Open Text looks to ECM standard

Shackleton: Social media is coming whether you like it or not

John Shackleton is chief executive of Open Text, an enterprise content management (ECM) company that provides software to help corporates and large government organisations manage different types of digital content and integrate that content with other software applications.

He recently told Computing why the forthcoming content management interoperability services (CMIS) 1.0 standard, currently being finalised by the Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), is a vital component for organisations looking to deal effectively with the morass of data being created.

Why is the proposed CMIS 1.0 standard so important?
John Shackleton: Organisations are trying to deal with the explosion of email content, and to integrate structured [database] data and unstructured data [email text, audio, video, HTML web pages and so on]. Other organisations are in acquisition mode, which means they inherit multiple information repositories, ERP systems, and other data sets.

CMIS offers a common interface for all that information, regardless of how it was originally created, which was not previously available, so that organisations can manage and analyse both structured and unstructured data side by side.

This can alert them to information patterns they did not previously know about, or see business opportunities that were previously hidden, for example.

When will Open Text integrate CMIS 1.0 into its ECM software?
The CMIS standard itself is already largely completed, though it will not be formally adopted and ratified in Autumn this year. We already have prototype software with CMIS 1.0 built in, though we are obviously working with the rest of the group to ensure compatibility. The biggest issue the media content types and file formats CMIS has to handle is changing all the time.

Previous attempts at creating a standardised, interoperable ECM interface have stalled. What is different about CMIS 1.0?
The ECM market has matured now and we know what is out there and what we need to connect to. All the major players are involved [EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Quark, SAP] and between them have about 80-90 per cent of the market. At some point you will see governments saying they will not buy ECM products unless they have CMIS 1.0 certification, then you will start to see things move.

How has Open Text managed to increase profit and licence revenue this year when other software companies have struggled?
Whether or not they have the budgets to do it, financial services companies have to comply with Basel II or Sarbanes Oxley for example, and we provide compliance-based software to help them do it. We are also seeing a lot of companies realising that streamlining back-office processes can save them a lot of money, and the by-product of doing that is compliance anyway.

Can social media technology be genuinely useful to enterprise customers or is it just the latest technology buzzword?
It is coming whether you like it or not, and by embracing it now companies can save themselves money by using Web 2.0 technology to process pictures and videos, online forms and enhance email integration. We are already seeing demand for social media integration coming from the government sector where a lot of people are retiring and they need to bring in new, younger staff to replace them.

What was the rationale behind the Open Text acquisitions of Vignette and Vizible?
Vignette was the last large independent web content management firm left in our space. Vizible was an interesting acquisition because we were able to pick up a company for $500,000 (£309,000) with leading-edge technology in streaming video that never made it to market, in which telcos had invested $40m.

How can ECM software be ported to mobile devices?
We have done some work with the emergency services to help them share information from mobile devices and create digital war rooms where they can see live video feeds from TV crews, pictures, schematics of the building on fire, and other information side by side.

We are working with Research in Motion and Apple to provide similar sorts of apps for other mobile devices, most notably smartphones, used by parcel delivery, telephone repair, construction and other companies with large numbers of staff out in the field. Our feeling is that smartphone use will really accelerate to the extent where people will no longer even take laptops with them when they are travelling for less than two weeks at a time.