SDA: Interwoven, had recently released a series of new solutions to allow organisations to turn content into an asset for improving customer relationships and driving revenue growth. What is the company’s strategy to achieve the aforementioned revenue growth?
James Murray (JM): For Interwoven green is the new black. We used to have a black logo and now it is green. Part of the reason for that is we believe the market is all about growing revenue. We’ve been helping our 3000 customers to successfully grow their business. We as a company also have been growing; our growth is more than the market growth expectations. What we find today is that revenue is really the new cost. Thus CIOs over the last five years are grappling with news economic conditions, as businesses somewhat lack lustre and the focus is very inward looking. So the question is, how do we take risk out our business with Sarbanes-Oxley around the corner, how do we reduce costs so that we can increase our profit margins and how do we cut jobs.
SDA: One of the things that Gartner had pointed out in 2006 was that the shift happening away from concept-oriented behaviour to more profit centred behaviour. We are tapping into that development on the prosses of revenue. The big question is, how does an IT director impact revenue? The answer is clear; the biggest area to impact revenue for an IT director is the Web. The Web provides the opportunity for companies in APAC and globally to expand market share.
JM: However on the Web, we have a more educated customer who caters to his needs through the click of a button. Thus it is a great opportunity to grab market share for companies who are effective by selling through the Web. The evidence is all around us. When you look at the trends of marketing today, there is a shift from traditional media outlets towards the Web. For a matter of fact the Web is actually bigger than any printed advertising media in most geographies. We are tapping into that revenue as we realise that Web is the biggest opportunity. And what we are doing with our new applications is that we give the IT marketing to make the most out of the Web. And our observation has been, if I can use a fishing analogy to make things clear. Marketing is similar to casting bait onto the pond and hoping for a bite but not really understanding what was undergoing beneath the surface. In the Web world we cast content out there to an unseen audience and you are not sure about what’s going on in the way they are consuming that content. So we are not really sure on how to gain productivity and revenue from Web activity. What we are doing is to turn fishing into catching. Now, fishermen enjoy catching as you don’t catch very much, thus when there is a catch it becomes very exciting. On the other hand, marketers find that extremely frustrating. On the contrary pure fisherman like to have the occasional catch. What we want to do through marketing is to catch all the time. So we come up with marketing tools to enable just that. Let me continue the analogy with fishing. With fishing, firstly, there are different kinds of fish, and we find the same thing in the marketplace. We don’t know, what customers or what fish are luring out there. We are never sure if the message or the bait is right. When we get success, we are not sure if it was part of a pattern or pure luck, so what we do is we keep changing things and hoping that we will achieve success. But what happens when we change things and put something else on the line is that we reduce our effectiveness in the market and we still don’t understand what’s going on. So what we need to pay attention to while we are marketing through the Internet is the concept of place—how we send in the message to the right place, do we understand where our customers are gathering. Secondly, we need to focus on the message—is the message relevant in terms of the product, the message, and the price. The third thing we should look at is if we are addressing the persona or the audience we want to target. Fourth, what are the strategies involved to go after the fish we are after. The fifth thing is, are we able to understand the customer, what the behaviour of that customer is, in terms of their buying pattern and so on.
If I talk about the market segmentation and market analytics solution in the context of the fishing metaphor—what we do with our lifestyle solution is that we create the habitat for the right fish to gather. What we call a micro site—this is where customers of a certain type gather. So we might have Jazz micro site if were to be working for a music company and wanted to target Jazz customers. Thus a micro site is split by type of customer, type of product and so on. We enable marketing to create that habitat, that micro site through a very usable Micro site PowerPoint for the Web. You can drag and drop a web site picture, a piece of functionality. As a marketer you can move the objects around, preview it and publish it if you are happy with it. What this implies is that marketing becomes very quick, being able to create the right habitat draws the right customers so that they can send out the right message.
