This is a brief overview of OpenText's 'Content Day' in Toronto yesterday. It was a useful day at the Radisson hotel (booo to them for not providing free wireless !), with good sessions by OpenText staff and some good customer case studies.
So, here are the highlights:
1. Strategic direction / roadmap
They are continuing to move to absorb and integrate all their acquisitions, and are doing this under the auspices of a 'soup to nuts' ECM suite.
By 2010 both LiveLink and HummingBird eDocs will cease to exist as separate products stacks and will be merged into OpenText Content Server 2010, which will be the basis of this ECM suite.
Interestingly their messaging is based on the premise that customer integration of best of breed products is complex, expensive and never lives up to the expectations (which I have to agree with!), while a single monolithic repository and ECM system (think EMC and IBM?) can never be good at everything.
So they have focused on web services and integrating RedDot WCM, Artesia DAM etc via a loosely couple web services architecture. Indeed more than one of their customer case studies noted how easy it had been to integrate LiveLink into other applications / systems.
They provide two 'user experience' alternatives to bring all of this together. 'Bloom' is the code word for their Enterprise 2.0 offering which should be released in the summer - this appears to be aimed at taking on EMC CenterStage and Oracle BeeHive (and maybe SharePoint...?). Bloom is being built on elements of RedDot WCM, Artesia DAM, FirstClass conferencing etc, and all of these historical 'divisions' are being brought together in a new 'front office' unit.
Go to this page on OpenText's site and scroll down and you will find whitepapers on 'Bloom' and Enterprise 2.0: http://www.opentext.com/2/global/enterprise2dot0.htm
What was intereseting though was that they also have a 'fat client' called Enterprise Connect which runs on Windows which can be used to connect to LiveLink, eDocs or SharePoint repositories, thus providing a common interface to these systems. It's interesting to me because its a genuine, 'old fashioned' fat client, not a Adobe AIR or whatever AJAX / JSON type web app.
2. Integrations
Of course OpenText always make a great deal of their relationship with SAP, well they have been partners for 18 years now...... So it obviously works well for them both :-) However this is a well known story and I am not going to concentrate on what they add to SAP.
SharePoint however is flavour of the month (or year, or decade....). OpenText provide a number of SharePoint integrations, and their partnership with Microsoft seems (along with EMC's partnership with MS) seems to be tacit acceptance by MS that SharePoint really is not a full ECM suite, however I digress.
OpenText's base 'Storage Services' integration attacks one of the architectural issues with MOSS, it takes content items out of the SLQ Server RDBMS where they are stored in tables as Binary Large Objects (BLOBS) and puts them into a file system, which is more scalable (and probably considerably cheaper in the long run).
Additional integrations / add ons are more at the user application layer:
- Case Management Framework
- Regulated Documents
- Legal Information Management
So, thats the highlights really. There was some really good customer case studies, and all in all it was an informative and interesting day. I have to say that the re-organisation of divisions and the focusing of the product lines and the marketing on the 'ECM suite' is a necessary move in the face of the competition from EMC, IBM and Oracle, and of course now that Canada is my adopted homeland, I should develop an 'emotional' interest in a great Canadian company ;-)
Yep, there is still left to secure yourself a place and come and join us at JBoye09 a "Knowledge sharing summit for online professionals" taking place in Philadelphia between the 5th and 9th of May (i.e. next week !)
I am doing a pre-conference workshop, a presentation on whether SharePoint (MOSS 2007) is good for intranets, and chairing a round table session - so its going to be a busy week.
However there are lots of very top notch speakers, so check out the full schedule here:
http://www.jboye.com/conferences/philadelphia09/schedule
And if you are one of the 3 people who reads my blog, and you do attend, come and find me and I will buy you a beer :-)
Updated 21st April - Please scroll down and read the comment left by Jorge from Liferay, who thank for keeping on the straight and narrow as far as the LifeRay portal :-)
So much for the earlier rumours of a joint Oracle-HP bid for Sun, instead the lean (?) mean acquisition machine goes for it again !
However swallowing the whole of Sun Microsystems with its own micro-processor designs, serious server hardware and its own operating system is not the same as taking onboard JDE, Siebel et al.
Nope, this one is going to take some more digesting, and could give Oracle some serious heart burn. However lets leave the discussion of indigestion for later analysis, instead lets think a little about what this means on the information management and content managment front;
Well first of all, Sun did not provide a CMS or an ECM system at all, so whats the big deal you might ask ? Java is the big deal I will respond !
The Java language and platform is a very big deal in enterprise IT, and it is of course the underpinning platform and architecture for many a content management system. Many pundits where worried about IBM getting their blue fingers all over Java, but is stewardship going to any better under Larry Ellison's team ? I really don't know and jury is going to be out on this one for a while, as is the whole issue of Oracle and open source in generally, highlighted by how Oracle will deal with the MySQL database.
Web portals are another confusing area, Sun had pretty much deprecated the old Sun Portal in favour of another open source product, LifeRay. However Oracle has swallowed up more portals than you can 'shake a stick at' (as we say in Yorkshire). So I don't see LifeRay getting a lot of attention when there is already the work being done to meld all the best elements from the old BEA (PlumbTree) AquaLogic product line into the WebLogic line to emerge as the Oracle WebCenter suite.
As for the hardware, well I can see where Sun's new massively hyper-threaded CPU's will provide a great platform for egually massive Oracle databases, and its ZFS file system and disk storage systems will provide a full on Heirarchical Storage Management (HSM) environment below Oracle Universal Content Management (aka Stellent).
So as they say in North America, Oracle can provide the full 'soup to nuts' enterprise IT environment:
1. Servers and highly robust operating system (Solaris)
2. storage (disks arrays, file systems and HSM elements)
3. The database !
4. Middleware
5. Applications (be they ECM, CRM, ERP, messaging and collab etc...)
I am still trying to figure out what the Yorkshire version of soup to nuts is? "From Ale to Yorkshire Pudding"........??
Perhaps the 'alternative' stack might be offered at the lower end of the spectrum ? Oracles' 'Unbreakable Linux' plus MySQL plus LifeRay..... etc on HP or other partners hardware (on Intel x86 architecture).Well, all we can do now is spectate, so pull up a comfy chair, and lets sit and watch the spectacle unfold before our very eyes.... :-)
Join Toby Ward, President and CEO of Prescient Digital Media online next monday to hear about how to plan for a succesful SharePoint implementation:
- Date: April 13, 2009
- Location: Webinar
- Time: 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM EDT
- Is SharePoint right for your organization?
- Are you considering the pros & cons of SharePoint vs other platforms?
- Do you understand SharePoint's design and information architecture limitations?
- Have you put in place the necessary governance and planning to make it work?
http://www.prescientdigital.com/events/upcoming-events/planning-for-sharepoint-success-free-online-webinar-presentation/If you have read any of my pages before, you will know that I always mention an old British forces saying, the 5P's - Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance - and this is as true for a SharePoint implemenation as it is for any other enteprise software.
