Great Article and I loved your definition.

I'd define a CMS as -

" A Content Management System is a container managing the lifecycle of a content, from creation to management, delivery and expiration"

~Lokesh

Great Post and Some Real World Facts.

If we look back we will see that open source profit model was primarily based on the s/w 'Support' .
With time the definition of 'contribution' and 'Support' changed and we started hearing "Community Edition" and "Enterprise Edition" ( I believe your open source bidder was projecting the enterprise edition ).

Now that EE has all these wrapped up (consulting, integration, and maintenance), and you will still hear open source is free/less expensive. There's nothing wrong in demarcating these areas of implementation and charging on what the customer have opted for. I don't think that these are the 'hidden costs' but yes these are the costs that are hard to digest when we think of opensource.

I agree, customer should be educated and informed on the actual breakup of the commercials involved.

BTW, I do not work for open source company and my love towards open source has changed with time.

~Lokesh

Nice post Apoorv, this will really help customers of both sides to re-assess their CMS technology roadmap.

In addition, EMC-FatWire is not just a WCM deal, Its a Web Experience Management(WEM) Solution deal. WEM as a 'suite' and 'framework', built on top of ContentServer has more capabilities than just WCM.

I believe, EMC, not only will have FatWire's WCM but will also be reselling Analytics, TeamUp(Creative Collaboration tool) and a large set of other upcoming products from FatWire.

I agree and as you mentioned, FatWire not only will be equipped with DAM capabilities from EMC, but will also have a broader marketing platform for their products.

Not sure about customers having both DAM and WebPublisher, redevelopment of delivery tier and investment on documentum connector will be fairly expensive.

~Lokesh

We should also consider storage for various ECM environments within one's infrastructure. Apart from production, a typical ECM environment consists of multiple Instances of development, Tests and pre-production.
Investments on SAN/NAS storage is much required for enterprises with high volume of content. If the content volume is large and business critical, then, there is a need of high-availability which can be catered by another set of investments on storage-clustering software.
Apart from DR, archiving and back-up, did we talked about payment to your content delivery network provider for your bit of storage?

Ta!
Lokesh

I agree CMIS is an attempt to standardize the concept of interoperability on various underlying silos. As I was reading your post, my mind was mapping each statement of yours with CMIS.I believe that the design of CMIS is to abstract the underlying silos irrespective of from which vendor they have come from. I found there is a near relation of your high-level approach with the current design of CMIS. The cobweb of point integrations between silos and the applications reminded me of CMIS API using JCR binding to talk to the JCR repository.

I agree CMIS is an attempt to standardize the concept of interoperability on various underlying silos. As I was reading your post, my mind was mapping each statement of yours with CMIS.I believe that the design of CMIS is to abstract the underlying “silos” irrespective of from which vendor they have come from. I found there is a near relation of your high-level approach with the current design of CMIS. The” cobweb of point integrations between silos and the applications” reminded me of CMIS API using JCR binding to talk to the JCR repository.
Yes, there will be a better world if silos obey certain standards around CRUD, access control, security etc.

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