Information Architected Market Alert (IAM Alert):

The Past, Present and Future of Adobe

With the acquisition of Day Software (highly scalable, standards and open source-oriented [not as deployment/sales model, but as underpinnings]), along with the late 2009 acquisition of Omniture (enterprise-class, quite high-end web analytics), Adobe clearly has their eyes beyond the deskop, with arguably the first major moves into server/cloud territory that they’ve executed on in many years.

Of course the question is… even if they have “best of breed” solutions in what they’re calling “customer experience management” (or CEM) – a decidely “big company/large enterprise” vision of customer engagement (or “marketing” as those who haven’t yet crested the new meme will still call it), can they actually pull it off?

Can they legitimately compete with the other “big (ol’) boys” of ECM/WCM such as ECM/Documentum, Oracle/Stellent, Autonomy/Interwoven, Open Text/Vignette, and the like?

Boundaries to Break, Skills to Sink Deep

The sales model is entirely different in enterprise/server-sales from the desktop and team-oriented, more consumer-oriented sales of most Adobe solutions, and although Adobe has some experience in the enterprise sales area, given their (long past) acquisition of Allaire (Cold Fusion), LiveCycle (born of various internal components of Adobe and one-off acqusitions of various parts, stretching back to 2001, and launching as a suite in 2005), and with the high-end web marketing folks of the enterprise via Omniture (a $1.8 Billion USD acquisition). Underestimating the sales cycle and re-aligning marketing/outreach to “sell” the new Adobe are classic traps that are not as easily avoided as they would seem – and all too many mergers/acquisitions that cross boundaries of sales mentality and market positioning #fail miserably in this regard, and the early focus of Adobe and the Macromedia acquisition from years past, with a focus on graphic/design tools for individuals and small teams, the core DNA is, in my opinion, anti-large enterprise. Time will tell how this shift works out – do they lose on the low-end and win on the high-end, or learn to juggle the spectrum?

The development model that Adobe has historically undertaken has been… sluggish, to say the least. Their cycle times make Microsoft’s 3 year cycles look swift, and with a desktop-centric view, their cross-platform (Mac vs. Windows) product roll-outs can and have been unsynchronized for years at a time – ironic given that PDF, Flash and AIR are all designed to be entirely platform neutral. As they embrace server-based solutions more completely, perhaps they will be able to apply more focus into a single lens (J2EE-based solutions), and tighten the development cycle.

Agile or Fragile?

Can Adobe continue to leverage the more agile developer talent from their recent acquisitions? Day’s mantra for the last year or so (aligned larger with Kevin Cochrane’s entree to the management team at Day) has been in agile development and agile marketing – can they successfully infect the parent company? Or will the Adobe waterfall drown them out? As a long time proponent of Agile (everything), I certainly hope so, but this is a massive cultural change issue – and large companies, in my experience, struggle mightily to change the development mindset to Agile from traditional “waterfall” development. Let’s hope the one-two punch of Day’s agile discipline and open source participation wins the (ahem) day at Adobe.

What’s in Their Wallet?

From a size/scale/staying power perspective, Adobe’s current market cap is at $15.5 Billion USD (NASDAQ:ADBE) as compared to Autonomy at $4.01 Billion USD (LON:AU), EMC at $42.01 Billion USD (NYSE:EMC), Open Text at $2.25 Billion USD (NASDAQ:OTEX) and Oracle at $121.94 Billion USD (ASDASD). In the grand scheme of most of their competition, they are on the small- to medium-marketsize.

Adobe is certainly well out of the world of the startup (fraught with peril and struggling for mere existence), and are operating in worlds that have mostly (or damn close) “crossed the chasm” into the mainstream.

There is still plenty of growth in the world of content, and they continue to have the ability to invest in making that future happen, not only monetarily (the benefits of a war chest), and with huge “mindshare” in digital content (server/enterprise credibility not withstanding).

Assuming a majority of the talent that comes with and stays at Adobe from their acquistions, they should continue to have fresh/modern skills and experience that bridge the gap from the origins of Adobe (desktop/small teams, and individual tools) to the new Adobe (focused on seamless experience, mobile, server, and customer/employee engagement).