Now coming to the second part of what we do. Like I already told you we created the habitat through the micro site. The second thing that we do is make a target so that the fish will gather there because of the right bait. Now, the problem is, the same fish will take different baits at different times of the day. What we might want to do is try a couple of baits at different times of the day. Maybe a worm, maybe a maggot or bread and see what happens at different times of the day. This is what we call split texting. Thus we do the same to the micro site, we use two or three different messages or content and see what is taken down well. This is done through a combination of making the micro site and our segmentation solution. What we do here is that, if a customer is of a particular type, age, income group, or is from a particular geographical location, or and so on, then we serve up specific bait or specific content. That’s the segmentation bit, it’s about targeting the fish with the right bait. Then once the bait is out there in the habitat, in the micro site and the fish are starting to get attracted to it. Ideally what we’ll be able to do is intelligently on the fly have our bait morph into something that is attractive depending on the species that is around it and this is way our rules engine plays a part. Our rules engine is looking to see what is the fish nibbling here, or what is the customer’s geo-demographic profile, what should I serve up. This is the live operation of segmentation that we’ve set up. What we do then is to serve up the right content for that customer, or the right bait for that fish.
The final part is the analysis of human behaviour—trying to understand what’s going beneath the surface of the water. This is where our link with analytic solutions comes into play. We have tried integrating WestSide Story with our segmentation and analytics solution so that you can see what the behaviour of the consumer is. You need to think of this as an under water camera, imagine how much easier fishing would be. You will be able to see what fish are out there, what fish are swimming into your habitat. Thus we will be able to understand our customers better, send the data back to the content production team or the fishermen, if you will, so that more bait of a certain kind can be created and then target that bait back into the market. We try to target a particular bait at a particular customer, we analyse how we consume that message and we send that back to the content production unit to create more like that. And that in essence is how we are helping marketers rise to the challenge from a consumer that moves from press and paper for the construction of messages to the Internet. We see that it’s far more aggressive in its requirement in terms of having an excellent customer experience when they go to a web site. Social network sites like YouTube and MySpace.com and so on influence their expectations. They are creating this wonderful experience where you can pretty much customise what you want on the flight, you can create content, you can be part of the creating process, developing the service and the product that you want and that is a real headache for marketers so what we’ve introduced is a solution to enable them to address the challenge of getting revenue from that customer.
SDA: Interwoven's Asia Pacific operations have continued to expand, and the company's presence to date includes direct operations in eight markets across the region including. Can you elaborate on your presence in the APAC region?
JM: We have four centres if you can call it that. We have a managing director for South Asia and our headquarters is in Singapore. Then we have Australasia with its headquarters in Sydney. We’ve got operations in Japan. Then we have Greater China headquartered in Taipei. Within India we’ve got three offices—we have 150 odd engineers employed in Bangalore, we have an office in Mumbia and also in Delhi. In China we have offices in Beijing, Hong Kong and Taipei and the other offices are across the geographies that we’ve mentioned. We’ve got around four hundred customers across the offices that I mentioned. That makes us the largest easiest player in the market. I know that big players like IBM have come into this market place so I’m not too sure where they stand, but I can confidently say that we are the biggest independent ECM player in APAC and also globally.
SDA: Frost & Sullivan had recognised you as the leading ECM vendor. What were the challenges that you had to overcome to reach such a position in the market place? Can you also brief us about what are the challenges faced in implementing your strategies in the APAC market?
