Interwoven Reports Losses, Launches New Software

Interwoven Inc. took the covers off the latest version of its TeamSite content-management software this week, betting heavily on Web services and regulatory-compliance issues. Given the continuing losses it reported Tuesday, the vendor would appear to need an enthusiastic response to this latest product release.

For the second quarter ended June 30, Interwoven reported a loss of $7.2 million on revenue of $26.2 million, compared with a loss of $13.8 million on revenue of $33.0 million a year ago. Licensing dropped more than 50%, to $10.2 million from $15.9 million last year. This comes a week after its larger competitor, Documentum Inc., posted its seventh-consecutive quarter of revenue growth and a small profit.

The biggest change in TeamSite 6 is the way it has been broken apart into a set of 120 core content-management Web-services modules, each of which can be built into applications with either .Net or Java 2 Enterprise Edition. The company made the dramatic change in its product architecture based on feedback from its customer advisory board, which includes companies such as General Electric, Intel, and Siemens. "They'd like to go to componentized application architectures," says CEO Martin Brauns. Having the ability to pick and choose content-management functions will let customers more rapidly test and deploy content-management systems built to their needs, Brauns says.

Echoing that move toward flexibility are new capabilities for letting IT administrators customize user interfaces to cater to the needs of the business. "It was four flavors in the past, when the customer wanted 31 flavors," Brauns says.

On the regulatory front, the company revealed its Interwoven Protect program, consisting of three key alliances to provide targeted regulatory compliance: with IBM for records management related to U.S. Department of Defense and Securities and Exchange Commission requirements; with SBI and Co. for compliance with the SEC and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act; and with Watchfire for meeting accessibility standards such as Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act.

TeamSite 6 starts at around $100,000 for an entry-level departmental deployment to 35 users.