Closed to Open

And while the Adobe of the past was primarily about proprietary formats (Photoshop, Pagemaker, InDesign, Framemaker, Allaire Cold Fusion, etc.), Day’s focus has been heavy on the open source world, as well as in involvement in Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) – a specification for improving interoperability between Enterprise Content Management systems -which is one of the convergence trends that is (finally!) gaining traction, as the buyers in the market of the last two years have finally begun to get it in their heads, and consequently into the seller/solution providers’ heads, that while they will continue to have silos (inadvertently or purposefully) of content… if the goal of an organization in 2010 and beyond is to provide customer or employee experiences, you absolutely MUST find some way to unify access to content – whether via CMIS, Federated Search, modern portals, or the like. Multi-platform access, seamless access, personalized – these are all areas where the combination of Adobe and Day holds the promise of serving people, rather than serving the acquistion of more raw technology (the typical buying organization’s approach).

Most of the grumblings I’ve seen about this acquisition thus far is in concerns that Adobe will kill Day’s involvement in open source and open standards. While both Day and Adobe deny this, again, it’s not really up to the stated goals of the acquisition – it’s in what happens when cultures collide, and if the support and uptake of a new mindset truly takes root, well after the acquisition has closed.

Wherefore Art Alfresco?

Another reverberation in the open source world, is the wonder as to what happened to the Alfresco and Adobe relationship? Up until this point, Alfresco had seemed a likely acquisition, given their partnership with Alfresco as the back-end and Adobe as the front-end in the 2008 OEM agreement relating to Adobe’s LiveCycle and Adobe’s Content Services offerings. Where will that relationship go from here? It’s anyone’s guess – as you can read over at an Alfresco blog post, the belief is that Day has been oriented more directly at Adobe’s customer engagement/customer experience model world, while Alfresco has been more about infrastructure and tools to support developers.

That’s a fair analogy, although at this point, while I’m a fan of developers having the tools and toolkits to do the job, I trust 21st century marketers and customer service managers to be far more oriented towards user success than I do anyone wearing a “pure” IT hat (and I used to be one of the IT purists – mea culpa). Thus far, no official word from Adobe on where the Alfresco relationship will go – and as a publicly traded company, it’s unlikely that we’ll hear why Alfresco or any other number of remaining independents did not make the acquisition list… at least not YET.

Embracing Managed Content

Last thought – I’ve seen some zings directed at Adobe and Day regarding the world of Digital Asset Management (DAM), specifically that the integration of Adobe and Day’s DAM solution is weaker than their competition, such as integrated DAM in Open Text’s suite of offerings.

To this comment I will say, stop trying to silo content in your enterprise – if you have to debate internally which silo to drop your content, DM, ECM, WCM, DAM, etc., then you have already so badly missed the point of any “content management” system of any kind, that you should take the time to back up and re-think your strategy. The more respositories/technologies that are thrown into the mix, the more likely you are to kill the purposes of manging content in the first place – decreased time to create/re-use content, faster processes, more consistent branding, etc.. For every ONE organization I’ve seen who has executed this well (as a buyer), I’ve seen FIFTY who have botched it.

DAM is DM (Document Management) on storage steroids, driven by metadata (the universal glue of ALL managed content) – with perhaps (if you’ve spent many millions), the ability to auto-transcribe or semantically identify the audio and/or video content above and beyond raw metadata (makes for great demos from Autonomy, but you probably can’t afford it, and really don’t need it).

The divide between DM, ECM, WCM and DAM is all in your mind until you start getting into fairly sophisticated and esoteric deployments where you are doing true, large-scale content re-use, with complex interdependencies in the final output/delivery of content.

In short, if you feel that the combined Adobe/Day DAM solution is not up to snuff – I’d be willing to bet that you are overcomplicating your perceived needs and resulting solution, or you are in the 1% of the world that really needs incredibly sophisticated DAM. If you happen to be in that camp, please contact me at 617-933-9655 – I’d love to understand what factors have impacted what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. We can all learn from those both on the leading and trailing edges – so if I am missing something that truly makes DAM a differentiator for your managed business content, let’s surface some use cases to show what “real” DAM can do.

