Last week we made a great addition to our offering: The Enterprise Edition as part of our Hippo Enterprise Subscription. One of the great advantages is that we are now able to offer features and benefits that our increasingly demanding (Fortune 100) customers need.

How does this relate to our open source background and commitment? In the past I wrote some long blog posts on open source business models. My take is this. Open source is the robust platform for innovation and quality. The standards based approach that comes with open source benefits everyone: developers, customers, and the community itself. For a community and open source platform to be viable you need an open development approach and this is the reason we have and always will be committed to development in the Apache Software Foundation. Just recently we helped to create a great new lightweight personalization, portal and gadget platform Apache Rave, that now has considerable traction and was mentioned as Open Source Rookie of the year by BlackDuck.

It’s that time of year again. Time to reflect on what we did this year and what the next one will bring. 2012 looks to be just as great — and we think some big changes are coming. Here are our top 12 predictions for what will be coming in 2012.

#1. Content as a REST Stop. Content as an Accessible Business Platform

Content is quickly becoming an important asset for organizations to manage carefully and thoughtfully. But the number of devices, interfaces and/or channels that need to be managed simply cannot be forecast. Before January 2010 no one even knew what an iPad was. Now organizations are scrambling to build interfaces to support it. 2012 will be the year that companies start to think about managing their Web content as a platform that can be drawn from like a well using REST-type API’s. In this way, there can be complete separation from the presentation of content and the management of it. Watch for new standards for Web Content Management, such as the WEMI standard, as well as CMIS to become more important. Then, new channel displays can be quickly assembled when needed and integration/interoperability between best-of-breed tools will become easier.

#2. Big Data Comes To Web CMS

A recent IDC study concluded that digital information is doubling every two years. That is certainly happening in Web content management systems. As WCM systems take over more responsibility for more platforms, tracking more usage, customer and other types of behavioral and other metadata, the repositories for these systems are becoming huge. Savvy customers — even those in smaller companies — will start looking at their CMS vendors for how they handle and scale large sets of information.

#3. Social Business Process & Governance Become Priorities

With the explosive growth of content display channels, so too will come the equally explosive growth of interfaces to manage, collaborate and share content. Identity management across devices, business processes and content quality governance will become big priorities in 2012.

#4. Contextually Aware Content And Behavioral Targeting — The New WEM

Web Engagement Management has been all the rage for the last couple of years. As mobile interfaces start to overtake the desktop in the sheer quantity of Web experiences, watch for “context” and “behavior” to drive Web Experience Management. Gartner has said that “context is as important to mobile as search was to the web.” In 2012, this becomes a reality for many organizations. Forward-leaning organizations will begin to develop content strategies that use context (device, location, time, behavior, etc.) to target more relevant content to their consumers.

5. RIP Websites — The Web Is Now Everywhere

In 2012, we’re going to start to see the idea of organizations publishing a single website die. Much more focus will be placed on publishing content when, where and how the consumer needs it. New trends like Mobile First, where interfaces now dynamically morph into interfaces appropriate for any screen size and device, and technology such as HTML 5, that help content publishers create hybrid solutions for tablet devices, will become much more commonplace. The key is that content management systems will need to be able to accommodate publishing content as a service — consumed by multiple interfaces and optimized for relevance using context.

#6. Best of Breed Across the Enterprise

As it becomes easier and easier to create information flow between applications, inserting “best-of-breed” applications as specialized point solutions will make much more sense for the enterprise than the “suite” of applications. As more and more hyper-focused types of solutions emerge, enterprises will be able to plug and unplug various types of content focused solutions: from email campaign management, web analytics, web content management, to CRM and others.

#7. The “Triple Play” of Intranet, Extranet & Internet Merge

Intranet managers are evolving. Whether it’s knowledge management, content strategy or community management, the idea of the knowledge based “internal” website is going away. As the enterprise becomes more social and the workforce and business partner ecosystem becomes more mobile,  intranets and extranets will move to more expansive types of experiences. People will start to understand that business is, and has always been, a true social network, and the idea of personalized content delivered to their interface of choice becomes much more effective than a simple “destination” portal.

