Content-Management Vendors Keep The New Stuff ComingContent-Management Vendors Keep The New Stuff Coming

Another round of ugly earnings announcements from content-management vendors not only isn't slowing down the market, it's being accompanied by an exhaustive assortment of announcements from vendors of all sizes. On the heels of large losses reported this week by Vignette Inc. and Stellent Inc., and with earnings releases due next week from Documentum Inc. and Interwoven Inc., a number of their competitors are looking to stake their claims to larger market shares. Among the recent developments:

• FileNet Corp. launched a major revision of its enterprise content-management platform that's designed to let customers build customized systems by choosing the exact capabilities they need. By offering its suite as a modular set of options, FileNet is making it possible for customers to minimize their initial investment and then add capabilities as their requirements expand. The suite consists of four main modules for managing business processes, enterprise content, Web content, and images. Pricing starts at $125,000 to $420,000, depending on configuration.

• Progressive Information Technologies released a revision of its Vasont content-management system, with a focus on combining digital asset management with traditional content management functionality. The software can handle the creation, management, and publishing of everything from text and images to audio and video. It also introduces multilanguage translation management so that global organizations can handle multilingual content from a single source.

• Bucking the earnings woes of its publicly traded competitors, IBM's DB2 data-management unit says the company's content-management business posted a 29% increase in revenue during the fourth quarter of 2002 over the same period last year, and year-end revenue was up 26%. In anticipation of a strong year in the content-management market, IBM says it plans to double its content-management sales force, and also will increase R&D spending on content management by 25%. The company will release an updated version of its Content Manager software sometime in the first half of this year.

• Ektron Inc. updated its browser-based content-management systems for companies looking to start small and scale over time. The Ektron CMS200 and CMS300, priced at $13,000 and $20,000, will soon support Microsoft Active Directory at no extra cost, providing centralized user administration and single-point authentication for improved security. The CMS200 is essentially a Web-authoring and publishing system, while the CMS300 manages both HTML and XML content.