Alternative Takes on the News

Find other takes from analysts (official and otherwise – aka Bloggers) via:

• VentureBeat (an investment perspective – fairly lightweight)
• Jon On Tech (an integrator’s perspective – Jon’s a pragmatic guy)
• CMS Watch (via Apoorv Durga – one of the newer CMS Watch analysts – expressing similar doubts about the enterprise mindset of Adobe vs. it’s boxed software roots)
• Tim Anderson’s ITWriting (expressing hope for Day’s openness and REST strengths to penetrate Adobe’s proprietary nature)

Your Thoughts?

If you are a current or prospective user of Day Software’s solutions, please weigh in with your feedback. Are current offerings serving your needs? Running ahead of where your organization is? Where your budget is? Just right? If you’re not using Day for WCM/DAM and/or collaboration, but are solving similar problems, what solution are you using?

How Information Architected Can Help

These trends, and solutions such as Day and Adobe’s content offerings, are the explicit focus of our business practices and expertise -  which is in creating strategies to provide for flexible information architectures and applications (technologies) that support the business architecture (roles, goals, people, processes, skills and culture) that, when combined, can deliver significantly greater value than a single business problem and isolated tool by itself. We are vendor neutral, and more often that not, can help you find ways to make whatever technology investments you have already made, greatly outperform the end results you are currently experiencing.

If we can be of help via our assessments, consulting or workshops, contact us now to schedule a private 30-minute executive briefing on how we can most effectively work together to solve your needs, whether customer, employee, partner or supplier-facing. It’s all content – manage it effectively, and get the technology out of your way.

Schedule a private executive briefing now

Information Architected Market Alert (IAM Alert):

Beyond Individual Innovators

Historically, Invention Machine’s Goldfire has been oriented towards providing an individually focused innovation “workbench” for the lone researcher or inventor. The offering combined (and continues to offer) advanced techniques and technologies such as semantic search capabilities, process modeling (typically in support of the assembled artifact of a product), knowledge mining, and knowledge re-use to decrease the amount of time it takes for individual engineers (much of the environment is modeled in support of physical rather than intellectual property inventions) or inventors/innovators to analyze a particular problem or set of problems, and uncover the ripest areas to go forth and solve the problem.

The offering has been and appears to remain one of the most advanced convergence of these technologies and techniques that we have seen in the innovation management space, and in many ways, is truly a solution with no direct, out of the box, commercial competition.

This is both a blessing and a curse, as markets are not typically made up of a company of one, but an ecosytem of competing products.

Innovation Market Maturity

As the company and it’s offerings have matured, and frankly, as the general awareness of innovation management has matured as well, there has been more of a push, alongside the rise of Enterprise 2.0 (meaning in most cases, collaboration) to support team-based or collaborative efforts at digitally supporting and scaling innovation capabilities.

With Goldfire 6.0, Invention Machine has added the collaboration-oriented ability to:

• Automatically identify and connect innovation workers with domain experts within their network
• Empower the community with precise “innovation intelligence” (similar to the “relationship intelligence” brought about by social network analysis and social computing I’d begun writing about in 2004 – see “Death of a Salesman? Birth of Relationship Intelligence” – now read over 4,000 times on Scribd) by leveraging undocumented expertise from problem-sharing dialogues, capturing and processing those discussions as reusable corporate assets.

From the managerial (top-down) aspect of Innovation Management, v6.0 provides:

• The ability to measure company-wide innovation initiatives and trends in real time.

With this third component, they have now begun to straddle three distinct layers – tools providing benefits to individuals (the original offering), to teams, and through to managers/executives.

Trend Watch

This offer is indicative of a two-part growing trend, collectively defined as “convergence”:

1. The convergence of tools to deliver value to individuals up through the executive suite (traditional enterprise software tends to focus on only one extreme or the other)
2. The convergence of process, information, content, knowledge and search techologies into a unified and pre-packaged business application (as opposed to a technology focused on a specific issue/problem)

Keep an eye open for areas where these trends are surfacing as business needs within your own organization, as this convergence is happening more and more, particularly as the realities of competition in the current economic environment continue to be challenging.

Combine those trends with the rising trend of innovation management maturity, and we’re (finally?) witnessing a triple convergence for business innovation.