#8. SEO Evolves, Becomes More Social

The practice of Search Engine Optimization is fundamentally transforming. Gone is the focus on keyword density, meta tag optimization and the idea of producing thousands and thousands of common themed pages of content. In 2012, SEO strategists will become much more content strategy and socially focused. SEO will be much more aligned with the deeper meaning of the content — focusing on the quality of experience. This includes how fast the web content platform performs, the quality of the content, the placement of the content and how much the content is “shared” and linked among relevant social networks.

#9. Textual Content Gets a Demotion — Video is Crowned King in 2012

In 2012, while producing high quality textually-based content will be vitally important, the real king will be video. Organizations are no longer looking at video as “cutting edge,” but are seeking ways to make video content the content staple of their various content strategies.

#10. At Least Two New Interfaces in 2012

We’ve already talked about how no one was ready for the iPad when it exploded onto the scene in 2010. Get ready for at least a couple of new ones in 2012. Many analysts believe that Apple will be launching an actual television interface. This new television will be yet another interface that will make our content easier to access and we need to be ready for it. Secondly, there will be at least one more mobile interface that will emerge in 2012 that we need to be prepared for.

#11. The Internet of Things Says “Hello World”

Content/data and our ability to manage it has long been generated by humans and in 2012 we will start to see the Internet Of Things begin to add value. Data generated from usage, content produced by “things” and their interaction will produce new opportunities for organizations to contextualize and produce better experiences for their customers.

#12. Social & Web Merge And Become Hyper-Personal

The idea of “social media” is going away. As social networks merge into our content, we will stop looking at them as separate things, and instead as one, integrated platform. One need only look at the Apache Rave (based on open social) concept to see how social networks, identification, content and websites eventually can blend into one thing. These can become the building blocks to new Web content platforms — where content is delivered on a hyper-personalized level and contextually based on preferences, location, device, etc.

A Great Year Ahead

We’re looking forward to another great year — and it feels like 2012 is going to be a year of true expansion for our industry. We truly wish you all the happiest and most fruitful of New Years!

 

 

Web content management has changed. Yes, again. The universe of options for organizations to create, edit, manage and ultimately publish content to their Web platforms has shifted for the second time in a decade.

In the first part of the 2000’s WCM software solutions were focused on one thing — and one thing only; making it easier and more powerful for non-technical people to move content from their desktop to their web site. Interfaces were critical. Every enterprise web content management provider touted their “easy-to-use” UI and how flexible and intuitive their solution would make the web content management process. And power-user enterprise features were also key — with the focus on powerful workflows, and approval processes — and the ability to integrate with other enterprise tools.

But then, toward the latter part of the decade and lasting up until this last year — the WCMS industry went through another major pivot. The marketing department and the “social web” became the primary business drivers for Web sites — and many of the solutions shifted their focus to solving marketing related challenges. Email campaign management systems, and Web Analytics systems were integrated into web content management, and there became a focus on testing, targeting — and driving more marketing value from the WCMS.

Now, as we move into 2012, and the middle part of this decade — the industry is pivoting yet again. The explosive growth of content consumption from mobile and social interfaces, the pending expansion of the “internet of things” and consumer expectation of content availability is driving WCMS providers to shift their value proposition. Ironically, the Web content management industry is no longer focused on web content management — but rather on the delivery of web content. Terms likeWeb Engagement Management, and Customer Experience Management are all the buzz among vendors. In fact, the latest Forrester Wave Report for Web Content Management is focused exclusively on vendors providing “Online Customer Experience”. Report author Stephen Powers states “functionality to enable publishing to the Web — whether internally or externally — has become commoditized. Yet, now, the WCM market is growing based on customer experience management.”