JM: That’s a big question. Let me address how we got here first. I don’t think much has changed in our central philosophy over the last five years. The answer to the first question actually answers the second. I have been in the company for seven years. I honestly believe I stay in any software company for three reasons. Firstly we are the best-of –breed solution provider, content is all that we do, we are not interested in selling new hardware, we are not trying to sell you services and we do not a confusing array of products like other vendors. I think we are different form other vendors as we try to create an all-in-one solution. Interwoven offers no-compromise solutions and we are focussed on content, not looking at hardware or services. Second thing is that we offer the best commitment and service that you can get in the market, Very small companies offer good commitment because they are small, hungry, they want to get the customer and look after the customer and go to any length to build the business. Usually when the company is big, an individual customer just happens to be a small fish in the big sea. Somewhere in the middle, we still have the genetic make-up of a start-up. We are one of the top fifty software companies world wide however, we still have humility and extreme customer care. Thus I think we offer the best commitment in service. We can, whenever the customer requires sort out issues that are critical. I think that customers respects and enjoys that. The third thing is that we try to avoid power point slides that try to show that our product is better than the products available in the market. I strongly believe that Interwoven has the best customer references in the market. I don’t look around and wish we had that customer because we have the most enviable customer references in the marketplace. Today content is the new goal and Interwoven has been successful in trying to deliver this goal. All our businesses references have been able to cut costs efficiently and increase their revenue in the ECM market space. So with those three things we’ve been able to go from a standing start in Asia to where we are now and the fourth really critical element in our success has been our partnerships. For example in
SDA: How does Interwoven tackle the complexity of content that exists inside and outside organisations today?
JM: The first thing is that we simplify that complexity. Let me look at productivity for a moment. Most companies produce only two things—products for service and documents. Most documents currently need repositories around organisations. They are very difficult to access when people leave the company. Many times they leave with those documents, which leads to the loss of the document. So that is the traditional story that we know to support document management solution. The biggest problem that we face is e-mail. For example if you were to ask a bunch of people if they use Microsoft Outlook, all of them will have a positive answer. Then if you ask the question, how many of you use power point or Word or other applications and then send those files via e-mail, the answer is again positive from the entire group. Thus despite the presence of a document management market out there, collaboration—the way that we really work in an organisation in every single process, whether you are in finance sales, marketing, and such, every single process is supported by e-mail. Documents are always e-mailed backwards and forwards. The battle for collaboration has been won by e-mail. Now the collaboration vendors out there and the document management vendors out there will argue the case that this is true, as we all know we are all sending documents by e-mail. Now this is a problem, as e-mails do not offer version control, tracking, auditing, etc, that is required in a Sarbanes-Oxley environment. This is where the complexity starts to increase, as we need to control these e-mails and documents that are flying all over the place and the regulatory aspects that we are supposed to adhere to. And the answer is Unified E-mail Records Management, all of that is confined to one place. We are the only company that offers that solution in the market place today. We are at the level at integration to notice that and Microsoft office that we have. And what that means is you don’t have to stop your behaviour, even if your behaviour is lousy from a document control perspective, but you can still send e-mails with documents attached. What we don’t tell you, or what you can know or not is that, that document is not being e-mailed physically. What we are e-mailing is a link to that document within our repository. And our repository is exposing itself to you as an e-mail client. What that means is that as a user you cannot send that e-mail, but what we have done under the e-mail systems is that we have cleverly inserted a document management and collaboration management that enables you to continue using e-mail in an organised fashion with version control, auditing, archiving and with record management. Now that is a really powerful concept and the best way to talk about it is to talk about our law firms that we have worldwide and the concept of matter centric collaboration. Matter centric collaboration; let me explain this using an example, say there was a case between Interwoven versus the United Sates Government. Hypothetically if there was such a case, the lawyers of Interwoven would want to have access to e-mail evidence or e-mail pleading, document evidence which could be electronic or paper, video evidence, audio evidence, thus there could be a variety of different types of evidence that are out there that needs to be accessed in one place for that lawyer to be effective. Thus the lawyer should have more time practicing law than assembling documentary evidence, wasting time to find out where he can find it across different folders, filing cabinets and so on. So you can imagine the contents of a legal file, which have 20 or 30 dividers categorised for pleading, evidence and such. Translating that into an electronic file if you will, that’s what we do. And that’s what we are also doing for manufacturing, finance, for airline and other types of companies. In most companies it is not matter centric collaboration, it may project centric, so within IT we might be working on the SAP project so we need to collaborate on design documents and user requirements. For marketing in a bank we might be collaborating around the development of a new product. And the development of that new product traditionally would involve sending e-mails to sales asking them if it is a good idea, while sending an e-mail back saying 'Yes, Why don’t you create a proposal', documents created for the business and that can be sent to finance and finance can decide about the logistics of the feasibility. Thus this enables interactions between people in the company internally and content is being used in those interactions effectively because it is e-mailed and documented. Imagine all that is pushed to one side and a place with a central repository that everyone can access wherever they want. And one single version of the truth exists there in terms of the document. And everybody is able to see each other’s changes as they have made their changes visible. All the people in the company will always be working on the same version of the document, always able to see the latest updates and the latest thinking, that makes processes go much faster. Because all the content is in one place we don’t have to face problems like leakage of IP. Secondly we have the benefits that when there is a problem, the external auditors from Sarbanes-Oxley or it could be a regulatory finance body that need to come in and check what has happened in a particular transaction or in a particular product process. They just need to log onto the system and they can go and investigate all of the e-mails, all of the documents in one place. This cuts costs for many financial institutions in particular.
