Cost of storage for ECM & DAM: Part 2

I recently posted a piece regarding storage costs for ECM that seemed to garner some interest, so I thought I might just flesh out some of the assumptions I made in that a little further. The basic premise was that people who buy ECM and DAM systems tend to underestimate the cost of related storage, and typically do so by a wide margin. In addition to underestimating the costs, buyers typically underestimate the volume of storage required. Combined, these miscalculations can, and often do, prove to be very costly.

In my experience these miscalculations are generally due to either a misguided assumption that storage volumes and costs are falling to the point whereby they are not worth worrying about, or that the buyer has previous experience with a web content management system, and assumes that as storage was a minor issue then, so it will be a minor issue with a full blown DAM or ECM implementations. The reality is, nothing could be further from the truth.

First, some basics. Although the cost of 1GB of storage has plummeted over the years, the cost of managing the stored data has not. In fact enterprise storage costs have continued to rise year on year. It is easy, though wrong, to equate the cost of disk space with the overall cost of storage. Disk costs represent a very small part of the overall storage bill. Managing the structure, security and access to and from that stored data is what costs a lot more.

Even as disk space costs have plummeted, our appetite for filling those disks has grown at an even greater rate. ECM and DAM storage costs have risen more than most as they both manage bulky content files. The increased use of rich media, PowerPoint, Flash files, video, audio or even just the use of graphics in typical office documents has bulked up storage demands way beyond anything one could have predicted just a few years ago, lifting many multi-terabyte situations to the petabytes today.

As the sheer volume of content being stored has grown exponentially, so too has the realization that hidden amongst these volumes are actual items of real business value, and/or items that could get us into trouble if lost (or found). The need to address such related issues as backup for basic protection, disaster recovery to ensure that we can survive if everything gets hit in a single location, and of course archiving, ensures that we can separate and actively manage important content over the long term. Enterprises must do this to meet compliance and legal needs. All of these of course add considerably to costs, though they do enable content owners to sleep well at night.

Some buyers just want to push it all to "The Cloud" and if that works for them, great - but that is not necessarily a low-cost option. As a rough guide, 1 petabyte of storage will cost you around $150k per month using Amazon S3, yes, that's $1,800,000 per year. Of course one can argue that "The Cloud" does all the DR and Backup work for you so there could be cost savings there, but its still not exactly cheap. Yes I know not everyone will need a petabyte of storage, but my point remains valid, as you will likely need far more storage space than you think you do. Whether you end up with a fiber channel SAN courtesy of NetApp, Hitachi or EMC or you opt for the Cloud - you are going to pay out a lot of money.

But hold on a second: surely this all assumes that such costs are inevitable and indeed necessary, that the only error is the fact that you, the buyer, underestimated them? In fact the major error here is that most buyers of ECM and DAM systems are not thinking about using storage systems in the way they were designed to be used. Theoretically at least such systems allow you to clear out junk (irrelevant, duplicated or redundant) on an ongoing basis, and only manage key data or files. This behavior is sorely lacking from our content management routines. Moreover, better systems integrate well with most common storage options, providing fairly seamless retention and disposition management, in some cases even going so far as to help in the automation of tiered storage. But few buyers ever make any use of these features and they become little more than electronic buckets, buckets that get filled in random order.

So, what is the lesson here? Well maybe there is more than one lesson, for starters:

• You should always ensure that accurate storage calculations are an early and important of any ECM or DAM project
• Put proper content governance in place to ensure you're not paying for space you don't need (Consider that a business case for ECM and DAM can often be made simply based on the savings derived from an efficient retention and disposal process)
• Finally, the next time you hear somebody say that enterprise storage is getting cheaper and cheaper, hit them, they deserve it.

By: Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Analys, CMS Watch, 24-Aug-2009
Link to original article: http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1671-Storage-for-ECM-DAM-Part-2?source=RSS

The Top 12 Options for Web Content Management

Gartner has published its Magic Quadrant for Web content management in 2009, to help CIOs and IT decide just what will meet the needs of the enterprise. Web software is now the fastest growing sector of the enterprise content management market, according to Gartner, and was valued at more $3.3 billion last year.

This annual report identifies the leaders in the industry. We've picked out the top dozen vendors aimed at enterprise content management on the Web. Here are their strengths and weaknesses, to let you get a handle on what's best for your business.

