Content as Dichotomy
Content is king, but it's not ECM, says Interwoven CEO Joe Cowan
Information Management Magazine, November 1, 2008
Joe Cowan
Advertisement
CEO,
Interwoven
A survivor of the dot-com bubble and the portal/content management experiments of the same era, Interwoven has witnessed many vagaries of the modern software business. A survivor and, today, a "strong positive" in Gartner Inc.'s latest MarketScope for Web content management (WCM), Interwoven pursues dual and separate strategies in WCM and document/records management. A year into the helm, CEO Joe Cowan, a software-industry veteran with a reputation as a "fixer," is settling into a growth curve, as he recently explained to DM Review Editorial Director Jim Ericson.
DMR: How have record and document management vendors seen the rise of Web content management as a different challenge?
Joe Cowan: In our case, we're really two companies, what came out of the old Interwoven and what came from a company we acquired called iManage. iManage is the document management business. It is a totally different product from our Web content business and is sold to a whole different set of customers. But we can talk about both businesses because they both have a tremendous growth opportunity under the Interwoven brand.
DMR: Does that reflect an ongoing disconnect between WCM and the old unified enterprise content management (ECM) model?
JC: [Years ago], the guys at Gartner said there was this thing called ECM, companies are going to want an integrated solution for the Web and so the document side has got to come together with that. They created this thing called ECM, and at one point our company went out and acquired iManage to add the document management piece. But in my world, ECM does not exist.
DMR: I'll let you expand on that last thought.
JC: The concept behind ECM said that whether you're working with the Web or working with your documents, you'll serve everything to your Web content management system because a lot of those documents are going to be used online. There was a time when a Fortune 500 IT department would look for a suite of products to solve the total problem and then hope to build a lot of applications on top of that for their solutions. That's the context. But we really had two distinct businesses - the WCM side, which is focused on marketing, and a separate document management piece that in our case is very focused on professional services.
DMR: I want to focus on WCM, but give us a snapshot of the document management business to clarify the distinction.
JC: On that side of the business, we're working with the biggest law firms, accounting firms and consulting firms; it might be a government agency with a lot of lawyers involved in a regulatory process or it could be a corporate legal department. Those people have unique sets of requirements and some of the most sophisticated document management problems you can imagine. There's an explosion of information hitting their people from many sources, and a tremendous problem brews if you are not good at managing that. For example, lawyers use a term called "matter centricity," which requires that our tool help present a case in intuitive ways to help you organize and manage and file all the relevant information from internal, external and shared sources, including email. Records management is part of our solution, so we provide a strategy for that. If you're an accounting firm, your documents are not Word docs; they tend to be spreadsheets. Across service industries, we offer products that are very focused, as opposed to a toolkit. The main competitor to our iManage products is not [EMC] Documentum, [IBM] FileNet or Stellent [now Oracle], it's Hummingbird.
Page 1 of 2.
