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There's been a good amount of buzz in recent months about whether Salesforce.com is prepping itself for a marriage of some sort. What about Salesforce.com and Workday? The two could make one heck of a SaaS powerhouse.

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The Long Tail, the now-famous reference to targeting customers that buy the hard-to-find or nonhit items, got a little shorter with the release of Baynote's Merchandizing and Editorial Console.

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I had an interesting discussion with John Newton, the co-founder of Alfresco, recently. I'm a little star-struck by this guy. It's hard to get much higher on the food chain when you look at Newton's credentials. Not only did he co-found Documentum, he's also less than five years into the launch of Alfresco, arguably one of the biggest disrupters to appear on the enterprise software radar in years.

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When Harley-Davidson CIO Jim Haney drove a Harley onstage during Leo Apotheker's keynote address at Sapphire on Tuesday, there were more than a few gasps from the audience. This is the type of stunt typical of a California tech company, not the stoic German we know as SAP. But I saw it as just one example of SAP trying to reinvent itself, including the upcoming change in CEO leadership.

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It's Sunday night in Orlando, and I'm getting ready to attend Sapphire 2008, SAP's annual user conference. Tomorrow I meet with co-CEO Henning Kagermann, and am curious to hear more about this cross-pollination idea he mentioned last week between the company's new SaaS offering and its traditional licensed software.

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One of our contacts in the PR world sent over some thoughts after reading our continuing discussion about why content management companies fail. His remarks might not be terribly surprising for those of you that live and breathe content management, but they warrant a re-visit.

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The anti-spam appliance vendor learned about the value of archives the hard way -- by getting sued by Trend Micro.

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So now that the BEA Systems acquisition is complete, what is next for Oracle? Given Oracle's pattern, it's due for about three acquisitions this spring.

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Leading off this installment of The Weekly Watch is Alfresco, a company that's proven there's plenty of innovation left in the enterprise content management (ECM) sector. Alfresco sent InformationWeek some of its recent accomplishments and a few grabbed our attention.

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Startup RevStor cuts your unstructured data into chunks and stores them on the PCs and servers on your network -- no NAS or SAN required. Is this plain crazy, or just crazy enough to work?

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I seemed to have touched a nerve in my recent entry about the top five reasons a content management company will go out of business, judging by the feedback received via e-mail, tweets, IM, and the blog.

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Are IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP the only companies that matter in the business intelligence software market? Well, of course not. That's ridiculous. Independent BI vendors and even some surprises -- Google, anyone? -- are driving a lot of the innovation.

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This week's "Weekly Watch" on content management includes an ECM acquisition, Vignette's enterprise 2.0 moves, and a few lesser-known companies making their own noise.

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Collaboration and community are two very big hills for vendors to climb these days. As the saying goes, many have tried and many have failed. Add Microsoft's SharePoint to the growing list of things you'll need to overcome and some might say you're spinning your wheels.

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I caught up with Oracle customer Dthree recently wanting to get the scoop on how Oracle's infrastructure is helping them deliver something meaningful to marketers. I'm always interested in how such technology-driven companies can speak to the business user.

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More details about the credit breach at the Hannaford grocery chain are becoming known, and they aren’t pretty.

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With all the activity in the content management market, I thought it would be a good idea to start a weekly ritual of quick blurbs and sound bites from vendors, users, and anyone else who'd like to throw their message in the mix.

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More than two dozen vendors say they can help ISPs filter unwanted P2P traffic. But only two were willing to put marketing claims on the line in an in-depth test of P2P filtering technology.

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Some of open source's biggest proponents were probably gloating this week over some results from North Bridge Venture Partners' annual open source survey (PDF). Most of the findings weren't terribly prophetic, but there were a few that caught my eye.

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There's a lot of interesting scenarios these days around the intersection of software-as-a-service (SaaS) and content management. Thanks to companies like Google, Salesforce.com, and Amazon, cloud-based computing is no longer some mythical, business-led, revolutionary approach to accessing technology. Everyday, mission-critical applications are being neatly packaged and delivered to business users regardless of time, place, or device.

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My first post of 2008 was a content management trend watch: number two on the list was the movement toward green IT.

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The latest exposure of more than 4 million credit and debit card numbers may strain the validity and stability of the credit card industry's controversial security rules.

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After hearing FatWire Software brag about one of the best quarters in its history, I thought it was a good time to catch up with its CEO, Yogesh Gupta. We spoke about everything from open source to SaaS, with Gupta also highlighting some of the company's recent enterprise 2.0 moves.

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As part of class-action settlement for one of the most egregious breaches of consumer credit cards in U.S. history, T.J. Maxx plans to hold a special one-day sales event. Seriously?

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A lot of the conversations I've had lately have revolved around the notion of the user experience, or in vendor speak, the Web experience. I'm not knocking the marketing messages (OK, maybe a little) but we've been talking about the Web experience since the Web 1.0 days, without much movement.