WCM software solutions are increasingly differentiating themselves on a scale of how well their solution can help a customer DELIVER a personalized “web experience” to the client’s consumers through multiple channels such as web, mobile and social.

However, this incremental step is just one toward a different corner in which vendors will find themselves commoditized. The real shift of Web content and consumer expectations is not in delivering a solution that helps a client DELIVER a web experience — but rather one that helps their audiences CONSUME an experience of their own making.

Web Experiences Won’t Be Managed

WEM (or CEM) itself is a marketing concept — defined by analysts and vendors as a method to create more relevant experiences for consumers using a combination of process and tools. In an article back in May, CMSWire’s Brice Dunwoodie appropriately put it this way:

"It's about managing content, conversations, conversions and relevance in mostly the same place and at almost the same time.”

The value presented by WEM/CEM is that this process is, at its heart, about managing the audience’s experience in such a way that they ultimately do what the marketer wants them to do. Marketers want the audience to have a relevant, engaged experience with content — just so long as they do what the marketer wants them to do.

In short — software vendors are going down the same road they went down before. Now, instead of making it “easier to manage Web content” vendors are saying it’s “easy to manage experiences”. Is it any wonder that many have found the whole WEM, CEM trend just another buzzwordy marketing acronym?

Audiences’ experiences (both good and bad) are affected by a number of things that are out of the marketer’s control. And as many have pointed out — content optimization is already a best practice that few practice. So in the end, while we can manage an experience to a point — down the road we may ultimately spend so much time trying to account for what limited sets of variables we can (or want to) control — that WEM from a MANAGEMENT standpoint stands the risk of becoming unproductive.

Search Isn’t The Answer

To answer the “contextual” challenge — there have been some analysts and vendors that have suggested that “Search” is a step in the right direction. The increase in the popularity of Google — and optimizing site content for external search engines has resulted in many corporate Web sites becoming bloated and “filled with data” and usability of sites have suffered. This has resulted in “web site search” becoming a crutch for navigation — and many have suggested that this is a positive step. For example, in a recent post CMS analyst Janus Boye suggests that “navigation is for losers” and says:

Today, search has matured into the primary mode of navigation for an increased number of users. Not just the digital natives. Users, whether internal or external, quickly scan the site and then don’t bother decoding what’s behind your navigation. Instead, they often simply go to the search field or give up.”

While this thinking is correct and is certainly a must-have for many sites today — it is still a “management” oriented strategy — and ultimately won’t help to create a contextually aware platform. Today’s site search is based on an assumption of “relevant” information based on a query. The user is immediately given results based on a semantic algorithm — despite the context in which they’re searching. In short, the user may want much different results if they are searching a repository from a mobile device than if they are searching from their desktop computer.

Contextual Content Delivery Is The Right Question

Rather — the real pivot — and the real future challenge we should be solving for comes in a different form. It is empowering our audiences to optimally consume our content when, where and how THEY want it — and giving us the insight to continually get better at the TYPE of content we are delivering, rather than the form it is delivered in. In other words, as we move into the future we should be focused less on how to construct Web experiences for our customers — but rather in opening our content and interfaces so our consumers are ultimately able to create their own. Rather than designing the experience, we should be designing FOR the OPPORTUNITY of experience. And the insight that is derived shouldn’t inform the interface construct — but rather should help authors and editors create BETTER content. That is context-aware content management.

Ultimately this means that designs, search, and “look and feel” more generally will be something that we pay less and less attention to — and we will instead put our focus on how to deliver better quality content in an increasingly relevant way. This means developing systems that understand how, what and when to deliver content given an astounding number of parameters. Interfaces will be separate, and unique to the devices, the situations and the platforms that consumers choose. But, this will be less relevant to the content producer — because the logic to deliver which content will be handled by our Web content management systems. In short, we will no longer be managing Web sites, we will be managing a contextually aware content platform.