Your Thoughts?

If you are a current or prospective user of Invention Machine, or any innovation management related solution, please weigh in with your feedback. Are current offerings serving your needs? Running ahead of where your organization is? Where your budget is? Just right? If not using Invention Machine’s Goldfire, but solving similar problems, what solution are you using?

How We Can Help

These trends, and solutions such as Invention Machine’s Goldfire 6.0, are an argument and opportunity for the explicit focus of our business practices and expertise, which is in creating strategies to provide for flexible information architectures and applications (technologies) that support the business architecture (roles, goals, people, processes, skills and culture) that, when combined, can deliver significantly greater value than a single business problem and isolated tool by itself. We call this an Innovation Architecture.

If we can be of help via our assessments, consulting or workshops, contact us now to schedule a private 30-minute executive briefing on how we can most effectively work together.

Schedule a private executive briefing now

Information Architected Market Alert (IAM Alert):

Colliding the Cloud and Premise

Iron Mountain is a curious company with a very large installed base from it’s traditional business of storing physical items for “safe, offsite, long-term storage.” Given the nature of most people in businesses as information hoarders, their traditional business has been remarkably robust, even giving the flailing economy.

What many people do not realize is the growing and significant impact of digital content that is “under management” by Iron Mountain. The split-personality of their physical and digital businesses not-withstanding (they reportedly have issues with the sales teams on either side of the virtual fences of the business not proactively selling across departmental or business unit lines), the digital business is booming as well, due in large part to concerns around rapid (and as low-cost as possible) response to eDiscovery issues.

Cloud 1st, Premise 2nd – Reverse of the Norm?

Back in 2007 (see Carl’s coverage of the acquistion of Stratify by Iron Mountain), Iron Mountain made one of it’s first explicit moves to directly address eDiscovery concerns with it’s acquisition of Stratify, a cloud-based offering used to outsource discovery activities with dedicated processes, semantic intelligence, etc..

Intrestingly, even though Iron Mountain’s longest line of business has been in the physical world, the Stratify acquisition jumped the straight past the traditional “legacy world” of on-premise solutions (to an extent) and straight to the cutting edge.

With the acquisition of Mimosa, Iron Mountain rounds out the portfolio for eDiscovery (integration and post-acquisition pains not withstanding) by specifically pulling in a solution that focuses on content where it lives in the largest typical buckets – those being email (as much as my fellow 2.0 pundits like to tout that email is dead, I can assure you it is not, and won’t be any time soon), SharePoint (that slow-moving content platform that is raising all boats), and for those still unmanaged files on desktops, file servers, etc., they can tap into the unmanaged areas as well.

The Theory Is…

If you’ll pardon the pun, Iron Mountain’s strategy appears to be (and which I largely agree with) if you can’t move the (content) mountain into active management, bring the mountain into passive management, so that in case of emergency, you stand a chance of actively managing your way out of costly, and expensive legal proceedings.

While you cannot anticipate every emergency, contingency, nor accurately forecast risk, by setting up both a proactive information architecture for your normal 80% of daily content concerns, being able to embrace solutions like what Iron Mountain is aiming for with this acquisition (we’ll see how long it takes to connect the vision to a seamles customer experience), allows you to break down both your normal legacy content walls, and burst up and out to cloud-based offerings to get the best bang for the buck. While I did not use this exact example in a recent webinar on Collaboration (see slides), I believe the graphic is still useful nonetheless.

The next time you’re looking at an overhaul, installation, or minor tweak to your own information architecture, enterprise content management or eDiscovery capabilities, take a look at this graphic and see if you have spent enough time, money and effort to cover your bases adequately.

Destroy and Converge

This general movement of destroying silos or at least virtualizing and providing access across multiple silos of information is a continuing theme (well past it’s time to come to broader light), that we also covered in a past IAM Alert on Present.ly and SharePoint, and which is being covered in a Cloud/SharePoint webinar today, by my colleague Carl Frappaolo (stay tuned for link to the archive).

Expect more on the cloud and virtualization front as enterprises finally take to heart what software startups (and the US Government) has known for many years now. High costs and barriers to the flow of information = bad business, and not just bad legal outcomes.

