Ektron Snaps Up Former Interwoven CMS Evangelist

By Irina Guseva | Published Oct 5, 2009

With the M&A activity in the content management space not dwindling down despite the economic crisis, it’s only natural to see the content management industry talent hop around. At times, that happens in a fashion resembling the game called “A Cold Wind Blows.”

Recently, web content management system vendor Ektron (news, site) announced that Tom Wentworth joined them as VP of Business Development. Wentworth comes from the Enterprise CMS player Interwoven (news, site), where he was evangelizing various web solutions that fall under the Autonomy Interwoven ECM suite roof for the past 2 some years. Before that, he worked for over 6 years in Interwoven sales engineering roles.

In the new role, Wentworth will report to Ektron’s founder and CEO Bill Rogers, who is counting on Wentworth’s “experience in driving corporate strategy and revenue.” For Wentworth, working for a much smaller vendor should be a welcome change in scenery.

We’ve seen a slew of Interwoven employees leave for other companies before, so this announcement doesn’t come as a surprise. Yet, it does spur a few questions.

Are things that bad at Interwoven that even the most passionate evangelists are looking for the exit sign? Is it the Autonomy acquisition fallout and the inability to effectively use the acquired talent? Is it because of Autonomy’s reportedly far from nurturing corporate culture and the “fear-and-intimidation style of upper management”? Are we about to see Interwoven navigate the CMS waters a la Titanic?

Expect to hear more from Ektron soon. The recently leaked version 8 should officially be making its entrance any day now…though, ahem, some delays there have been raising eyebrows.