SDA: Can you brief us about the growth-rate of the ECM market worldwide?
JM: The ECM market worldwide is growing at 14 to 18 per cent. We can confidently say we are outstripping the market growth. The Economist recently published an article on eCommerce, saying that the eCommerce market would grow at 14 per cent over the coming years. The article starts that the market will grow from a USD 172 billion in 2005 USD 329 billion in 2010. And by that time there will be two billion people on the Internet. The mobile growth is going to reach 88 billion by 2009. All of this means that if you are in the content space and you are able to deliver excellent customer experience to mobile platforms or to Web platforms. Then your future growth is secure. That’s exactly where Interwoven is right now. 3G, we are providing mobile solutions to the Far East, to Taiwan. We have a mobile portal and we span entire Europe, and we are into many Asia-based programs to rollout the SG initiative. We are well and truly into eCommerce, this is what the company has been doing since 1995. We will ride the wave of both the growth areas and we will deploy this revolution in special computing that we are seeing. The likes of MySpace.com and YouTube are creating a very good market dynamic as it is bringing people together through common interest, which represents huge opportunity for marketers to target social groups with a message. Of course the huge threat is that, if you don’t get your act together with marketing, messaging and such, then your customer will walk, but with Web 2.0—the YouTube, MySpace.com kind of an organisation is absolutely what we are supporting as well. When we look at Sky, a European movie channel, its concept was to air cinema, but combine that with a YouTube or MySpace.com kind of concept and they created an organisation called SkyLight, which was initially surfaced around the Super World Cup back in 2006. And the YouTube software to bring people together in order to review news articles, movie trailers and enrich content online enables the creation of social groups. So they are able to create their own blogs and link those blogs to other blogs and make friends across the Internet and form central groups. They can form a fan club, or a cinema lovers fan club. The result of Sky using our software and setting up that concept was over a 70,000 members in a three-month period. That is a massive opportunity to target those customers with products and services and to do it in an intelligent way by saying for example let’s get a football offer out there and let’s not target the football fans but the Ronaldino fans. Basically, it is to target the right community at the right time with the right message. And that in a nutshell is what our segmentation and analytics is all about. So bringing it back to your question, how is the market expected to grow? It is double digits. Going forward, we almost doubled the market rate in APAC. We are riding on the wave based on the shift of marketing from traditional printed version to the Web. I think the biggest fact in our favour is that, ten years ago when I joined Interwoven, we were like evangelists, we were bringing content to an ill educated audience that did not really understand the value of content. Now, several years later, the market fully understands that content absolutely drives business. How can you compete in a 3G environment? Your space to attract your customer is very limited, so how do you go about attracting the customer. The answer is simple, the way to attract customers is to put rich content and try get customers, due to the richness of your content. I think the markets that as grow significantly, mobile phone uptake and Internet uptake increases. Now we are right in the centre of that perfect storm.
SDA: Can you tell us how companies have optimised content to generate growth?