Are You Embracing Hybrid Strategies?

Weigh in with your success or failure stories, and let’s keep pushing the boundaries. We have a long way to go, but there has never been a more exciting time to be involved in these areas.

If we can be of help via our assessments, consulting or workshops, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Enter Microblogging

With the rise of Twitter in the consumer-facing world, has come the enterprise-facing versions of microblogging, with solutions such as dedicated offerings from Yammer and Present.ly, to the embedded capabilities within larger suites/platforms.

It seems clear that entirely stand-alone enterprise microblogging is not a “market” in and of itself, and the real trick, from a usability and adoption/change management standpoint, that microblogging, as with other forms of collaboration, need to be embedded within the flow of normal work, NOT as a separate interface.

Integrate to Disintegrate (Silos)

With this release of an integration point into the “elephant in the room” of Enterprise 2.0 – Microsoft SharePoint (which surprisingly does not currently have microblogging, nor, based on research we had done earlier in 2009, a usable wiki nor blogging capabilities), the power of an ecosystem around a major player in the market is helping to integrate and raise awareness ACROSS the market, as to the benefit of features and the overall system.

The benefits of light-weight communications (ala microblogging, streams) are tremendous, and in embracing the 2.0 methods of microcommunications (transparent, widely spread) vs. the siloed communications of traditional microcommunications (private IM conversations on specific platforms, such as LiveMeeting, etc.) is beginning to gain momentum, driven by the “twitter effect” (for those who see value in Twitter, of course). But it is still fairly early days for this capability, and the need to provide multiple ways to consume and use microblogging, whether stand-alone, integrated into a general platform (SharePoint) or a purpose-built Enterprise 2.0 platform (PBWorks, Thought Farmer, SocialText, Open Text, etc.), is key to getting microblogging/microsharing off the ground and into a sustainable mode.

Whether there is a market for microblogging per se, I would expect that purely stand-alone microblogging is going to disappear, as it is more of a feature than a “product.”

Where does your organization stand on microblogging/microsharing? Are you using Present.ly and similar microblogging tools, integrated suites WITH microblogging inside, Twitter (and damn the consequences), or none at all.

Wiki Acceleration

The Wiki World has transformed radically this year, representing major disruptions to the notions of what wikis even are compared to the first wiki from Ward Cunningham in 1995.

Having been one of the earliest analysts to cover Wikis starting in early 2003 (while at Delphi Group), it has been fascinating to see the classic disruptive innovation (ala Clayton Christensen) of wikis and Enterprise 2.0 dismantle the established 1.0 players (whether content, knowledge, information or collaboration solution providers), forcing them to acknowledge the changing notions, price and complexity of collaboration and content.

Collaboration Convergence – Beyond Wiki

With PBworks’ latest release, the convergence of collaboration of many types becomes even tighter and ‘in the flow’ than ever before.

For those times when classic wiki check-in/out is not enough, now there is realtime wiki collaboration (Live Editing).

For when a separate bridge line or concall would be necessary to talk live with colleagues, there is now realtime voice (Voice Collaboration – announced and anticipated Q1 2010) .

For times when voice isn’t necessary (or can’t be done, such as working from a hotel lobby, Starbucks, airport, conference/seminar, etc.) there is integrated IM Collaboration (rather than as a separate screen/page, as with MediaWiki and others).

Collapse the Silos – Getting Usable

The silos of collaboration are suddenly dropping away as Enterprise 2.0 providers embrace the needs of realtime, converged interfaces. Combine this with business wikis having long since dropped wiki markup in favor of WYSIWYG for humans, and the maturity of wikis has never been more capable of challenging the expected norms of enterprise collaboration.

Facing RealTime Competition

While Google has announced in their tightly controlled “preview release” of Google Wave, very similar features to this release by PBWorks, or related offerings from EtherPad, and to a lesser extent, the platform which SocialText released recently, Wave suffers from a major problem now. You can’t collaborate with someone on/in Wave until they’ve been let into the system – which is absolutely unlike ANY other web-based collaboration system I can think of.

So in a very real sense, Google Wave is no competition at all to this release, or any of the others pursuing RealTime collaboration RIGHT NOW.

