IT Investment Research

Another sane open source man catches Microhate

Michael Tiemann, the respected executive director of Open Source Initiative (OSI), has lent that organization’s reputation for fairness to the movement for unnecessary government intervention in the free market, infected I am afraid with Microhate In this OSI blog post, Tiemann appears to be criticizing ISO for following its long-followed procedures in considering Microsoft’s application for approval of OOXML as an “international document format standard.”

This is of course the same process ISO used to “approve” Adobe's PDF and Sun/IBM's ODF. (I think Tiemann would say, clearly dancing on the head of a pin, that there is some distinction between approaching ISO via OASIS as opposed to via ECMA. This is a distinction only lawyers can love.)

In another blog post, Tiemann equates Microsoft with the early 20^th century Klu Klux Klan and WWII-era fascists.  Apparently in Tiemann’s opinion it is a violation of the U.S. constitution’s thirteenth amendment and the UN Charter of Human Rights for Microsoft to ask for ISO approval the same way Adobe and Sun/IBM did.

Unfortunately another formerly sane person has caught Microhate joining Columbia law professor Eben Moglen who equates Microsoft with the former Soviet Union except, Moglen says, the Soviet Union never launched intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Always keep in mind that standardizing IT docment formats is a solution chasing a problem.

Microsoft Continues to Waste Shareholder Value on Standards

Pardon my French but de jure information technology standards such as the Open Document Format [ODF] suck and never achieve their intended goal. Especially when they are just the creation of one company using the standards movement, and complicit governments, to try to make up for total failure in the marketplace.

To the extent that Eurocrats want to waste their time on standards, so be it. Talk about activity having a negative effect on economic development (but does it matter since the EU will shrivel to nothing as an IT market shortly anyway?).

But Microsoft (MSFT) continues to waste shareholder value on standards too, trying to placate Brussels. It’s a bunch of European academics trying to dictate that the little thing that turns on the automatic windshield washer in your car always be on the left hand side of the steering column… from the same people who cannot agree on where the steering column should be in the cabin. Or what side of the road to drive on.

Please Microsoft, for the sake of your shareholders, let these hypocrites adopt Sun’s (JAVA) and IBM’s (IBM) “standard” Open Document Format. Tell the world that this is a company vs. company thing that goes back to the dirty tricks played by them in Massachusetts four or five years ago. Then let the market decide the way it always does.

What’s the current score? Something like 12:1 in downloads (measured in millions) with Office with OOXML leading Sun and others’ ODF.

Enterprise Content Management Investment Opportunites Still a Few Years Off

The exhibit floor at the annual AiiM show from March 3-6 in Boston is an instructive walk around for the information technology [IT] investor. AiiM is now known as the Enterprise Content Management [ECM] association but we greybeards will always know it as the Association for Information and Image Management.

For a technology junkie like me it is always instructive to be reminded that that the ‘I’ in IT, the information, is really more important than the ‘T.’

So if you’re thinking of investing in ECM, which is arguably something easier to get your arms around in terms of investment research than technology lower in the stack (because ECM is closer to an enterprise’s executives and users in most companies), then AiiM demonstrated that there are no real ECM-specific investment opportunities out there right now. But watch for a few open source software [OSS]-based IPOs one to three years out.

What happened to the pureplay ECM investment opportunities? Stellent became Oracle (ORCL), Documentum became EMC2 (EMC), CA (CA) bought MDY, and so forth. Microsoft (MSFT) ECM features are all wound around and integrated into Sharepoint. IBM (IBM), which bought FileNet last year, was not at AiiM, confirming my theory that IBM didn’t even buy Filenet for its ECM features. I didn’t see Interwoven (IWOV) either but maybe I missed an aisle. Google (GOOG) was there, nibbling around the edges of ECM, wanting a bigger piece of anything with “enterprise” in the acronym.

There is always an exception of course: Day is listed in Switzerland and Kofax/Dicom in the UK. And Captaris (CAPA) might consider itself a pure play but that’s not the message it gives out via emphasis on business process management. Ditto OpenText ((OTEX) and in Toronto) and its various product lines.

As for some ECM investment possibilities in the out years, open source companies such as Alfresco were exhibiting and not only positioning themselves as replacements for the Stellents and Documentums of the world but as companies that will redefine ECM. Alfresco was founded by John Newton, also one of the co-founders of Documentum. I didn’t see Nuxeo but Alfresco, Nuxeo and other new OSS ECM players such as Jahia are covered in this free research document available at ebizQ.net. Although not specifically OSS, SpringCM (originally founded in 2005 as DocExchange) will presumably test the IPO waters sometime soon.

Running its own little exhibit within an exhibit in Boston were the founders of the Drupal OSS content management project (but be careful: that’s not the same as enterprise content management), who this week rolled out more details of their for-profit open source effort called Acquia. And there are still some legs in old-school ECM perhaps; BankTec is making noises about coming out again sooner rather than later.

So if you want to invest in ECM take a breather for 2008 but add the above company names to your Google Alerts.

(As an aside, AiiM is co-located with the On Demand Conference and Exhibition so I went looking for cloud computing and software-as-a-service suppliers only to find I had walked back into that Ozzie and Harriet-era past where people actually printed things and carried around physical representations of intellectual property. On Demand in this case refers to the ability to just print one or two copies of a book, brochure or whatever without having to “fire up the presses.” “On Demand” is already on my confusing buzzwords list but now I have to add a sentence to the definition.)