February 24, 2010
On Opentext's acquisition of NStein
Here is a nice post by Tony Byrne of CMS Watch evaluating the acquisition of NStein by OpenText.
I've got a couple of things to add to Tony's concise analysis. From my standpoint, the real value of NStein from OT's perspective has to be the Text Mining Engine (TME) technology as well as NStein's small but loyal foothold in a few vertical markets. NStein has done a pretty good job of selling its not inexpensive suite of products into a few large publishers, for instance, and the pull-through has been incredible given that the TME is the key selling point.
As far as the collection of products NStein sells, Luc and Co. appear to have grown the company by acquisition and partnership. It was a clever idea for them to partner with and integrate tightly with Ixiasoft's TextML server, although that was a shot across Mark Logic's bow in the XML Server market and might have alienated NSTein from partnering with that company. Given OT's penchant to own the market, I'd say they'll set their sites on MarkLogic Server or Ixiasoft TextML Server sometime in '10.
However, the CMS/DAM story at NStein has been less-than-ideal, since both have disparate application stacks and relatively immature feature sets compared to their value (their CMS is LAMP-based and their original DAM product was .NET based). Also, given that OT has acquired the Vignette VCM/VAP stack that is largely Java/J2EE, the Artesia DAM that is also Java/J2EE, and the Emotion/Corbis product that is .NET, the picture gets a bit more complicated as to how this all will get sold in-market. Right about now Scott Bowen at OT looks like he's got his work cut out for him.
At the end of the day, whatever OT's motives, they seem to be guided by increasing market share and not necessarily best-of-breed. However, no matter what they do with these competitive product sets (sell up/down market, sell into verticals, sell into geographies, etc), I think that NStein TME is the keeper. Many of the other products probably will likely on the vine, although you begin to wonder with all these different competing products at OT now, which ones are going to be killed or will OT just let them die by attrition, which would NOT serve the market well.
Posted at 09:48 am by Joseph Bachana
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Joe, I concur that the Text Mining Engine was the true value in Nstein's stack. The semantic engine and linguistic analysis was the secret sauce and could have been readily deployed across many technologies. It was much better than competitive technologies from a portability perspective since a custom "cartridge" for a specific company/industry could be developed to improve the text mining result set and that the system could be tuned to feed results based on desired output patterns for it's intended destination (consider "health" vs "sports").
NStein's DAM was novel in its approach to managing article models, but to consider the Nstein system a true DAM that effectively manages binaries is a bit of an overstatement. It fell into something between a DAM and a CMS.
As for the WCM component, I believe that its relevance was for French-language news publishers. The workflow was simple and intuitive, along with having text mining built in. For syndicator subscribers, it was comparatively easy to deploy.