That said, Google Wave is a “preview” release – not enough worthy of being called a “beta” release (and Gmail only had the beta tag removed in the last 6 months).

So the release of Wave is really more about gathering feedback from people while they refine it, and also in generating buzz around Wave precisely because they have made it a SCARCE resource. If it wasn’t for the scarcity of invites, I suspect we’d all be talking far less about the offering.

The Rising Tide

As one might expect, the brewing viral buzz “wave” of Google Wave may well be unstoppable, but as to whether Google “wins” this space or not (they are not infallible, and have shut down plenty of large and small experiments.

But if nothing else, we are right on the verge of whatever mix of real-time/asynchronous communication and collaboration we want, and prices we’ve never seen before. Enterprise 2.0 has made gigantic strides in the face of the economic meltdown, and we are all beneficiaries.

Anyone pursuing RealTime collaboration, please weigh in. What are YOU using? How do PBWorks, EtherPad, SocialText, Wave et al standup vs. other options? Does RealTime even matter to your use cases, or is Wiki 1.0 good enough?

Amazon has long been held up as the best of E-commerce 1.0, and has powered the growth of Amazon from the laughing stock of bookstores (“Who can sell books without REAL bookstores?”) to an extended platform for e-commerce – selling nearly everything except houses, cars and people, to the infrastructure of many web 2.0 startups, and even into becoming the infrastructure of corporate america via Amazon’s Elastic Computing offering (EC2), or the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) (and related offerings) that make up Amazon Web Services.

One of the interesting ironies of Amazon, however, is the near non-existence of traditional “customer service.” Frankly, that’s because for the most part, there is no need to interact with the people behind the scenes at Amazon. When you’re buying through Amazon, you are buying the customer experience, streamlined order processing, and ability to find darn near anything that can be bought online, along with all the recommended items that “others like you” have bought.

So why buy Zappos?

Zappos has been selling through Amazon for some time now, and many of the brands that Zappos sold could also be bought through Amazon.

Perhaps this ~8 minute clip from Jeff Bezos (CEO/Founder of Amazon) to the employees of Zappos, will help.

Next Gen Customer Service

As some have put it already, the acquisition of Zappos by Amazon really brings to Amazon a “next generation customer service capability.” While Bezos claims to be “customer obsessed” (and as a long-time customer, and purchaser of quite a bit of products and services from or through Amazon, I do agree), Zappos really does embody going well above and beyond customer service, as anyone who has purchased from Zappos already knows.

Will the combined innovations of Amazon and Zappos work? Is 1 + 1 = 3++?

Amazon clearly has the technology and logistics capabilities that most companies would kill for, and Zappos provides the “over the top” human-side of the customer experience, together with a deep understanding and use of social media (primarily Twitter).

No doubt there will be hurdles to overcome, although some of the traditional issues of acquisitions are being sidestepped as Zappos will remain it’s own “wholly-owned” brand.

Given the speed with which Zappos has tended to react and improve, versus the longer-cycle of testing/innovation/improvement that Amazon has typically shown, it will be interesting to see how the combined operations work together.

What are your predictions for this acquisition? And what can you learn from the strengths of the respective companies, applied to your own?

Introduced last week at the Google I/O developer’s conference is their latest entree the “Google Wave” offering (see preview announcement of Google Wave at Google). (Note: This offering is currently only available as a developer preview – meaning it is a “closed door” preview at this point.)

The Evolution of a Wave

From the team in Australia that brought out Google Maps functionality as an independent company (Where2), acquired by Google in 2004, has been hard at work for the last several years in rolling out what is being called “Google Wave.”

As I mention frequently, technological innovations take time to disperse, and the “overnight success” takes somewhere around 10 years to finally find a home. Credit this thinking with Geoffrey Moore of “Crossing the Chasm” fame, Everett Rogers from his 1962 book, Diffusion of Innovations, and others.

In this case, as an old hand in the enterprise portal world (I had worked at Delphi Group for 13 years, from 1994 to 2007), having been involved in the earliest days of the enterprise portal movement and evolution across a series of portal seminars and conferences, research and consulting work from 1996 to 2002, I have to say, on the one hand, I am happy to see Google more directly embracing the portal metaphor.