Context Aware Content Management In Practice

Gartner has been releasing research and thought leadership about Context Aware Computing for a couple of years now. In fact, they estimate that “by 2012, the typical Global 2000 company will be managing between two and 10 business relationships with context providers, and that by 2015, context will be as influential in mobile consumer services and relationships as search engines are to the Web.”

From a content management perspective, that’s extraordinarily powerful. If context and content used together is as big a shift as search engines were to the online consumer experience, then it provides enterprise WCM providers with an unprecedented opportunity to be the ones to deliver these experiences.

This goes well beyond “managing Web experiences” and traditional “personalization” — and digs deep into how we will enable clients to open their repositories so that things like location, environmental data, history, social attributes, online behavior and other information can be utilized to deliver a more relevant contextual experience in real time.

If Web Engagement Management solution providers want to continue on their focus of empowering business users to create content more effectively for better web sites — that’s fine. However, this challenge is largely solved. Rather the more interesting, and bigger challenge is in empowering our audiences to create their own experiences — and give us REAL insight into how to deliver a truly contextually relevant web experience.

 

I’m just back and caught up with all the follow-ups from the Gartner Portals & Collaboration Summit in Los Angeles, where Hippo was proud to be a participant and exhibitor.

One of the things that struck me most about the conference was how closely aligned Gartner and Hippo are about the future of Web content management and the views I expressed in an earlier somewhat controversial post in Emerce (Dutch). One of the themes that kept coming up in the sessions were how organizations of all sizes are making increased investments in an expanded Web content platform in order to affect sales and customer service. This isn’t new of course. But what is new is how expanded this view is.

It’s not just about Web sites any longer. It’s an integrated Web experience across the Web site, mobile platforms, social, email and all of them across multiple languages. And, most importantly, it’s about delivering content that’s contextually relevant to the user no matter what platform, device or language they use to interact with the business.

In short – and contrary to the way most content management systems operate today – it’s about LOSING control over your web pages – and instead managing content in a way that empowers your audience to access it in any way they want.

Let’s look at it from 5 perspectives:

1. Our Strategy Is Now A Content Strategy – Not A Web Site Strategy
   Consumers now expect our digital content in a contextually relevant way – no matter where, when and what device they access it with. It doesn’t matter if it’s a mobile phone, a television a toaster or the bathroom mirror – the consumer now expects content to be available to them whenever and wherever they are. And, businesses are struggling to deliver that content across those channels with their traditional tools. As Endeca revealed in a study conducted earlier this year, businesses have made improving the user experience a priority, but are struggling to solve the technical challenge of which technology will deliver “cohesive user experiences”.

2. Use Context To Deliver Smarter ContentWe now know so much more about the context of a particular request on our Web content. We can know a user’s location, their preferred language, their device and their previous interaction with our content. So, we need to start looking at this context every time we deliver a search result, or our “home page” to that user. How can we start personalizing that content – and delivering a context-aware experience?

3. SEO Is Changing – Long Live Social Relevance
   With the addition of the “+1” - Google has finally recognized the importance of applying social filters on top of search results. This means that organic search and search engine optimization are changing forever. But, beyond what it means to our SEO strategy – it means that we too should be looking at using the social graphs of our users to deliver a more relevant experience. We’ve got to look at our content repository in context with the social graph of our audiences. We have to ask ourselves how can we start to deliver our product catalog, or our online magazine with more relevance to the networks of our audience? Ultimately this will mean greater sales, more page views, and higher loyalty.

4. Can Our Content Platform Help With CRM?
   Context goes beyond just the implicit attributes that bring a visitor to us (e.g. organic search or a banner ad campaign). Context is also “what do we know about this user explicitly” – and namely we should inherently know “is this visitor a previous customer?” Our content management and delivery system needs to integrate with our CRM so that we can begin to use that data to deliver a better experience to that user based on our relationship with them. If they’ve purchased a particular product – hitting them with in-house banner ads for that product makes no sense. It’s wasteful as well as irrelevant. Let’s optimize the customers’ experience based on our relationship with them.

