we do not.

13. Our licensing model is simple enough for a 5-year-old to understand.

Yes, it’s basically a CPU model for Enterprise and a matrix of users and servers for Corporate.

14. We have one price sheet for all customers.

Yes, by product and geography to reflect local markets.

15. Our top executives are on Skype, Twitter, or some similar channel, and: Feel free to contact them directly at any time.

Yes, I’m here – oh hang on you said ‘top executives’ – our CEO and Marketing VP blogs on www.this-is-marketing.com. Our CTO blogs there too, as well as at Talbot on Technology and is on Twitter – www.twitter.com/mike_talbot

—- Update – been prompted to add this ID: 9c56d0fcf93175d70e1c9b9d188167cf as suggested by Bertrand Delacrétaz to help Google find related pages —-

Having got my caveats out of the way, I believe that this is hugely exciting for us. In the same way that I have talked about Morello delivering on the promise of Web Content Management, of truly enabling wide spread author adoption and participation in the web publishing process, I think this kind of marriage is what dynamic web delivery was built for.

What do I mean by that? Well many of us have had a good flirt with personalization, but at best it is typically restricted to a single channel (the web) or even to a single experience, maybe only based around previous transactions or limited to that session. Fine if you are Amazon, I only interact with them on the one channel – OK maybe two if you count e-mail, oh hang on.. they slip leaflets into my parcels too – so that’s print – is that three? Of course, most businesses, including our own, meet people in many different ways.

But, it’s not just about pulling together those crumbs of information we leave dotted around the companies we deal with. It’s of joining those dots with marketing processes, experience, tools, partners – of turning that unified set of data into a dialog with your consumers – a tough ask if that’s not your core competence. We have for some time seen Morello as a tool for the marketers – for the communicators in an organization – and it’s a natural fit to bring content into that marketing platform mix. This consumer insight and acting on it is a key piece of the Persuasive Content principal that I discussed here.

Forrester have been quick to blog positively about the aquisition and I look forward to seeing how this discussion shapes up and their upcoming research. We are joining an exciting, growing company and we will have something different to offer this market.

To learn more about the acquisition of Mediasurface by Alterian click here.