I have no idea who the guy is on the stage. He came out after a Harold Faltermeyer-esque opening movie (complete with Windows system click sound at the end) and started talking. No introduction whatsoever.
John Shackleton has now taken the stage. Older guy. I’m vaguely curious to know how long this guy has been with OpenText. Claims OpenText is now the largest independent ECM vendor.
Has asked: “What are you going to do to me?” Those of using the CMS product have all chuckled rather derisively. He is referring mostly to the Hummingbird acquisition, which is why this is now the OpenText Summit conference, rather than the Hummingbird Summit conference.
(OpenText is a weird company. I remember when they started, a spin-off of the University of Waterloo. They were s search engine, back in the early days. Competitor to the early generation, even powered Yahoo! back at the start. The search engine eventually gave way to content management. Now they’re a massive ECM vendor.)
Has said he needs to improve the QA of their products. Buddy, you got your work cut out for you.
Looks like most of OpenText’s executive is here. STODGY. Talking suits. Thank God that Critical Mass presentations aren’t this dull. I’ll probably never talk to any of them — they’re not the ones who’ll have direct influence on the software I want to talk about. But I’ve already met the president of that division.
Introduction of Tom Wilkinson, Chairman. Product roadmap. Mention of a DAM product. If it ain’t Canto, I don’t know what he’s talking about. OpenText apparently has 22% of the ECM market, just behind IBM’s 28%. A passing note about WCM, and apparently 20% of attendees are here for the WCM product.
OpenText bigger than Interwoven, Vignette, Mobius, and Hyland combined. Ouch. Why partner with the biggest companies, though? You become a number. I mean, I was worried about going with Interwoven because they were too big. Thankfully, the WCM product is a separate division, so we get good attention.
Mention of OpenText’s early days. “Geometric growth” since then. Somehow this is supposed to tie into customer data volumes.
Talking about departmental content silos. This doesn’t sound remotely familiar at all [insert thick sarcasm here]. Some emphasis on SAP and Microsoft apps blending through LiveLink ECM. The guy fastened ALL THREE of the buttons on his suit jacket. Faux pas. Support for PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel. And Lotus … ugh.
(Side note: IBM, please drop Lotus like a bad date. It’s horrid software and poorly maintained. Just adopt Microsoft as a partner or go open source. Lose the baggage.)
Transparency between people, processes, and content. Supposedly this leads to better compliance (SOX?) and “keeps your boss out of jail”. Something to think about for the intranet project, methinks.
Bla bla bla ECM bla bla value chains bla content processes bla bla bla bla contracts management. Uh, 20% of us are feeling ignored, here!
Major partners with SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft. Specific note to SharePoint. Not sure why flagging the competition. There are videos online on OpenText’s site from user conferences about what they were going to do — they claim they’ve done what they’ve said. Gonna have to curtail my YouTube habit a little while.
New guy. Kirk Roberts. More animated. Thank God.
Lots of empty seats in the keynote. Lack of interest, or not as many attendees as planned. The Canucks (Mitch, Brad, Rod, and myself) are bored. OpenText, OpenText, OpenText. At least there’s no fat, sweaty jock running around the stage screaming “developers”.
Methinks no note about the WCM for now. I’ll cut this post short and wait until the next session.