5. Static Web Designs - Let It Go….
   This is a tough one – but we ultimately need to stop trying to guess how people will navigate through our content platforms. If we can empower people and our interfaces to conform to each other – based on their preferences and behavior -- then we will have truly delivered a contextually aware platform. Obviously, this vision is further down the road. But we can ask ourselves today “how easy is it to build and optimize interfaces on our content today?” Can we make our content available through an open and standardized API that allows us (or quite frankly our customers) to assemble interfaces on top of it. Look how Twitter has been able to cultivate an entire ecosystem of applications that sit on top of its content platform. 

   

    We should ask ourselves how we can do something similar.

All of these are areas, I’m proud to say, where Hippo is focused in our product and service development. We really do believe that there’s a new standard for how organizations can empower their audiences to engage with content. It comes from our passion about Open Source and Open Standards. We’ve been empowering our users for more than 10 years.

It was great to see this thinking also coming from the analysts and customers in Los Angeles at the Gartner conference. We’re really excited for the future of Web content.

And, of course we’d like to hear your opinion on it too.

I am not a social media genius, don't have too many online friends, just a few. But last Friday Whatser turned my otherwise mediocre Friday night into a blast.. Seriously. Whatser works!

I was at the Spring party (Spring Associates if you need some advise on renewable energy). Once the party in the MC theater finished, a couple of friends and me wanted to go for drinks. We did what you usually do… you just start walking in a random direction and entered a bar 100 meters down the road. The bar sucked. And then….. in a moment of brilliance I decided to pull out my BB and have a look at Whatser… Suddenly it recommended Pacific Parc, just 200 meters away and it was in the collection of Michiel, Alexander and Unlike.. so I decided to check it out. 

This was what I was looking for! Great crowd, great music and I met some friends that already knew the place.. I had a great night and didn't fell the urge once to check my email, twitter or do whatever (my BB was in my pocket all night.. ) I was having fun! 

The next morning I added Pacific Parc to my collection. To me Whatser is like a worldwide address book on steroids, because it's based on the opinion of people I know. Some friends are good for bars, others for restaurants. Whatser is unlike the Foursquare or Gowalla, because I don't want to check in each and every time I go to my favorite spots. It's unnatural, hence they need artificial game mechanics to persuade people… it may work for a while, but then.. who remembers Secondlife..? 

So friends, add your great places to Whatser, and have fun!

Disclosure: I am Michiel's brother and Whatser is probably the first useful thing he ever did :-) 

The recent turmoil by Gartner's Brian Prentice blogpost and my upcoming trip to the Open Source Think Tank inspired me to pick up a piece I was writing long time ago. It's good to see Matt Aslett participate actively as it was his business model report "open source is not a business model" that triggered me back then.

Matt now says he couldn't write the report anymore with so many companies making money from open source. Hmmm, I don't think the world changed that much from 2008. Also back then, a lot of companies were making money of open source, albeit maybe for a large part by providing time & material services around certain open source products. Specializing in open source technologies is something companies like Optarus, Sourcesense and Smile, have been very successful at (read Gianugo's opinion on sustainable software here).
 
The big question for the venture backed open source companies is obviously this: how can we get returns to scale AKA very big margins. Jamie Dixon's example MicroStrategy IMHO is just doing a lousy job, Jamie probably agrees there :-). Simply put: from a business perspective we all like to be Microsoft and their licensing revenue for sure doesn't get consumed entirely by their marketing activities.

So what about returns to scale? Any software has returns to scale: develop once use forever. Point is, with a proprietary model you can reap the benefits of this initial investment yourself. Proprietary software has (near) zero production costs for the extra dollar of revenue. And the cool thing is: entry barriers are very high, because the initial development costs are high (natural monopoly). Really, Bill can't help he's a monopolist ;-). Of course there is a big problem: consumers are paying too much because as a monopolist you can differentiate pricing the way you like it (low cost for students, universities, high costs for businesses, different pricing in different countries, etc, etc.). But the other big problem is: monopolies don't innovate. They milk their products. Of course they make it look like they innovate, but the pace is controlled by them and therefore slow. How many innovations have we seen in Windows 95 to Windows 7 (mind you, there's more than a decade between them) other than that the product now looks like it's finally stable and performing? (I won't bother you with tacit collusion here, but rest assured MS, SAP and Oracle are silently becoming each others biggest friends, not foe).

