Irina Guseva: Random Thoughts on CMS, WCM, ECM and Other Acronyms

She is well-versed in matters of Enterprise CMS, Enterprise 2.0, collaboration and social media; specializes in VQA wines, weaves in candy and aspirin into one sentence and posts some of the yummiest foodie tweets out there.

Soon after her resignation, the former Open Text-er was asking on Twitter whether 6 pairs of shoes would be enough for one week in Paris, there was a chance that French bistros, Père Lachaise and walks down Canal Saint-Martin were not the sole purpose of the trip.

Meet Cheryl McKinnon, who, as of today, is the new Chief Marketing Officer of the Paris-headquartered open source ECM vendor Nuxeo.

As the new CMO, McKinnon plans, first of all, to put the right team in place (Will we see former Open Text-ers there?) “to make a big bang in the U.S.” and work on Nuxeo’s messaging across the web, print and other channels to deliver “what business and technical buyers need to hear about.” We should expect to see at least 15 more hires in sales, product development and engineering in both Boston and Paris, according to Nuxeo.

After learning the ropes of Nuxeo Enterprise CMS product (including Nuxeo EP and Nuxeo DM), McKinnon admitted she was “pleasantly surprised by the usability factor and a clean, intuitive UI.” “This is not a product you would struggle to use.”

With virtually non-existent experience, exposure or previously declared affection for open source, McKinnon sure did learn some lessons from the proprietary enterprise content management space that should translate well into both French and doing business the open source way. “There’s only so much you can learn in one place. The more that you wait, the more time that you waste.”

Why Nuxeo?

Quite a few of you are probably puzzled as to why someone would leave a position on the growth track at one of the ECM giants. McKinnon has the answer; she is a “big believer in leaving at the top of the personal game.” The last year of her career at OTEX “was the most fun and fulfilling,” due to being able to learn new products, explore social media and start writing again. But it was time to “take all lessons learned and apply [them] to a company on the brink of making a jump to the next level.”

In addition to that, Eric Barroca, Nuxeo’s CEO, “reached out and painted a picture.” No, he didn’t exactly DM her on Twitter, but this level of personal recruitment made McKinnon feeling “obliged to return the call,” even though she returned none of head hunters’ calls.

More on CMSWire: Former Open Text-er Takes CMO Job at Open Source Nuxeo

Personally, I cannot wait for October to arrive. Open Text Content World will be in the lovely Orlando, and we all should expect to be enlightened on OTEX’s product map and strategy for its two web content management arms: Web Solutions (aka RedDot) and the recently acquired Vignette.

Commenting on my previous post on the Open Text WCM saga, Markus Giesen et al. — representatives of an unofficial RedDot blog — raised several worthwhile questions. Not with publicity in mind, but in an effort to get some real, transparent answers I reached out for comments to Open Text.

Disappointingly, we did not succeed in squeezing a ton of clarity from Open Text’s Marci Maddox — their Director Global Product Marketing for Web Solutions.

The official party line is that no product migrations, discontinuations and code mergers will happen for Vignette and RedDot. RedDot is not dead, and Vignette will continue to get R&D money. A “singular solution” — whatever that means — is still on the roadmap for the next 2 years.

The response from the community is still “Yeah, we’ve heard that before…” as many are thinking of Gauss and Obtree.

Without more answers, the Vignette acquisition looks to be more of an impulse buy. And hey, most of us do impulsive things every now and then (more often than we’d like to admit), only to find ourselves stricken by a profound “Oh, my…” moment, then scrambling to put the puzzle back together again.

Granted, decisions of this magnitude are unlikely to have been made impulsively. They are also not easy to pin down in a relatively short period of time.

However, reflecting on the recent communications strategy, opinions like “The botched messaging around RedDot speaks unbelievably poorly of OTEX leadership, IMHO” are nothing but expected.

Open Text has finally revealed a bit more information about what the giant plans to do with its multiple WCM offsprings. More specifically, where the recently adopted Vignette child may be placed in Open Text’s Enterprise CMS and Web CMS families.

“Our plan is not to eliminate products, but to offer solutions that help our customers effectively fulfill their unique, organizational needs,” said John Shackleton, president and CEO of Open Text.

The product architectures and technologies are quite different. And it is still not clear yet how this WCM/ECM quilting exercise (Open Text should really patent this phrase) will go on. At this time, however, there are no planned migrations of customers from one platform to another. Open Text is “not going to force anyone in either customer base,” according to Scott Bowen, Sr. VP at Open Text.

Saying that Vignette adds the right technologies to the portfolio at the right time, Open Text plans to leverage Vignette Content Management (VCM) as the foundation of Open Text’s Web business solutions, aiming to cover all possible content management implementation use cases from basic to sophisticated deployments, while utilizing both RedDot’s and Vignette’s “historic strengths,” adds Bowen.

Within the next 24 months, Open Text is looking to launch a “singular WCM product offering” that will combine key strengths of Web Solutions and Vignette.