Leaders

While there's some overlap with generally popular offerings — Drupal-based solutions and open source are getting more attention than ever — most of the top dogs in ECM on the Web are specialist vendors who focus solely on the needs of enterprise. Gartner's choices for who fits inside the Magic Quadrant bear this out.

Oracle remains one of the biggest players in this area, despite being better known in many circles for its databases. What really brought them on the scene was the acquisition of Stellent in 2007, and since then their strength has been integrating WCM into their wide-ranging offerings for content management.

Autonomy, which entered the sector through its acquisition of Interwoven this year, tends to appeal most strongly to the marketing side of WCM. While they offer an ability to deliver content that's highly targeted, WCM will continue to be a sideline in terms of profit. While Autonomy can deliver right now, they lack a detailed roadmap for the future of the product.

Open Text is one of the most well-known in this space, and is the top pure play vendor for content management. Despite a close partnership with Microsoft, Garner predicts that Open Text's top competitor will continue to be SharePoint and other .NET software packages.

SDL acquired Tridion in 2007, and since then has shown impressive growth. This is the result of solid capabilities in multilingual and multichannel content management, as well as robust SharePoint integration.

Challengers

While the three companies listed at challengers by Gartner hardly seem like underdogs, software from Microsoft, IBM, and EMC are increasing in importance very rapidly.

Microsoft's SharePoint is growing enormously in market share as a Web content management solution. In addition to feeding off the trust that the Microsoft name inspires in just about every CIO, one of the strengths of SharePoint compared to current leaders is the partner ecosystem that is growing rapidly, and how tightly integrated it can be with Microsoft's other products in e-commerce, Web analytics and search. Of course, as fast as it grows in WCM, SharePoint is hated for its weaknesses as an intranet and document sharing system.

IBM's greatest strength in content management is also its greatest weakness. The fact that Lotus WCM is vertically-focused and is closely integrated with the entire Websphere Portal makes it appealing to organizations who already use the portal. But for those who don't, Lotus seems lacking without the rest of IBM's system.

EMC has been slowly brewing its WCM capabilities since it acquired the fairly popular Documentum in 2003. EMC is especially good in the sense that it works with a broader ECM solution, and can do DAM and records management of Web content too. It's also shown some of the biggest improvements in its latest release, 6.5, through adding technology first used in X-Hive, an XML database and dynamic delivery environment.

Visionaries

A list of honorable mentions shows up in the Visionaries section of the Magic Quadrant. The label might sound fanciful, but most of these up-and-coming vendors are making a real name for themselves.

Sitecore is a Denmark-based company that's also a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. Their .NET CMS is unsurprisingly tied to Microsoft in a multitude of ways, which can be either a plus or a minus, depending on where your enterprise stands technologically.

FatWire Software has a Java software package that focuses on collaborative features and analytics, but suffers from what Gartner calls "costly" customization needs to make it play nice with related technologies.

Ektron is especially famous in the SMB market. Its CMS400.NET integrates relatively well with SharePoint Server.

Day Software sells software based on Java EE, and it's made strides in usability. Despite these improvements sales have lagged, and Gartner predicts that the partnerships with IBM and HP that this Swiss-based vendor has will decline in the future, weakening its position.

Clickability is a pure SaaS vendor in Web content management which is making progress with enterprises fed up with the costs of on-premise WCM, even if SaaS remains on shaky ground.

There are at least a dozen more vendors in enterprise-class Web content management who get short mentions in Gartner's report. Solutions such as Alfresco's open source software or Acquia's Drupal distribution might not warrant inclusion in any list of leaders yet, but they're making respectable gains. For a detailed account, be sure to read the full report.

Link to original article: http://www.readwriteweb.com

Are we reaching the limits of UI buildout?

By Kas Thomas, Analyst
CMS Watch, 28 July 2009

As you can imagine, in the course of covering more than 200 software products, my colleagues and I get to see and touch a lot of different user interfaces, and one thing we've all noticed lately is the trend toward larger and larger interfaces. To put it bluntly, many products (particularly in the WCM and DAM spaces) now have client UIs that are just plain enormous. By enormous I mean busy and option-rich, with tons of controls, and often with a super high-resolution monitor required just to see the whole UI.

