Through the fog... How to buy content management software

Quocirca's Bob Tarzey weighs up the rights and wrongs of buying CM software. Take heed...

In a previous article, Quocirca advised on the problems of getting value out of all-too-expensive content management solutions. The piece concluded that content management should become pervasive and that prices need to come down to a least €100 per seat to achieve this. Many organisations, it was contended, would stick with ad hoc electronic solutions like Microsoft Outlook and Explorer – or the filing cabinet in the corner.

How close have vendors come to delivering their products at a price that will allow pervasive content management? And how should you go about selecting a product?

You are not spoiled for choice – the German-managed website www.contentmanager.de currently lists 1,434 products and 1,096 vendors. Having decided to address your content proliferation problem and then finding you are faced with so much choice, it might be tempting to put the project on one side and move to the next task.

Fortunately many vendors can be dismissed because their products are too specialist, either because they are only available in their local market or they are aimed at a niche market, like media or pharmaceuticals. This will still leave you with tens of vendors to consider who are capable of providing an all round solution. You can filter these depending on your requirements. Some of the questions you should ask are: What do you already have? What new capability do you want? How much are you prepared to spend?

Content management is a broad term which covers two major requirements. First, the management of all sorts of documents and digital assets such as pictures, videos and sound, as well as more structured data found in databases.

Second, the ability to find required information and display, or 'publish' it, where the end user requires. More often than not that target for publishing is a web browser.

There are of course many other media for delivering content including mobile phones, interactive TV and personal digital assistants. Some vendors, for example CoreMedia, are specialists at multimedia publishing.

All products lie somewhere on a continuum from pure content management to pure publishing. The vendor's background will usually indicate where their strengths lie. Vendors with a strong back ground in document management such as Documentum, Filenet and Stellent have their own content repositories. Most of the content that their products can access will be stored within these, although external data can be accessed – in general they like to be in charge of content.

Other vendors, like Interwoven and Vignette, who grew their businesses and reputations during the internet boom, have strengths in web publishing – they operate using virtual repositories.

While some of these vendors will claim to be able to cater for all your requirements, they will generally admit to their core competence. In fact, end users and integrators will sometime use one product for content management and another for publishing.

The market is consolidating and vendors who are strong in content management are buying up smaller companies with publishing capabilities. In Europe earlier this year the German vendor IXOS purchased the Swiss web publishing vendor Obtree and, in a similar vein, IBM has just announced the purchase of the Australian vendor Aptrix. Both now have more complete solutions.

Having decided the problem you need to fix - content management, content publishing or both – you can narrow the list of vendors further. Although many take a scatter gun approach with their publicity and marketing, they are usually more focused with sales.

The majority, including Core Media, Filenet, Interwoven, Stellent, Tridion and Vignette all state that their principle sales focus is large blue chip organisations. If you are a small business, you might consider it fortunate that your choice is more limited. A subset of vendors including Documentum, IBM, Merant, Microsoft and Red Dot has extended their focus to include smaller businesses.

Because of this these vendors are also well positioned to deploy departmental solutions, which could be scaled up at a later date – interesting for larger, cost sensitive organisations. Some vendors have a strong reliance on partnerships to take their products to market – IXOS claims a surprising market share but then 60 to 70 per cent of their sales are via SAP.

Having narrowed down the number of vendors you are talking to based on your requirements and the type of organisation you are, what should you expect to pay? Definitive advice on pricing is hard to give, as there are many variables such as user- versus server-based pricing, concurrent versus named users and so on.

Entry level pricing quoted by vendors ranges from about €5,000 to €75,000. The lower end of this range was quoted by those vendors with a small business focus and was for about 5-10 users. Many admit the average cost of buying their products is well over €100,000.

These costs are just the licensing. The cost of implementation varies widely. Many vendors admit that to deploy what they provide requires a greater spending on services than on licences – and they were cagey about deployment time. Merant and Stellent were exceptions, both claiming their product can be implemented within 10 days, keeping service costs to a minimum.

Content management solutions are still expensive to purchase and deploy. They need to earn their living by providing a benefit that outweighs their cost. Vendors are starting to react by making their products cheaper and easier to deploy.

The market is consolidating but the amount of choice is still huge. We are still a long way from a price a $100 per seat and pervasive content management. Many organisations will continue to use ad hoc solutions to solve their content proliferation problems – and I guess they will also hang on to the filing cabinet in the corner.

**Quocirca is a leading, user-facing analyst house known for its focus on the 'big picture'. For a full summary of its activities see www.quocirca.com, or reach the company's founding directors by emailing quocirca@silicon.com.

Also in this series: Through the fog... Getting your business processes finely tuned Through the fog... Better connecting users to technologies Through the fog... Better connecting users to technologies Through the fog... Predictive texting Through the fog... Business continuity and disaster recovery Through the Through the fog... Wireless email at work dilemmas Through the fog... Storage as a service Through the fog... Buying an application server Through the fog... Corporate content management Through the fog... Automated speech recognition Through the fog... Public Key Infrastructure Through the fog... Vendor-channel relationships Through the fog... What future photo messaging?

For Quocirca's 'What's the fuss about...?' series for silicon.com, see this page

And for their earlier 'Surviving the Recession' series, see this page.