Partners in Web Content Management

Analyst firm Gartner recently updated their Web Content Management report in which they discussed trends and took a look at the software companies successfully serving the market. Gartner’s report gushed that "the prospects for web content management are overwhelmingly positive" and I am very happy to agree with them given that we have just finished one of our most successful financial years.

Among the many Ephox highlights of this past twelve months I believe that the hallmark of our success was partnering. Partnering is easy to say but hard to do and Ephox is unique in how we compliment and offer value-added technology to the WCM market.

Our long-held belief in partnering has resulted in us now working closely with 7 of the 17 vendors in Gartner’s report: Ektron, EMC Documentum, IBM, Open Text, Oracle, Percussion and Vignette. Hopefully more will follow shortly.

Of particular note is the strong partnership we have with our friends at IBM to improve the content authoring capabilities in the IBM Lotus Web Content Management system. We now have over 100 joint customers with IBM and generally enjoy partnering with Big Blue. The Ephox-IBM hosted Australia Day party at Lotusphere in January was particularly good fun!

This past year we also entered into expanded agreement with EMC Documentum. Our partnership extends back to 2004 when we worked with EMC to integrate EditLive! into WebPublisher. We have always been impressed with their engineering and product management teams and we are very happy to see our partnership expand into more products.

Last month we also signed a renewed agreement with Oracle. We had originally worked with their Stellent team to integrated EditLive! prior to their acquisition by Oracle. In May, the Oracle Universal Content Management (UCM) product shipped with EditLive! and we entered into an expanded relationship where we would work together on a new Enterprise Edition of EditLive! that will be coming out later this year.

And finally this year has also seen the launch and initial customers of EditLive! for RedDot. Open Text's RedDot is an impressive WCM solution known for its ease of use. With the new EditLive! integration we hope we can take usability to even greater heights.

For the WCM market to truly thrive it needs innovative software vendors who can develop complementary technology to the out-of-the-box platforms. There is a very large scope for innovation in the web content management market and we are happy to be part of it.