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It's always a challenge for something baked into an enterprise platform to be as competitive as the pure-play providers. And in most cases, if content management is the set of applications you're trying to incorporate, it can be even more daunting.

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The open source CMS platform Drupal is going commercial thanks to an 11-person startup named Acquia. It recently secured $7 million in funding and plans to sell a suite of services it says will make Drupal enterprise-ready.

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One of the most exciting concepts demonstrated during ETech was a data visualization concept, a phenomenally attractive and useful way to find information so quickly and thoughtfully, it seems at once elegant, clever, and obvious. The company: Stamen, a design studio in San Francisco. The application: Like anything in the visual world, it's easier if you just see it, but it involves a series of sliders that make underlying data come to life as you stretch the boundaries of the information you're looking for.

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E-mail governance might not be the sexiest thing when it comes to content technologies, but don't tell that to your CIO or general counsel. Besides keeping them out of jail, a solid e-mail governance strategy drives compliance, improves information retrieval, and reduces paper.

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A good way of perfecting your trend-watching in the high-tech sector is by paying close attention to how and when vendors release their so-called strategic road maps. It's essentially their way of legitimizing themselves in an increasingly competitive and noisy marketplace.

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Last week I hosted an ILM (Information Life-cycle Management) video Web cast. One of the questions that came up was "Where do I start with ILM without much risk?" It's a good question.

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Rob Howard, CEO of Telligent, pulls no punches when he talks about his company's aspirations in the content management space. And the way Telligent markets its new CMS offering is just as brazen.

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For those of you who think Web 2.0 is a fad, you might want to take a look at what's on tap for some of content management's household names.

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The company has launched a new version of CA Recovery Management, which includes modules for ARCserve Backup and two disaster recovery/CDP products.

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Open source ECM provider Alfresco is publicizing the release of its second global survey of open source use in the enterprise.

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Even before the first wave of baby boomers began reaching retirement age, predictions of an impending brain drain looked pretty dire. About 50% of the federal government's workforce was expected to retire over the next few years. Now, it looks like many of those people will be staying put longer.

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During a recent flight from Boston to L.A., Paris Hilton was standing next to me as we all made our way to our seats. I saw her -- big glasses, platinum blonde hair, wispy frame -- but didn't make the connection until someone pointed it out later. So it may come as no surprise that I asked Coral8 whether numbers one through seven had been taken. They responded that it was just as it sounds, Coral8, as in "correlate, you idiot." Apt for a company that does complex event processing, the rarified air of correlating transaction data in motion.

Paris Hilton; complex event processing. Hey, sometimes correlation is in the eye of the beholder.

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If your IT department isn’t pals with legal, now's the time to strike up a friendship. Both departments must work together to produce e-mail and files related to litigation, otherwise known as e-discovery.

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Are these guys the Salesforce.com of Web content management? To help you decide, I caught up with Clickability's CEO John Girard and Robert Carroll, its newly appointed head of marketing, to hear how it plans to reshape the Web content management landscape.

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Is the U.S. economy in a recession? With the Fed cutting interest rates like a tailor on speed, a streaky stock market, and no good news on the employment front, it's safe to say we're at least hip-deep in a contracting economy. And decent financial results from EMC, HP, and others have led some to conclude storage is recession-proof. That may be true, but here's why we'll know a lot better in 60 days.

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This is a curious link to follow if you agree that women as storage buyers:
A) Are aliens
B) Constitute a completely different species
C) Need to be spoken to like prostitutes (the "Pretty Woman" Julia Roberts kind, not that Theresa Russell sort)

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PCI regulations require companies to protect credit card numbers. But first you have to know where they are. Here's what I've learned from retailers and PCI auditors about step one of PCI compliance.

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Fortiva has launched an archiving service to address e-discovery for e-mail. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) demand that enterprises involved in litigation be able to produce relevant e-mails within prescribed time limits.

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The last few years have seen a ton of movement in the open source software market. And the recent string of acquisitions are sure to shake up the business of content management.

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And buried inside a mystery: It's where my mind goes when the subject turns to Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). And apparently I'm not alone.

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Oil prices hit new highs daily. Federal aid to boost the economy. Whispers of inflation at every turn. It's economic doldrums, except here in Storageville, one of the few sectors of the economy (and IT) that appears relatively insulated from it all.

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This isn't a partisan screed -- you've got plenty of places across the blogosphere to click for that sort of thing. So here goes: Why is the White House getting a free pass where overwriting the same backup tapes is concerned?

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If you’ve been following the BEA/Oracle saga over the last few months, Wednesday’s announcement that Oracle finally bought BEA probably wasn't surprising.

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EMC's trying to break some new ground by adding flash-based, solid-state drives (SSDs) to its high-end Symmetrix arrays. The thinking is that these high performance drives can be used for especially processing-intensive applications (think database backup and replication) or for data that's frequently accessed.

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I'm excited to be a part of InformationWeek's blogging community and hope you'll join me as I explore the world of content management.

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