Analysts React to FileNet's Panagon Suite
Earlier this week, FileNet (Costa Mesa, CA) released the Panagon IDM document management suite. We wanted to know what others in the industry thought about it. Here's what Bruce Silver,
Bruce Silver Associates (Aptos, CA) and Jeetu Patel,
Doculabs (Chicago) had to say.
Silver:
"I think Panagon definitely delivers on the promise of the Saros acquisition, which boldly asserted that customers don't want separate vendors, or even separate product technology, for EDM and imaging solutions. This was a radical assertion in early 1996, but I think gradually that is being borne out, even though it took some major reorganizations and management changes for FileNet to fulfill the assertion.
"As far as the NT/BackOffice orientation goes, I think that's mainly part of the race for market share and channel partners on the EDM side. I think the imaging server will still strongly leverage Unix for scalability in big deals, which is where the revenue is. My understanding is that the Panagon IDM client can access either NT or Unix servers. (Sure, the web server is NT only, but that's a non-issue.) The term "enterprise," as I have written several times, is vague and confusing. I think in the Panagon case it refers to a single company deploying many separate applications, some EDM-oriented, some imaging-oriented, in various locations, with a single client (thick or thin) that can access any of them. It doesn't necessarily mean 2000 concurrent users of a single worldwide imaging application.
"I think Panagon should do quite well versus the other suites for customers who want EDM and imaging to be truly integrated at the client level. Panagon has a common object model and API for both EDM and imaging. No other vendor of production-scalable back ends has that. The other vendors who will be impacted by this, in my opinion, include PC DOCS (Burlington, MA), IBM (Armonk, NY), and Eastman Software (Billerica, MA). The former has to partner to get production imaging, and the latter two are taking a groupware approach to EDM. Documentum (Pleasanton, CA) also has to partner for production imaging, but really isn't selling a technology story anyway. Panagon greatly enhances FileNet in the EDM space, but it's not certain that ease of development and deployment will be enough to let them catch up to Documentum."
Patel:
"Certainly, Filenet has faced serious challenges since its acquisitions of Saros, Watermark and Greenbar. Panagon is the first step of execution to Filenet's (now almost two year old announcement) claim of an integrated desktop, and I think that it will serve the company well.
"Some of the vendors that might face some competition are vendors such as Eastman Software, PC DOCS, and Documentum. Although the individual products offered by each of these companies do very different things, the competition will still prevail. I think that all the vendors including Filenet will have to work hard at proving the value add over and above what the horizontal vendors such as Lotus (Cambridge, MA) and Microsoft (Redmond, WA) start providing to the market from an infrastructure standpoint.
"A challenge that I think Filenet has faced over the last two years is one of the adoption rate of the market for these technologies. Not always does the suite approach work out as the optimum approach for companies. The Filenet sales cycle might have elongated considerably due to the suite that organizations were now considering on purchasing, as versus individual technologies.
"From a competitive standpoint, Filenet is definitely coming to par with the other vendors as far as product features are concerned. In addition, they have an opportunity to truly capitalize their offering with a special emphasis on mission criticality given their background in IMS.