Alterian Drops Immediacy, Morello Web CMS Brands

By Irina Guseva (@irina_guseva) Feb 3, 2010

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There have been some rumors circling around about Alterian (news, site) discontinuing its Immediacy Web CMS brand. Morello, their other CMS, is part of that goodbye story as well.

So, is it true that it is finita la comedia for Immediacy and Morello? We had a chat with Alterian’s VP of WCM product strategy Ian Truscott to find out.

When Too Much is Too Much

As you may know, there’s a bit of a mish-mash of web content management technologies at this vendor as a result of the Mediasurface acquisition 2.5 years ago. Alterian, as a company, has several CMS brands: Immediacy, Morello and Alterian Content Manager.

Don’t you think that would only be logical to apply some consolidation rules to this variety? And this is exactly what Alterian has decided to do.

The Web of Web Engagement

Continuing to preach web engagement, Alterian wants to focus its WCM strategy on web engagement, bringing together audience insight, content and analytics to deliver a multi-channel, personalized message.

The product strategy is focused on realizing exactly that, with the recent release of the WebJourney product, a tight integration of Alterian Content Manager (ACM) to it and to the SM2 social media monitoring tool, plus improved integrations to Dynamic messenger e-mail delivery platform, so that a marketer can drive a multi-channel campaign from within ACM.

As Truscott notes, the CMS market segment that Alterian lives and breathes in has become increasingly competitive and lower tiers are pushing up in functionality, hence the need to change. We’re frankly surprised it took the vendor so long to consolidate all those brands.

Given that a new major release of the Alterian Content Manager — Alterian Content Manager 7, or CM 7 — is coming up later this year, Alterian decided to take this opportunity to consolidate to one WCM platform and drop Morello and Immediacy brands (sorry, we know you like those pretty names).

The combined product, according to Truscott, is being built by the same teams that built Immediacy and Morello:

“This strategy means that we don't need to build and maintain two of the common components (WYSIWYG editors, multiple SharePoint connectors, accessibility checkers, etc.) and focus on differentiated functionality for today’s WCM market.”

But the not so good parts will have to go. Immediacy will soon be discontinued because it was constrained in some functionality. We have heard before that Immediacy – with its page-based content delivery and storage model — has been criticized for its lack of API and browser support.

However, Alterian wants to keep the best parts of the product, such as its easy- to-use theme and plug-in functionality, as they build out the new version CM 7.