On the other hand…

Congratulations Google, you’ve invented the real-time portals that CoreChange (later acquired by OpenText) among others had pioneered roughly 9 years ago. Why not simply acquire rather than re-invent this capability?

What is a wave?

From Google’s description:

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

Don’t we have these pieces already?

Live/real-time communications already exist in the form of IM, microblogging (ala Twitter), video chat, etc.. – or from the Google universe, via Google Talk and Google Chat.

Document-based sharing is already available as well, via Zoho, Microsoft Live, and of course Google Docs (documents, spreadsheets, and presentations).

And by distinction of being “web-based” – all of these are already shareable on a common platform – the browser.

So what’s new?

Back to the Future

As with many things Googley, the “great Google” sky tends to approach new technologies from the consumer-oriented point of view, which is a much easier market to address, and allows for faster and larger scale experimentation. The prior portal players, with the exception of Yahoo! and Excite (which was sadly gutted and destroyed many years ago), the “typical” portal platform was created up front with an internally focused “enterprise view.”

To that end, some are touting Google Wave as an “all in one” killer – aimed at Twitter (created at the hands of many ex-Google employees – any animosity?), at IM (AOL, MSN, Yahoo!), and even at e-mail (take your pick).

The primary purpose of a portal (in the past or now), is to bring together the separate islands of functionality or underlying systems into a single dashboard, view or, that’s right, portal.

If you recall the early days of Google, they specifically built a search interface that was the anti-Yahoo!, Excite et al. Sparse, simple, streamlined for search and search results.

As happens with many software companies, when you do not currently have a solution or capability (whether due to focus, laziness, or inability to compete), the obvious play is to deny it’s importance.

In 2005, Google launched iGoogle which is of course a personal portal, complete with Google Gadgets (also known as widgets, portlets, and various terminology from other portal offerings). It would appear that the portal metaphor has legs, and Google is finally aligning it’s offerings to continue on the evolutionary trail already well established by other companies.

Time to Unify the Google

What appears to be happening with Google, and is a trend I’m seeing over and over again, is that there an increasing amount of simple but very specific tools being created (the vast majority of both the Web 2.0 and Enteprise 2.0 solutions),  which stirs up competition and innovation with tools that quite simply, get things done.

On the other hand, and the other extreme, more pointedly, is the desire of some companies to get the “all in one” solution, such as, witness the billion dollar market for Microsoft SharePoint (MOSS2007/SharePoint 2007), and the acquisition sprees of OpenText, Oracle, IBM, Sun, and the “large enterprise” players.

The Mashup Middle Ground

Re-enter the portal play – while it’s quite easy to argue that Google Wave is nothing new, and perhaps misses the pros and cons of earlier portal offerings, there is no doubt that this is part of a re-birth of portal technologies.

Which is perfect timing for a shaky economy – as we say in nearly every consulting engagement… You probably do not need MORE technology in your organization. You just need to make your existing investment work much more effectively, which is exactly what a portal “meta layer” will allow you to do.

Standards are more broadly adopted and understood at this stage in the market, and there is a far greater chance that portal implementations in 2009 and beyond will happen in weeks to months versus the 6-18 months of days past.

Will Google Wave be the Portal Saviour?

It seems unlikely that, early buzz aside, Google Wave will “own” the portal space any time soon, but if nothing else, it may cause Microsoft to realize once again that they have some turf to defend – after all, SharePoint initially came to be known as a portal framework, although it has rapidly come to be known primarily as more light-weight filesharing and search platform.

It will be interesting to see who rallies around Google Wave as a platform for development ON TOP of this infrastructure, as has happened with Salesforce.com, Amazon’s cloud services, and Apple’s iTunes Music Store (among others), and otherwise, exactly how much market share Google itself takes directly via Google Wave.

What’s YOUR Take?

Does Google Wave has a place in your portal or collaboration strategy? Replacing existing systems? Supplementing? Have never had such capabilities?

Let us know – this will be an interesting fight to watch.

Is Your Information Architected for Collaboration?

If not, let us bring our portal, collaboration, process, and content expertise to bear on YOUR project.

