1. Could you elaborate on the Interwoven range of products and what is your core area of focus?

Interwoven was one of the very first companies to develop products for managing enterprise content, and as such, is widely recognized as a leader in content management. Just as Ford invented the concept of the assembly line for mass-producing cars, companies today need a similar "soft" assembly process to produce their knowledge.

Interwoven develops the best soft assembly line in that context. Our core focus has been to provide an open, flexible platform for companies, institutions and government entities to produce, access, manage, distribute, and reuse digital content. This platform is essential for critical business applications such as e-commerce, intranets and portals, extranets and customer relationship management, knowledge management, and eLearning.

2. Recently interwoven launched its Global Customer and Partner CyberSchool said to be the industry's most advanced online education program. How are you planning to implement it across the globe?

Interwoven CyberSchool is global already, because of its online nature. Online learning itself is not a new idea. What is innovative is how an eLearning application works with an open content platform using the latest technologies such XML content. With the CyberSchool infrastructure Interwoven, its partners and customers can develop and launch many online courses at the same time, while reusing many of the basic teaching materials. It gives many customers the flexibility to add customization and testing as well as develop best practices for the business user. The CyberSchool also offers the benefit of being able to measure learner progress and engage in self-paced training anywhere, anytime, thereby saving money on travel and classrooms. The CyberSchool is a scalable and economical way of getting the right education materials to Interwoven customers and partners in 40 countries, with fresh and tailored educational topics. 

3. How will the custom-built training and certification classes leverage organizations to develop best practices?

With the usable content technology deployed as part of the CyberSchool, partners and customers can configure their own training programs based on their industry vertical, target user profile and other criteria. That knowledge can then be shared across organizations.


4. This is the 3rd time running that Frank Russell has bagged the WMA Award. What, in your opinion gives them that edge over their competitors in this field?

Several years ago, Russell made a strategic commitment to set up an open content platform for building their Internet-based business applications. Having an independent content platform enables them to accomplish hundreds of content-centric initiatives a year, without requiring a new database and application design every time. Personally, I believe that is a big part of their edge over competitors.

5. Could you elaborate on the Content Management Product, Content Intelligence Product and the Content Distribution Product?

Interwoven Content Management software is our product that helps enterprises to organize their content activities from individuals to departments to business divisions. It offers a framework for parallel business processes and project environments. It provides completely open interfaces for new content creation and legacy content integration. You can use any tool to modify any asset type. It offers individual asset and whole content collection versioning and workflow. 

Interwoven Content Intelligence software is about making content smart, much like a library's index system for books. Content has much less value to a business unless you know what to do with the content. The product classifies content based on the organization's taxonomies. It generates key words, summaries and other key metadata for the content. It promotes subject-based content search, personalization and reuse. The right content shows up in the right context with the help of our Content Intelligence product.

When you do have smart content, you need to put it in use in the right business application environments, such as e-commerce, CRM, Portal, HR etc. Interwoven Content Distribution software does exactly that - taking content from one source environment and distributing it to hundreds of application destinations within your company or across companies.

6. Interwoven has identified 5 critical components of a truly successful ECM system known as the 5 ECM Imperatives. What was the methodology in finding these attributes? Could you elaborate on the 5 ECM Imperatives, where it finds application in enterprise organization and what its benefits are?

The 5 ECM Imperatives came as an aggregated experience and wisdom from hundreds of Interwoven customers and prospects. If a customer follows the 5 Imperatives in selecting content management technologies and products, they tend to succeed in rolling out their CM projects. The reverse is true too. I have personally heard from several now-Interwoven customers about how they failed in deploying a CM system, because they had selected a system that was inflexible, closed, un-scalable, or with very high total cost of ownership.

The 5 Imperatives require a content management system to be usable, open, scalable, robust and have a low total cost of ownership. Business users should be able to use a CM system in the comfort of their desktop environment with little or no training. The openness is required because a true CM system needs to support well over 50 tools and hundreds of content types and applications, without porting effort involved. Scalability spans in multiple dimensions such as scaling to very large number of projects, people and assets.

With content management system becoming business critical, it needs to have the true enterprise software characteristics such as 7x24 availability, redundancy, backup and other key capabilities. 

Much like a cell phone subscription, it is not the cost of phone but the monthly payments that have the potential to bankrupt us. The importance of total cost of ownership (TCO) comes from more experienced CM customers. In their mind, it is less important how much it would cost on the first project, given every company has at least dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of content-rich applications. If the second project costs the same as the first one, the customer definitely has a TCO issue. Imagine you've just spent $50,000 for one project and you have 99 projects to go, you have to write a check for $5,000,000. Interwoven has quite a few customers with thousands of projects. That cost formula would not have worked for them if they didn't have a better TCO. Rule of thumb, the follow-on project should cost you no more than 10 - 20% of the initial project with a system that has good TCO.

7. Despite the global economic slowdown Interwoven has managed to post strong financials. On what do you attribute it to and what are your plans for the future in terms of expanding your core area of technology and reaching out to wider markets?

Content management is still in its infancy. Content management as a platform across the enterprise is still a new concept to CIOs. There are a number of new technologies and product capabilities we are developing leveraging including XML, Web Services and metadata. They will greatly help our customers to use content, both structured and unstructured, and they are a primary competitive thrust in winning their business. We came up with the idea "content in motion," the process of connecting the right people with good content in an appropriate context. That in essence is Interwoven's future vision.

8. Today's competitive business environment requires that deployed content change reliably, accurately, and quickly. How does Interwoven OpenDeploy make it possible to distribute and replicate all types of contents? What are the tangible benefits that OpenDeploy offers?

OpenDeploy was designed from day one to deal with Internet-based applications, an environment where changes happened on minute-by-minute basis. The technologies we invented make content and code distribution at the speed of the network, with very little overhead. Our efficient algorithms understand what's changed in a development environment so that only the changed content, code and database records get deployed out to the appropriate applications. The product also offers encryption and transactional deployment for security and reliability out of the box.


9. You have been ranked among 'the Top 100 Companies That Matter in KM'. You also have 7 out of the Fortune 10 as your customers. How would these facts help you in your organic growth?

It feels good when our effort is recognized through these industry awards. But our organic growth really came as a result of customer adoption and from customers rolling out our solution enterprise-wide. Our more than 1100 delighted customers have propelled our success.

10. For a Company founded in 1995, your product - Interwoven 5 Platform, has been used at over 1000 Global Enterprises, that include the British Airways, General Motors, Cisco Systems, General Electric and Philips to power their eBusiness initiatives. 

I attribute this to our focus on execution and operational efficiency. Honestly, as a company growing up so quickly during the Internet boom days, we skipped a few classes along the way. The downturn gave us some breathing room to streamline our business. We believe we are well positioned to serve the market when the capital and IT spending comes back.

Top