In the WCM world, products like Alterian Morello, SDL Tridion R5.3, Sitecore CMS, and TYPO3Canto Cumulus and Mediabeacon R3volution (among others), which have seen UIs grow in tandem with product functionality. (among others) have seen their user interfaces grow to the point where even power users find it challenging to learn the product -- and then stay current on it. The same is true, in the DAM world, for products like

UI sprawl is not limited to any particular tier or type of product, of course. Creeping featuritis has led to bewilderingly complex UIs for Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop, and countless other familiar software tools. In the Web CMS world, the problem seems to be compounded by a recent trend toward re-centralization of control and consolidation of roles in web publishing (just the opposite of the trend toward decentralization and specialization that was so common a few years ago) -- whereby power users dominate systems activity, and often system selection.

Looking forward, it's clear that "UI buildout" cannot continue much longer. For many products, cognitive overload is no longer a threat, but a reality. How many toolbars, tabs, nested menus, and clickable controls (not to mention nav-trees in which you have to scroll horizontally as well as vertically to find things) can a mere mortal handle? If a cognitive limit exists, I think we're pretty much there.

The question is, what can be done about it? Is there a way forward?

As a stopgap measure, simply hiding controls based on role can be useful. Many vendors make at least a token attempt to give you control over the visibility of important UI pieces based on a contributor's permissions.

As a whole, though, the industry needs to do a lot better in giving system implementers and admins the power to custom-configure task-based interfaces for different system personas. It can be very difficult (even impossible) in some systems to make a given command just not show up. It's hard to understand why that should be. Not everyone needs every command. Why put controls in a user's face if you don't have to? As noted UI expert Aza Raskin says, "If you notice the interface, that means you're thinking about the interface and not the thing you're trying to do."

It's been said that something like 45% of the features in a typical software system are never used, while another 19% are rarely used. That means the majority of executable code in a product seldom, if ever, executes. Clearly the opportunity exists to scale back UIs. The problem is, products with super-lean UIs don't demo well. In any featuritis arms race, the product that can stand up to the most overspecified RFP has a big advantage.

Maybe there are lessons here for all of us.

Vendors: Strip the UI to a skeleton and make it easy for implementers (and/or administrators, and/or power users) to add functionalities back one by one.

Customers: Stop "requiring the world" in RFPs and PRDs. This only exacerbates the featuritis arms race. And make sure non-tech-savvy casual users (not just power users) are properly represented on product selection teams. It's your non-techies who will push back hardest on hard-to-learn systems -- and ultimately decide the success or failure of the system.

We say it throughout our reports, but: Take time to do some usability testing of your own. Find out up front if a product's UIs are going to be a problem for your organization, and don't assume you can fix the problem with training. Training isn't the answer for users whose tired brains are already, even before you roll out the system, saying, Don't make me think.

More @ http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1652-UI-Bloat?source=RSS

The boondoggle that is software maintenance fees

By Tony Byrne, Analyst
CMS Watch, 28 July 2009

Annual software support and maintenance fees are something every customer loves to hate, and yet, for the most part we keep paying them. Technology managers fear "going naked," right up until they replace the package. Meanwhile, the underlying economics keep vendors keen to promote what has become a major profit center for most.

And which vendor has perfected the maintenance fee profit engine? You guessed it: Oracle. InformationWeek's Bob Evans explains in an excellent column, "Global CIO: How 22% Annual Fees For You Equals 51% Operating Margins For Oracle."

I think Oracle's success has had a huge influence on the technology marketplace. In the ten years that I've been covering content management, portals, search, et. al., I've seen many other vendors deliberately mimic Oracle's model.

And we're not just talking about commercial vendors here. A new breed of "commercial open source" vendors has also explicitly copied Oracle's approach: if a lion's share of the profits lies in customers paying annual fees, why charge for the software up front at all? Simply invest a little R&D to get started, use consulting projects and whatever the community can muster to drive ongoing innovation, carefully collar tech support costs, grow the company, and then sell it to a larger firm looking to acquire reliable revenue streams...such as Oracle.

These fees would feel less galling if you received great support in return. You've told us over the years that some vendors do indeed excel here. But most do not.

Then there's the thorny issue of supporting the software versus supporting (and upgrading) the implementation. In most sizable projects, someone (either your developers, a consulting firm, or a vendor's professional services arm) has so heavily customized the software that your vendor's tech support can quickly become impotent, save for addressing common bugs or very low-level problems. We've been advising buyers to take a close look at warranties and tech support within any consulting contracts, including those signed with a vendor. Remain particularly alert when buying software via a re-seller -- an increasingly prevalent model in the Web CMS market, as well as several others we cover.