It it is entirely likely that you will not need to spend a single dime more on technology to get far better use of any investments you have already made.

Or if you have not yet invested in collaboration, let us help you make the most cost-effective choices in Doing Collaboration Right. It’s not just the technical tools you use, but the entire business environment as well.

• More about our Collaboration Consulting Services
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Today OpenText announced plans to acquire Vignette. (See press release.)

On one hand this move makes sense. OpenText has clearly been on a growth through acquisition strategy, and this move is aligned with that. As I blogged about last January, Tom Jenkins, OpenText Chief Strategy Officer and Executive Chairman, stated that OpenText was positioned to be the first ECM company to achieve $1 billion in revenue. With the acquisition comes the revenue and installed base of Vignette.

But, unlike other acquisitions made by OpenText, (e.g., acquiring DAM technology via Artesia) with this acquisition there is little to no gain in functionality. The overall value proposition of OpenText remains the same. With Vignette, OpenText acquires redundant capabilities. OpenText was the first document management solution to embrace the internet and thus provide WCM. They strengthened this offering with the acquisition of RedDot. So what, technically does Vignette add to the OpenText toolset?

I cannot help but think OpenText would have been better off exerting the time, energy and cost behind this effort, with a campaign to go after Vignette customers (and those of similar waning solution providers) and make them a “deal they couldn’t refuse.” This is similar to what Interwoven did to PC DOCS customers years ago.

The ability to assist customers with such a migration plan is in keeping with the OpenText BLOOM strategy. Wouldn’t Opentext have been better off leveraging BLOOM in this way? Instead, now OpenText has yet another technology platform to support or build an integration strategy for. At least short-term, OpenText will have to keep Vignette’s product line intact.

Technically, what is the OpenText strategy? Vignette only makes the company’s technology strategy more complex and confusing. Open Text already has a mix of of .NET, C++, and Java technologies. With Vignette they add a J2EE-based system. And for what – redundant capabilities? Is this a poor leveraging of the BLOOM strategy? Is OpenText out of their Bloomin mind?

The field of “independent” ECM vendors just shrank again, as Autonomy announced that it plans on acquiring ECM vendor Interwoven for US$775 million.  In a word – WOW.

This announcement is loaded with sub-plots and interesting twists and turns.

It underscores the financial strength of Autonomy, who also just posted their best quarter ever.  Autonomy expects to have a cash balance of at least $75 million after the deal.  What recession??

Armed with this level of cash, if properly and effectively used to launch a frontal assault on competitors such as EMC Documentum, OpenText, IBM/Filenet and Oracle(Stellent), Autonomy could be the biggest shaker that the ECM market has seen in several years, especially in the legal and compliance sectors.

That said, this acquisition reduces the direct (i.e. standalone ECM providers) competition faced by OpenText, further strengthening their position in this sub-market. The combination of Interwoven with Autonomy’s IDOL clearly rivals the rich mix of functionality of OpenText, and the IDOL platform rivals the OpenText Bloom philosophy.

Back to Autonomy:  The Interwoven technology will likely be integrated into the Autonomy  IDOL (Intelligent Data Operating Layer) search technology.  Leveraging Interwoven’s core competencies/product strengths and customer base, Autonomy will be thrust into being a major contender in the ECM for legal and compliance applications.  Interwoven has a long history in this market niche of ECM, complementing Autonomy’s other acquistions targeted at legal and compliance including Zantaz and Meridio.

The consolidated group will have a client base of 20,000 businesses. Businesses using both Interwoven and Autonomy include Bank of America, Bayer, Deutsche Bank, DLA Piper, Shell and Tesco.  This is a heck of a starting point from which Autonomy can go forward to make its mark on the ECM market.

While the Interwoven name and product names are likely to be fully consumed (aka disappear) in the Autonomy mix, (Does anyone remember Verity and the K2 server), this is actually good news for customers, as integration is likely to be swift. Autonomy has consistently demonstrated the ability to do just that with other acquisitions such as the aforementioned Verity, Meridio, Zantaz and Virage.

I had more or less written Interwoven off as an “also ran”, in the ECM space, but with this acquisition, they are likely to remain a major player,  albeit under the name of Autonomy.