Other plans:

• The release of the long-anticipated Vignette Content Management version 8.0 (VCM v8) is still on track for H2 2009.
• The recently released Web Solutions 10.0 will be followed by Web Solutions 10.1 in H1 2010.
• Vignette Social Media Solutions (Community Applications and Community Services) will be the basis of a new Social Marketplace offering as part of Open Text Social Media.
• Vignette Collaboration will continue to be enhanced as part of the underlying Vignette Social Media technology stack.
• Vignette’s Transactional Content Management product line (think SAP and Oracle integrations, B2B and eCommerce) should see the light of day at some point.

More on CMWire.com

Enterprise CMS provider Open Text announced unaudited financial results for Q4 and FY2009.

Despite the current economic climate, OTEX reports achieving bottom line target, although net income for fiscal year 2009, and license revenue and operating cash flow in the fourth quarter have dipped.

Conversations on Vignette’s fate and product integration strategies are ongoing.

Acquisitions always seem to be part of any conversation around Open Text. During Q4, the company acquired digital media, 3D applications makers Vizible for an undisclosed sum to expand its portfolio of digital media applications. There are no details yet as to what Open Text plans to really do with the eye candy that Vizible is.

Finalized in July of this year, the acquisition of Web CMS vendor Vignette and its positioning in Open Text is starting to look less nebulous.

John Shackleton, president and CEO of Open Text, said, “We are pleased with how the acquisition is progressing and to date the integration is tracking to plan.” While also adding “I am disappointed that we were slightly off on our Q4 revenue targets, mainly due to the WCM delays where customers were waiting to see our new WCM strategy with the announcement of the Vignette acquisition.”

Vignette’s prior (not very promising) financial behavior and miscellaneous struggles are playing a role in Open Text’s balance sheet.

According to Open Text’s CFO Paul McFeeters, “As part of acquisition accounting, we will fair value the acquired deferred revenue for customer support contracts…  However, I expect the range of this adjustment to be between US$ 6 million and US $ 8 million for the first year of operations. While we will not break out the financial effect of the acquired Vignette business, I will remind you that they were operating at a breakeven margin. We expect this acquisition to be neutral to the operations in Q2, accretive in Q3, and on our operating model by the end of this fiscal year.”

In addition to that, Open Text plans to cut Vignette’s worldwide workforce (layoffs wouldn’t be for the first time) and “continue to rationalize facilities in both Open Text and Vignette. ” Open Text and Vignette restructuring charge will be approximately US$ 32 million to US$ 40 million. How many jobs is that?

It would be reasonable to expect that Vignette and former RedDot (now, Open Text Web Solutions) will be merging in some way or another. With  Vignette, most likely, taking the upper hand. The detailed roadmap and product integration strategies should be announced in October at the North American Content World Conference in Orlando, FL.

More on OTEX numbers on CMSWire

Open Text said it’s a done deal. The planned acquisition of all of the issued and outstanding shares of Vignette (worth approximately US$ 321 million) has been completed late yesterday following a shareholders’ meeting where the voting and approval took place.

While Vignette is busy nostalgizing, Open Text says it’s working on the strategic aspects of what may come next. Let’s not forget that Open Text already has a WCM-centric group called Open Text Web Solutions. Offering an even broader range of (quite similar) products is going to take some brain activity. Then again, this would not be the first quilting exercise for Open Text.

In the meantime, there’s still some Vignette cash to recognize on OTEX’s balance sheet.

According to the “big brother,” support will continue for Vignette’s products and (the relatively quickly decreasing) installed base (bringing in the licensing revenue). The same applies to existing Web Solutions products and customers. No comment has been made in regards to new(er) Vignette products.

There is a talk about a “combined product,” but no details on what it will be, except for providing a supersized meal of a “full set of feature options, from… fast-to-deploy web publishing application, to… enterprise-class e-business platform for large-scale deployments.”

Vignette’s social media, DAM and personalized content seem to be some of the most palatable notes in this content management connoisseur combo. Open Text also expressed intent to potentially leverage some of Vignette’s components in its ECM Suite.

More details on the product strategy and the product roadmap are not likely to be announced earlier than October, when Open Text’s annual conference — Content World 2009 – will take place.

Restructuring is expected. We should know more about the range of that initiative around the end of August.

Originally posted on CMSWire: Vignette Stockholders Said Yes to Open Text Acquisition

Remember Open Text Social Media? FirstClass is a communication and collaboration platform that was used as the underlying engine in that product. If you use FirstClass for your e-mail, calendaring, etc., we have good news for you.

FirstClass (brought to Open Text via the Centrinity acquisition) went mobile.

Available from the App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch, the long-awaited app promises “a broad range of rich features” when accessing messaging and collaboration services. Secure login can be accomplished from the above devices to any FirstClass server.

More on CMSWire: Open Text’s FirstClass is Finally iPhone-Friendly