More on Open Text’s WCM Product Plans

In the interests of continuing an open dialogue about our WCM product plans, I thought a second post was in order to provide more background and to discuss next generation product planning. We care about our customers and partners, and believe a transparent and open conversation in a social medium is a good way to communicate our future plans, provided straight from us. Through this process, we expect good feedback and ideas, and yes, some criticism along the way.

I’ll go into more detail below, but for those who want the highlights, here they are:

1. We appreciate all your feedback and ideas. We are sharing as much as we can while we continue exploring the best options for our customers.
2. For Web Solutions (Red Dot) customers: You will continue to be supported and your product will continue to be improved. We are putting the finishing touches on an upcoming release and we are working on a roadmap that will take you into the future.
3. For Vignette Customers: We have released Vignette Portal 8.0 and will soon release a major update to VCM 8.0. We will continue to invest in VCM as part of the Open Text ECM portfolio and the Next Generation initiative.
4. For new customers considering Open Text: Open Text offers one of the most complete portfolios of web solutions in the industry, is the 6th fastest growing technology company according to Forbes, and is dedicating a sizeable engineering staff to advance our leadership in WCM.

Turning to the topic at hand, Jon Marks ‘ comment asks two fundamental questions: What is relevant today and how will the rationalization of the Vignette acquisition affect the future of WCM at Open Text. I believe that with our continued investment and support of the existing two product families and the commitment to launch the next major version of our products as a version that respects the heritage of both preceding product versions, we are doing what customers expect for their maintenance dollar and what does justice to the tradeoff between upgradeability and innovation.

We have committed to continue to develop the technology our customers are currently on well beyond the launch date of our next generation product. We understand that Web requirements change over time and that customers are looking for the right moment to upgrade or redesign their sites. We believe that our next generation product will be very compelling and set a new bar in Web content management.

Again: We will provide an upgrade path for customers coming from Web Solutions and for customers coming from Vignette Content Management once we get to the next generation, but we will be proudly offering products we have available today as they will be state of the art for the next 2-3 years (confirmed by Gartner who has clearly put the Open Text offerings into the leadership quadrant in their most recent WCM analysis).

To put things into further perspective, Open Text is investing in WCM engineering staff and we expect to have the largest engineering force assigned to this area in the entire industry. We are very proud to serve more than 5,000 customers using our Web offerings (WCM, Community, Social, Portal) and we have every intention to keep all of them moving forward with us as WCM is a strategic R&D investment for the company.

Now to reiterate the tactical questions posed by Jon:
1. How does the new offering we are talking about fit into the overall architecture?
2. Which products will this new offering replace?


To the first question: For those of you who know these two product lines, I know that you will agree with me when I say that the strengths and use cases of both the Vignette Content Management and the Open Text Web Solutions offerings approach the WCM problem from two different starting points. Web Solutions customers are largely looking for a web site centric, easy-to-deploy and prescriptive WCM system that helps them to empower their web authors. Vignette customers in contrast really like the ability to create powerful online experiences that also supports a fair amount of unique application logic, served with a standard set of content and authoring capabilities. From a technical persona perspective, we are serving the webmaster/designer persona with our Web Solutions offering and the web developer with the Vignette offering. From a project perspective, we are serving the persona of a page-oriented method of content entry with Web Solutions and a more content-centric approach with Vignette. To address these very different needs in the market, and fit within the overall architecture of ECM from Open Text, we will continue to invest in these products separately and strengthen their unique persona use cases moving forward.

To address the second question: It is easy to read with all the comments floating around out there that something HAS to be replaced or is going away – but that is not true. I think most would agree with me in saying that the ideal WCM system should offer a balance of the two characteristics above in the same system. We have an innovation team that is evaluating the technology acquired from Vignette as part of our ongoing WCM advancements. Looking at the evolution of the Web over the last 5 years alone, we have seen AJAX, HTML5, Visual Studio, Web Services, SEO and Social constructs erupt onto the scene. Open Text is committed to investing in the future of our products for the benefit of our customer’s goals and success. We have acquired the best user experience and prescriptive application knowledge through Web Solutions (RedDot) and expertise in defining a highly scalable, dynamic and extensible WCM foundation through Vignette. We have an innovation team looking at the next iteration of Web Content Management, one that we are categorizing as Web Business, one that will redefine the way people work, find information, interact and uplift the traditional product value-chain to what we call the Web-centric value chain.

To support this vision, we are developing a Next Generation WCM solution (names still not decided at this early stage) and are including the expertise and concepts from Vignette into the mix. There has been speculation that we are trying to merge the code from Web Solutions and Vignette Content Management, but that is not the case (and in some cases not possible). This is an evolution of core WCM capabilities and the designs for this project have been in the works for a good year now. With the acquisition of Vignette, we gained new IP and philosophies that we want to add to our existing plans.

Rather than replacing an existing offering, this Next Generation WCM application will be an incremental offering. We have such a great (read “many” and “wonderful”) customer base using all of our WCM solutions. Our goal is to deliver a first iteration of the Next Generation WCM in 24 months. Upgrade to this Next Generation offering is an option from our existing WCM systems – but NOT a requirement. We do expect it to be a compelling offering, one that customers will want to move to when the time is right. This includes our WCM Presentation Server and WCM Content Server customers as well.

Do we have all of the answers now? No. As with any good engineering project we are writing requirements, designing, estimating, prototyping and working through the quality metrics. Do we have a design in mind? Yes. Can’t share that here, but if you want to get a glimpse into how it is formulating in our minds, take a look at our Vignette Media product which is available today. It offers the application and persona orientation that we are looking for with a commercial packaging that addresses the needs of both use case scenarios in the new Social oriented world of tomorrow.

Will competitors try to take advantage of the current situation and offer replacement promotions and claim that they can do what Open Text does? Sure. But the questions to ask them are not only if the technology is proven, stable and feature rich, but is there a cohesive direction, worldwide support, referenceable customers and an ecosystem of partners to tap into as well. And is there the kind of R&D vision, investment and commitment to innovative solutions as we’ve made?

Open Text has a strong vision for Enterprise Content Management, one that addresses the core business challenges of people, processes and content within a secure, compliant and agile methodology. Across documents and archives, to Web and rich media, Open Text is leading in our vision and execution supported with a strong leadership and partner community.

I hope the above provides the clarity you were looking for. As said before, we will provide detailed roadmaps during our Content World user conference in October. If you can, come along and see for yourself – we have a talented team working on our WCM portfolio and it would be a shame to miss what they have to say.