Is there anything to like about maintenance fees? Some observers pointed out on Twitter yesterday that we should at least value the predictability of such expenses, even as we decry the rates (@lehawes). Annual fees help provide a kind of insurance for the customer and enable the vendor to invest in long-term support for the core codebase. And they put less pressure on vendors to front-load their total costs+ profit (@damtrends). Presumably vendors can break-even now, then profit later.

But oh, the profits. As part of our evaluations of publicly-traded vendors, we often listen in on quarterly financial analyst calls, which as Evans notes, can be quite revealing. One of my favorite vendor boasts to equity markets is, "obtaining a higher yield from existing customers." How much should financial performance matter to you the buyer? A little. It's good to know your vendor won't go bankrupt. Nonetheless, I think traditional technology analyst firms do enterprise buyers an injustice by too often conflating a software vendor's financial success with technical acumen or product development skill. (Some analysts also mis-identify vendor marketing and sales acumen with customer value, but that's another story....) I'm quite certain that in the software world, there's no definite correlation between profits and quality. According to Oracle's CFO, there is a correlation between profits and size of maintenance base.

There's some good news, though. We're seeing increasingly better peer-based, community support. This trend is surely more advanced in the open source world, but commercial vendors have been catching on here, too. The availability of peer support has become an important criterion for our evaluations in recent years, and enlightened suppliers are fostering active communication among customers.

Our research reports also instruct technology buyers how to negotiate down annual maintenance rates. In the field, we sometimes receive slack-jawed responses from both the customer ("you mean we can do that?") and the vendor ("you want to carve up our golden calf?"). Yes, on both counts.

Optimizing Digital Asset Management

Reblog from Business Management
E-Magazine

In an exclusive interview the IDC’s Melissa Webster talks to Business Management about the increasing emergence of digital asset management and the potential for the future of the sector.

“Increasingly what we see is companies wanting to design media and career assets that can be used online and in print, digital asset management can play an important role along that repository”
-Melissa Webster, IDC

Perhaps you could give us an indication of the types of challenges enterprises face when managing their digital assets?
Melissa Webster. First of all it’s a really fragmented market, mainly because there are so many different use cases. For example, if you are talking about the enterprise, typically the needs of the enterprise are revolving around management and marketing and you need to manage a library or repository of assets, which can be shared for worldwide marketing programs and that can be taken and reused by regional or local groups when they kick off their own campaigns. The assets can be marketing collateral, designed for print, web or radio, or they could be brand materials such as logos.

So, depending on what your business is, if you are a large brand manufacturer or consumer goods manufacturer, you are going to have a tremendous amount of content – some of it will be product photos, some of it will be rich media, such as video, audio or multimedia. You need to have expert metadata about your assets so that you can serve up the appropriate version to the right person, in context. Of course the digital asset management (DAM) system also provides the security, authorization and control over who actually says what. That’s part of the equation and it has worked for us for interesting assets and cataloguing them, but also when people use them and implement things like notification and approval workflows and so forth.

How does digital asset management refer to enterprise content management? Are the to related? Do they have unique functions and features?
MW. The difference really lies in the unique workflows, which need to be extremely specific in the case of digital asset management. The digital asset management system hopefully takes apart the asset into its component parts and storing these as separate assets in order that they can be reused in other creative ways without being redundant and then putting those assets back together when need be.

A digital asset management system can be used to help with problems around logo changing. For example, if I need to change the logo in 2000 brochures in 75 places than you can change the logo in one place and reflect that change throughout your current set of print brochures and on to websites. There is this notion that were used and the extensive linking of assets to each other, and we can call that level. There is the unique workforce for the creative process, which is a little different from what we do on the enterprise national side.

Do you see digital asset management as a subset of an enterprise content management system or something completely separate? Is it within an enterprise content management (ECM) solution or is it something that companies will be looking to purchase separately?
MW. That depends on the requirements. Certainly the enterprise content management vendors have for some time offered digital asset management systems. However, there is still a place for DAM solutions, even in organizations that have these ECM offerings from the top ECM vendors if your requirements are specialized. If you are a large print publisher, for example, it may be that your enterprise content management vendors digital asset management solution does not deal well in designed documents and doesn’t manage those components. If you are doing a lot of print publishing, perhaps you need to buy a DAM that is tailored to managing that kind of content because you need to manage the component level so that you can print different renditions or need to dynamically resize things for the web.

