Analysis: Content Management Gets a Customer-Centric TwistAnalysis: Content Management Gets a Customer-Centric Twist

With its announcement yesterday that it's introducing the industry's first "Customer Experience Management" solution, Interwoven wasn't introducing new products as much as it was repackaging existing capabilities with a major new marketing push. The new thrust marks a departure from the tried-and-true selling points for enterprise content management (ECM)--providing a single platform for all content management needs, consolidating vendor relationships, easing training and development headaches, etc. But it remains to be seen whether the new customer-centric twist drives the "market tsunami" the company predicts.

Interwoven says its new solution is about automating the "customer experience management" process, from the creation of customer-facing content through publishing this content on the Web, mobile devices, contact centers, e-mail, retail stores, printed collateral and television advertisements. The company says it's a critical need for Global 2000 companies that want to reduce time to market for new products and marketing campaigns, present a more consistent brand experience worldwide and improve customer interactions across all touchpoints.

The brand consistency and time-to-market imperatives have been around for years, and in terms of technology they get back to Web content management, digital asset management, and content distribution and provisioning. Indeed, many of the companies cited in Interwoven's presentations and press releases have been customers for years, so stories once presented as Hilton Hotels' "global Web content management and localization approach" or DaimlerChrysler's "digital asset management initiative" have been given a fresh coat of "customer experience management" paint.

In some respects, Interwoven's new push is refreshing. For one thing, the company is championing the advantages of content reuse, single-source translation and localization, and multi-channel content delivery. Most ECM vendors aren't paying enough attention to these opportunities. Niche companies such as Vasont, XyEnterprise and PTC ArborText use these techniques to deliver technical documentation more efficiently, but here is Interwoven taking it mainstream with a customer-centric spin. Every company has customers, after all, so it's really a broad, horizontal play.

There's also a bit of news on the partnership front, with new or expanded alliances with Adobe and Microsoft for content authoring and creation tools, with SDL, Translations.com, thebigword, Idiom and Transware for translation and localization services and technologies, and with Avenue A | Razorfish, Macquarium and Molecular for systems integration. Print publishing capabilities have been added (for print collateral and signage) through tools such as Adobe InDesign and Quark, and a fresh integration with BlackBerry mobile devices supports document and e-mail delivery and collaboration.

Interwoven isn't the first company I've heard talking up "customer experience." In fact, in a March 7 press release, Chordiant dubbed itself "the leading provider of customer experience software and services"--the firm's new name for what it used to call BPM technology for service-oriented organizations. The release confided that "key industry analysts identify customer experience management as critical to a business' success," so it seems this is a direction that the Gartners and Forresters of this world have spotted as the next big opportunity.

Now that CRM has been heavily consolidated by the SAP/Oracle duopoly, perhaps there's room for many smaller vendors to make headway with customer experience applications. But it strikes me as another knowledge management or "smart enterprise suite" hype wave in the making.