JM: I gave the example of SkyLine where they were very quickly able to provide where the WorldCup back in 2006. To target their customers they used cinema sports content. In order to encourage them to come to their web site, they are allowed to form a community around that content by adding their own ideas to that Web space. One of the interesting things about SkyLine is that it is almost 80 per cent driven by customers. We are harnessing the power of the customer’s creativity and the content they have to offer a d have Sky to contribute content to its customers and to grow in size that way. I think the figures speak for themselves. 70,000 customers were roped in a three-month period.
The other traditional stuff that we do is enabling customers within the marketing department to very quickly create a promotional offer and publish it to a web site to tap in on the marker opportunity at the right opportune moment. If we can provide a good offer fast enough we are able to grab market share. Now, traditionally, a problem with that is, though they come up with the idea quickly, but the reality is that you have to go through extensive approvals process—paper and e-mail driven. Secondly you want to get to the Web—the channels of market and then form a document that takes weeks to break through. What we’ve done is that we have enabled the business take control of their own destiny by providing them with tools to publish promotion to the Web site without the need of IT. What that means is that we come up with the idea quickly and then assemble the content and messaging rapidly and publish it to the site in days as opposed to weeks and that is possibly the biggest areas of growth for our customers in order to grab market share quickly.
SDA: Can you tell us about Interwoven's upcoming products such as MediaBin Digital Asset Management (DAM) and how Interwoven fares against its Competitors.
JM: The first thing to say about the MediaBin solution that is coming out is that, it is a solution fully integrates with our WorkSite solution. It is completely in vogue with WorkSite, which is the collaboration and documentation solution that I talked about earlier on, which enables e-mail, electronic documents, records, all to be stored in one place, that concept is Unified Document Management. We recognise that in addition to these traditional documents, e-mail and electronic documents records we also need to accommodate images and the reason we need to do that is because there a number of business processes out there that need images to be part of the process. So if you think about the way Interwoven has achieved great success is because we work with marketing organisations. We work with big branded companies and those companies are absolutely keen on the protection of their brands, also they are highly innovative and are constantly bringing out new promotions and new products. Now that would require new imagery, thus there is a lot of collaboration with outside agencies. So what we enable is that, one example of the process is to talk to marketers and ask their opinion on launching a product. This initial chat is taken forward through e-mail correspondence developing and shaping that concept to get to a business case. Thus we have progressed form a chat to e-mails to an email document and then building it into development. Then we start to crate imagery and packaging to go around that product. At that point in the project we are heavily dependent on outside creative agencies. The traditional way for these agencies to provide information is by sending in CDs that take a long time. Now what we need the design agencies is to come up with proofs and deposit those proofs within the collaboration environment and to invite through e-mail the marketing managers to click on an e-mail, which goes to the image proofs and to then sign those off and then to move quickly into the next stage which is product launch. Here is an example where high-end content management solution coincides and combines with Media Bin is supporting an end-to-end process within marketing, or developing an idea through the concept, through the business ace, through the development with outside agencies to the launch phase. It is a very exciting extension of what marketers are doing to protect their brand online. We get back into the business offering to streamline the process of bringing new products to the market with e-mail documents and image based. That is the rationale behind the MediaBin announcement.
James Murray is the Vice President for Interwoven in Asia-Pacific. He joined Interwoven in 1999, with over 15 years of experience in the IT industry: over 10 years in software companies including Comshare and JDA; and 5 years in IT consulting and business process outsourcing at Accenture, within their Financial Services Division, working at various customers including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Royal Bank of Scotland and LloydsTSB. James was part of the original team that started up Interwoven in the UK. He was responsible for building Interwoven EMEA's customer base adding companies such as LloydsTSB; Shell; British Airways; British Telecom; Novartis; GSK; Standard Life; Friends Provident; HFC Bank and Axa to name but a few. With these accomplishments, James was promoted to UK Sales Director and after achieving significant success with the UK team, was promoted to Vice President of Sales for Interwoven EMEA. Before coming to Asia-Pacific, James spent the last 18 months managing his team to greater success driving profitability across the EMEA region. |
