Will The Real Content Management Vendor Please Step Up?

While no one doubts the demand for pure-play content management services, there's still a tremendous amount of confusion around what customers should hand off to certain vendors. Fact is, sometimes your CMS provider may not be the best fit for managing the flow of content in your online community or forum.And to be fair, many of the community software vendors just aren't very good at the heavy lifting and process-specific tasks that a traditional ECM or WCM vendor brings to the table.

Enter Portland-based Jive Software. It isn't in the content management space, don't let that fool you. The community software vendor is just one of an increasing number of collaboration vendors willing (and able) to take on more of your content management headaches.

I asked Barry Tallis, director of solutions strategy, about how Jive addresses content as it brings communities to life for clients like Bank of America and Intel.

"We're definitely seeing more of a need to manage content in our workspaces," said Tallis. "This year or early next year, it's likely we'll add additional content management capabilities within Clearspace."

Jive's content management aspirations really underscore how other vendors view the world of content management. They're realizing there's a direct correlation between becoming content experts and grabbing a bigger piece of the enterprise budget.

Tallis tactfully described Jive's content approach, seemingly cautious of how pure-play content management providers might perceive Jive's strategy.

"We've been working on some key integrations with some of our ECM partners around more traditional things like document management and collaboration," said Tallis.

"We're not going to replace those types of things, we're positioning Jive's platform to complement those processes and sit atop existing enterprise stacks."

While that sounds like everyone's playing nice, you have to think the larger collaborative and social media software companies will inevitably craft their own Powerpoint decks describing how they're best suited to deliver and manage your content. Does that mean the big guys like EMC and OpenText will be relegated to just providing the big content repositories? Hardly.

In fact, in enterprise content management(ECM)environments, Jive is already aligned with companies like EMC|documentum and Microsoft, so it isn't too surprising it would decide to venture out on its own to deliver content management services. Tallis also hinted that Jive's ECM alliances could bear more fruit down the road as the company dives deeper into the enterprise.

"There's a lot of convergence in the marketplace," said Tallis. "We're already seeing traditional content management vendors adding social technologies on top of their platforms. And we're nimble enough to sit alongside those technology stacks. We've adhered to the openness mentality from day one and believe that gives us an advantage."

And Jive is apparently backing up its openness pitch and launching its own online community in late March. Tallis said Clearstep will be a hub for the discussion revolving around social computing and enterprise 2.0.

"Clearstep will focus on the process, people and objectives needed to build online communities," added Tallis.

I'm in.