Content Management Matters ™

Analyst Jeremiah Owyang is Forrester's man at the bleeding edge of social media and web communities. He is building a dedicated 'Wave' (Forrester's vendor database and recommend-engine) for Social Web products and community platforms, aimed at helping organizations decide which solutions in the space are right for them. The Wave will also help CMS, ERP and other developers figure out which 'White Label' services are worth pursuing for partnerships or investment.

Mention web content management and open source in a single question today and you commonly get two words back: Drupal and Alfresco. These are the two most well-known open source content management solutions in the market today. It seems that Forrester has not been too busy dishing up Enterprise 2.0 predictions to recognize this.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that Enterprise 2.0 is a hot topic these days and organizations across the globe are scrambling to implement some aspect of it -- when they can actually figure out what it means.

Forrester analysts could now be adding to that frenzy with their newest report that states that Enterprise 2.0 will become a $US 4.6 billion dollar industry by 2013.

It's always nice when your blood, sweat and tears get recognized by the critics in your field. This is that time for Open Text.

Forrester Research has just named Open Text a global big player in its report, The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Content Management Suites, Q4 2007.

According to Forrester, Open Text was the only pure-play ECM software provider worthy to be called leader amongst the 11 companies researched.

60 criteria served as battering rams to gauge an enterprise content management system's quality.

Livelink ECM has long been the shining star in Open Text's suite, and it apparently shined brighter still on paper after the gleam Forrester gave it. "Open Text Livelink ECM shows great breadth and depth, with strong scoring in core ECM capabilities — document imaging, document management, records management, and content archiving — plus good support for web content management and digital asset management," the report reads.

That's a lot of bases to cover.

Congrats to Open Text. Being crowned King by the cold, hard analysts of the world has earned you a hat-tip, and maybe a few round of drinks, to boot.

The Forrester Wave for ECM Suites in 2007 is out, and like its rival the Gartner Magic Quadrant, it has listed IBM as the leader in Enterprise Content Management.

Interwoven is hosting a webcast at 10am Pacific time today. The event will feature Forrester Research industry analyst, Stephen Powers. The topic is the latest trends in Web content management and which next-generation Web CMS capabilities are enabling companies to get ahead and "drive top-line growth." You can register here, and should do so quickly if you want to attend -- you've got exactly one hour before cast-off.

[[Update: The full webcast (slides & audio) is now available from Interwoven (Windows Media).]]

After evaluating 11 web content management vendors and providers across 190 content management and delivery criteria specific to external sites, Forrester ranked Tridion, Fatwire and Interwoven as leaders in the recently released Web Content Management for External Sites report.

A recent Forrester Research study -- involving 119 CIOs -- indicated that over 60% of those surveyed showed a "strong desire" to purchase and implement Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis and other light-weight collaboration tools. Manifesting a classic corporate quandary, those same CIOs also implied that they would prefer to purchase said technologies as a suite from a "large, incumbent software vendor".

Its not music to everyone's ears, but IBM with their new Lotus Quickr product intends to deliver for just such a crowd.