How does the increasing digitization of many different types of content and information add to this challenge?
MW. Well, on the one hand we have this tremendous explosion of digital content and that is the case inside the enterprise as well as on the consumer side – we all take more photos with our digital cameras for example. There is a huge distortion of digital content and one of the things that happens is that because everything is digital it is relatively cheap and everybody keeps everything.

On the flipside, having digital makes it so much easier to catalogue, find and search. You can immediately call information based on a search, watch a preview and verify that that is the asset you want, which makes life so much easier. The other thing that is so great about the digital world is that it is easy to create variance of that asset, it just takes a little code, whether that is a transcoding video or audio or whether you are taking a brochure apart and putting it back together in a new way with new ingredients. It is so easy to take, edit and revise different assets.

One of the things we are talking about in this issue is the idea of managing the customer experience across different platforms and channels. What role does DAM play in helping manage that customer experience for companies?
MW. The digital asset management system is a source of direct images, video, audio, the rich media and multimedia formats assets. It might be used in the context on a website with mass logos and text or the applications to enable transaction on that website and other commerce. The DAM is managing ingredients for that process. Increasingly what we see if companies wanting to design media and career assets that can be used be online and in print, so the digital asset management system can play an important role along that repository and surface the right assets for the right publishing point, although they it is not itself providing the web publishing capabilities, that is the job of the web content management system.

Where do you see the market heading next? Is there a major trend that you think will have a big impact on this particular sector?
MW. I certainly think that the trend seems to tightly connect the digital asset management system and the web content management system as an important trend. Increasingly among smaller web content management vendors are integrations with DAM systems and I believe we are going to see that more and more between the web publishing side and the digital asset management side.

We are seeing grand management applications on top of digital asst management systems to provide some of the out-of-the-box workflows that the marketing department needs, either to work internally across a large globally distributed marketing organization or to facilitate collaboration with their advertising and interactive agencies and stakeholders to help in their marketing.

Types of DAM
There are several broad categories of digital asset management systems, including:

• Brand asset management systems: With a focus on facilitation of content re-use within large organizations, here the content is largely marketing or sales related. For example, product imagery, logos, marketing collateral or fonts
• Library asset management systems: With a focus on storage and retrieval of large amounts of infrequently changing media assets. For example, video or photo archiving
• Production asset management systems: With a focus on storage, organization and revision control of frequently changing digital assets. For example, digital media production
• Digital supply chain services: With a focus on pushing digital content out to digital retailers. For example, music, videos and games

Autonomy Puts Its Meaning-Based Technology to Media Use

By Irina Guseva, CMSWire, Jul 16, 2009

Autonomy has partnered with VMS, a provider of media intelligence solutions. VMS will use Autonomy’s meaning-based computing software to build tools for media analysis and competitive intelligence.

VMS is planning to enhance its own PR and advertising solutions for media monitoring, measurement, analysis, competitive advertising and marketing intelligence, workflow management, analytics and PR measurement across all types of media.

Autonomy Interwoven web content management system — powered by Autonomy's Intelligent Data Operating Layer — will be used by VMS as an integration point for developing tools that can analyze different types of content and act accordingly.

Digital Asset Management (DAM) will also be part of the offering with Virage MediaBin, where meaning will be extracted from video and digital media.

Audio analytics from Autonomy can be used to analyze speech and music files.

VMS is no stranger to Autonomy’s circle, being their customer and partner. You may know VMS by their products, including Vantage and AdSight.

As Autonomy indicated earlier, meaning-based marketing (and meaning-based everything, really) is indeed coming to the forefront.

Reblog from CMSWire, http://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-cms/autonomy-puts-its-meaningbased-technology-to-media-use-005052.php, 17 July 2009

Major New Release of Open Text Web Solutions Makes Delivering Content-Rich, Personalized Websites Easier Than Ever

Open Text, a global leader in Enterprise Content Management (ECM), today announced the immediate availability of Open Text Web Solutions 10, the latest release of Open Text’s industry-leading Web Content Management (WCM) software. The new release allows organizations to intelligently manage and deliver a broad set of corporate information to users over the Web, and features extensive usability upgrades, a new technology foundation, and deeper and more comprehensive integration with the Open Text ECM Suite and the SAP NetWeaver® Portal component.reBlog from digitalassetmanagement.org.uk, Digital Asset Management, Jul 2009