Fatwire “Rescues” Interwoven and Vignette

Forrester recently named Fatwire a Leader in their WCM for external Sites Quadrant. And the folks at Fatwire have already called two of their fellow-quads (for the lack of a better term), Interwoven and Vignette as legacy WCM products! Incidentally, Interwoven sits nicely in the Leader quadrant in the same report and was also named the fastest growing ecm vendor by rival analyst firm Gartner. (Yeah, yeah I know –  the report by Forrester is on WCM and the other one by Gartner is on ECM).

On a more serious note though, Fatwire has been making some news in recent times. Among other things, recently they announced a rescue program for “legacy” Interwoven and Vignette customers – an offer to move to Fatwire at no license cost (only the support costs). They have announced this offering in partnership with Vamosa and Kapow. Vamosa and Kapow both have content migration offerings and compete in this space. Fatwire says they both add value to this proposition. I suspect they have partnered with both because Vamosa, along with expertise in many aspects of content migration, has connectors for Interwoven and Vignette while Kapow has connectors for Fatwire. Any content migration scenario will require both set of connectors – one set that exports from interwoven or vignette and one set that imports into Fatwire. You could obviously roll up your own migration scripts by publishing from Interwoven/Vignette as XML and then using Fatwire’s XMLPost or BulkLoader to import into Fatwire. But then the offer for free licenses wouldn’t be free or would it?

BTW, even though Fatwire’s release mentions these as partners, neither of these two have issued their press release nor have mentioned it on their respective sites. I think that’s natural because they probably have partnerships with those “legacy” vendors 🙂

This is an interesting and I’d say an aggressive move by Fatwire. After all there are only few niche WCM vendors remaining and they are one of them. There is a clear divergence happening in the marketplace – On the one hand, there are more web oriented scenarios (Web Content Management, Site Management, Portals, Web Sites and so on) and on the other hand are more repository/management oriented scenarios (Document Management, Records Management). The requirements, challenges as well as decision makers (and stake holders) for both these areas are usually different. Fatwire for one has been focusing on and targeting the needs of interactive marketers which usually fall under the former category of web oriented scenarios (or Web Experience Management, as they like to call it). While many other products have been diversifying horizontally. Call it vertical Vs horizontal diversification if you will.

If there was any time to go aggressive, this was possibly it when the two other big ones have been acquired. Interwoven and Vignette, though can by no means be called “Legacy”, even though they have been acquired. There are probably a few customers out there who are not convinced about Interwoven’s and Vignette’s future after their acquisition by Autonomy and OpenText respectively. But then, as Forrester’s Tim Walters says on his blog, there are many customers out there, including Fatwire customers who are unhappy with their current implementation. So nothing stops the other vendors to come out with this kind of offer for existing Fatwire customers. In fact, as Tony Byrne says, there’s nothing new in these kind of Competitive upgrades.

If you indeed take up this offer, remember that even though there is no license cost, there are quite a few other costs apart from the support costs that you would have paid to Vignette or Interwoven. Here’s Irina’s post on real costs of implementation.

For one, you will have to work with Fatwire’s “proven migration tools and services” which probably means you will need to work with Fatwire, Vamosa and Kapow’s professional services. All the three products (Interwoven, Vignette and Fatwire) have decent mechanisms for importing and exporting content. So content migration per se is certainly not the most challenging aspect. In particular, when you migrate from Interwoven to Fatwire, there are many other challenges depending on what version of TeamSite you are using. TeamSite’s delivery templates are totally different from those of Fatwire’s. If you are using the Perl based PTs (Presentation Templates) and doing a static publishing, your challenges are even bigger. There are many other issues as well – different ways of defining assets, all the complex customizations, different storage (XML Vs Database), workflows and so on.  Vignette, although more similar to Fatwire than Interwoven in terms of architecture, will also have similar challenges. Apart from technical challenges, any content management implementation and content migration has its own sets of challenges in terms of user training, ensuring content quality (Vamosa has some useful offerings here as well), different skill sets and so on. Here’s a nice take on different issues by Jon

I could write a big article on just the differences between Fatwire and Vignette/Interwoven and resulting challenges but the point is that don’t assume it is only about “content” migration. You will need to budget for many other things as well.