So what about open source? This is disruptive: you can't beat free. Innovation goes at a higher pace (the standing on the shoulders of giants effect kicks in) and it's basically a route towards perfect competition in software. Good for consumers, good for companies. Of course there's numerous problems I won't touch upon here (like a unpredictable development pace, etc, etc).

Software is not manna from heaven

Software is not manna from heaven, it's development requires time consuming labour. Someone has to do the initial investment in the software, and then it requires continuous effort to make it better and stable. Also it's somewhat naive to think that there're successful pure community driven open source projects without one or more companies backing them with continuous support and resources; look at the flight Drupal has taken since Acquia. There have to be companies that think they can make money by contributing to open source. In a way I am really indifferent how the code gets there... If some mobile phone maker decides to build a open source mobile OS. Fine, they make money from billing you for hardware. If a advertising company like Google decides to build a open source mobile OS. Fine, they make money form running ads on your mobile or selling your (hopefully) anonymous profile. This is all good stuff for the customer and clients of Brian Prentice, they can re-use the investment by others and leverage that. In short: to me any business model that drives people or companies to invest and grow the open source stack is good. We all benefit. 

So what if a company creates a proprietary product and in the process contributes to the projects they are using from Apache? Fine too! But doing proprietary add-ons is obviously were this "open core "discussion is about. This is were it gets messy: say there's an open core BI engine and two companies are competing with add-ons on this product and since it's open core.. (assuming the core is distributed under OSI approved license) they both contribute new features to the core. Everybody can start it's own add-on business on this core, and the community can start providing features like these proprietary add-ons in the core itself as well. This certainly has advantages over likely any closed source model out there. But hey? Don't we have a word for this already? Open Source... But then again the companies providing add-ons are basically plain old proprietary software vendors, that contribute back to the open source stack.

The problem is indeed, when the benefits of open source for the customer are attributed (by marketing) to this proprietary vendor itself. The reason for the category/term "open core" to pop up, is that in real life it's probably not nearly like my description above. There's one vendor deciding what goes in the core and what is (a paid for) add-on, good old bait & switch. I agree with Brian there, what benefit does it bring to the customer? None. 

A open source software business model simply doesn't exist, by definition. You can't charge for the software. What we are seeing in esp. with the venture backed so called open source companies, is that they still try to catch some of the value that open source software brings and make money directly of it. I think your business model should be around something else than the software. Let it go, you are not selling software anymore. But there's still plenty of stuff you can do that does scale: support subscriptions like we are doing are like insurance policies, they scale. But yes, there's competition. Someone else can provide these services too, this keeps pricing at a realistic level. Good for the customer. In short: you have to bring added value to the software. 

Good luck everybody with finding a scalable model! 

Two final thoughts

On Nuxeo studio discussion: if they have proprietary software that enables them to run Nuxeo as SAAS it's is fine, given that a customer can take it's data out and locally install Nuxeo for free and continue working like he used to (with all features). This is absolutely a great benefit to the customer as it gives him freedom of choice and he's not locked-in, like with many other SAAS providers. I see this as one of the scalable services you can provide, other than selling software.

What about integrators using Open Source as a basis to develop custom features for you. With pink glasses on their customers are getting value, they only pay for the custom stuff. But what is the business model of integrators? Their real incentive is to do a as many hours possible.. So you end up with a potentially unmaintainable bag of proprietary code, were proprietary in this case means it's your own (if your IP lawyers did their work well), but all the problems it has are yours too, esp. when they have poked into the open source core itself and not given back. Maybe something to give some more thought later...