FileNet Steps Up Content Management Push

FileNet Verity

The move follows FileNet's decision last month to buy Web content management vendor eGrail for $10 million, about double that company's revenue last year, in a move that pits FileNet more squarely against rival Documentum.

"The announcements are in the right direction for FileNet," said Nani Naranyanan, senior director of content and commerce practice for integrator Nexgenix, Irvine, Calif. "You'll see other document management vendors announcing partnerships and extending their products."

FileNet's OEM agreement with Verity, a supplier of search and knowledge management software, will give FileNet customers the additional out-of-the-box capability to run parametric searches against XML-tagged content.

While FileNet previously offered full-text search capabilities, the company decided to offer Verity's technology because it could search XML objects and afforded the opportunity to add future enhancements, in particular Verity's content categorization capability, said Harris Hunt, a product marketing director for FileNet.

Verity also has OEM agreements with Documentum and Stellent. But until the release last week of Verity's K2 Developer 4.5 release, the company did not offer its more advanced search, classification and personalization functionality on an OEM basis, said Praabhakar Raghavan, CTO of Verity.

Interwoven currently offers classification technology capable of tagging and classifying documents and creating file topologies, leading a trend that is blurring the line between content management and knowledge management.

Nexgenix already has been integrating FileNet's applications with Verity software, as well as other search technology, for clients that required those capabilities, said Naranyanan. With the OEM integration, "it becomes easier for everyone," he said. "They are legitimizing it."

FileNet's integration of eGrail's Web content management software with its document management and workflow software could be the more significant development for partners, some solution providers said.

"We do a lot of city and county stuff, and they want to provide a lot public access for their documents," said Randy Miller, CIO of ThirdWave, Los Angeles, a FileNet imaging solution integrator. "And I'm just waiting to get a little more information on this eGrail to see what it's going to do for our customers."

Industry watchers have been forecasting a convergence of document management and Web content management vendors for some time, and they point to Documentum as one company that has been among the first to successfully marry the two application areas. With its installed base of document management customers, Documentum also was one of few enterprise software companies to report an uptick in is first-quarter sales.

"FileNet is making the right moves. Documentum has pointed the way to enterprise content management. They'll be right in Documentum's backyard," said Chris McLaughlin, a content management consultant based in Irvine, Calif.

FileNet's acquisition of eGrail also prompted some industry speculation that IBM Software, another longtime document management player, would come under pressure to make a Web content management acquisition. IBM, however, sees things differently.

"We're sticking to the infrastructure business," said Brett MacIntrye, vice president of content and information integration for IBM. He said IBM is providing some Web content management capability with its WebSphere portal but will continue partnering with companies such as Vignette and Interwoven for more advanced applications. "We'll build the simple stuff, not the high-end tooling," he said.

FileNet's strategy of wanting to provide both the infrastructure and applications that go on top of it could put it in competition with its partners, said MacIntrye. "It's a very open approach we're taking here," he said.