Apr 10, 2002
FatWire slims down for departmental portals

Dynamic content management company FatWire Software has announced a new product: Spark pCM for BEA WebLogic Portal Server. At about $25,000, it's one of the cheapest content management systems that is not actually free. It's designed especially for use with enterprise portal software.

Context Portals may be the fastest-growing software market in terms of license revenue, but this is not because enterprises are rebuilding their infrastructure. Rather, says FatWire CEO Mark Fasciano, buyers are building portals one at a time, ensuring that each installation provides a respectable return on investment before moving on to the next one.

Fasciano believes this trend is changing the economics of the content management market. Portal customers know content management is necessary, but at the same time they recognize that a $250,000 enterprise CM system is overkill for the task at hand.

Technology FatWire has its own J2EE enterprise CM system in UpdateEngine. A recent upgrade to version 6 was accompanied by a de facto price hike, when the company split out its development tools as a product to be bought separately. Like rivals BroadVision, Documentum, Interwoven and Vignette, FatWire risked pricing itself out of the market.

Spark pCM (for portal content management) was built to help the company avoid that fate. It is essentially a user- and feature-limited, cut-down version of UpdateEngine. It includes what Fasciano describes as core CM primitives ? rollback, workflow and version control ? but lacks UpdateEngine's more sophisticated tools, such as tight integration with Microsoft Word and Macromedia Dreamweaver.

When it is time to add more features and users, customers may upgrade to the full UpdateEngine. In the meantime, Spark is designed to meet their departmental portal needs.

Competition UpgradeEngine already has a strong presence in companies worth over $1bn. If FatWire is right about the 'less is more' trend in portal deployment, Spark should give the company a foot in the door at many more prospective sites. The question is, how hard would it be for FatWire's hungry competitors to produce cut-down versions of their own CM suites?

UpdateEngine's advantages include the fact that it is written in 100% Java ? making it able to run natively on the application server ? and that it has a 100% XML interface ? making native embedding in portal servers possible, too. Fasciano claims it will be much harder for FatWire's more document-centric competitors, like Documentum, to offer such tight integration.

Conclusion A possible drawback to FatWire's otherwise ingenious plans for Spark is the dependence it creates on portal vendors, especially the pilot partner, BEA. Plans are afoot to support Spark on other portals as well, which will ease this pressure in the medium term.

It's worth noting, though, that the vendors FatWire has in mind ? IBM, Oracle and Sun Microsystems ? are not merely portal vendors but application server players in their own right. Pure portal players Epicentric and Plumtree already have a limited amount of CM functionality. CM specialist FatWire has far more to offer to the bundled application server and portal player.

Besides this purely functional aspect, FatWire is probably also bearing in mind that it is far from clear how the portal market will play out. Some people believe there is a place for an independent portal vendor, but more believe the portal is a component of the application server stack.

If, as seems increasingly likely, portals are absorbed into application server platforms, the role of independent CM vendors will also change. In that eventuality, FatWire needs all the application server friends and allies it can get.

Publication: The 451