Immediacy is dead, long live immediacy...

The publishing of the latest CMS Watch report brings with it the death of another notable CMS brand – Immediacy.

Although it has been slipping away over the last year or so following the acquisition by Alterian, the recent relaunch of the Alterian Content Manager website and the listing of the 42 products reviewed by CMS Watch has consigned the brand to CMS history once and for all.

In terms of the product itself, I’ll take a wager on Alterian CMC 6.2 (or Alterian corporate edition) being consigned to history too by the time the next CMS Watch report is published.

So this post is an obituary to an old friend who brought fulfillment to many but could, at times, be frustrating and hard work to live with.

Born as a product in its own right in 2001, or thereabouts, from some previous efforts of providing content management capabilities to customers of increasing size, Immediacy encapsulated a new breed of simpler content management systems focusing very strongly on ease of use.

If the founders had listened to analysts at that time, they probably wouldn’t have bothered starting a CMS product business, as the consensus at the turn of the century was that there were already far too many products trying to do the same or similar things and that the market wasn’t there for reinventing the wheel continually.

However, no-one told the potential customers that - and although the technology markets were reeling from the over-inflated expectations of the dotcom boom and the reality check that was the dotcom bust, many organisations themselves were just only starting to understand how to create and manage dynamic websites and the vast majority didn't have the budgets or technical expertise to deploy the type of systems the big telcos and the Global 2000 were using at that time.

I arrived at Immediacy from just that type of organisation, deploying just that type of system.  As the 10th employee joining the already crowded offices that were shared with a local taxi company it was quite a culture shock but also a breath of fresh air.

After several years spent navigating through the complex interfaces of systems such as Vignette, Oracle Portal and Documentum - Immediacy's 'Word like', WYSIWYG Editor was a joy to work with. For a marketing person looking to build an engaging, effective, search engine friendly web presence, the emerging range of plug-in modules for things like menu building, form-building, email newsletter creation and user polls etc it was like a kid being let loose in a candy store in terms of the capabilities I now had at my fingertips. The sort of feelings I get using Wordpress or Joomla for free these days.

It was clear that other organisations were starting to think the same. I remember particularly, interviewing a local council for a case study that is still being used here and recognising just what potential there was for an easy-to-use system that could be packaged to the particular needs of local authorities and then to extend that idea to other organisation groupings and organisational needs such as Intranet solutions and marketing suites. Credit to the Immediacy developers such as Simon here who made such things happen - and fast!

One of the things I remember most during my early days with Immediacy was describing the marketplace at that time as a 'land grab'. The net result of which was an explosion in activity to take on as many partners as possible and get through the doors of as many organisations as possible (particularly local authorities). All credit to the formidable Immediacy sales team who traveled the length and breadth of the UK to grow the partner and customer base to a level where it had to be taken seriously by the industry commentators. The downside of going for quantity over quality of course is keeping pace with demand and focusing on high standards of delivery. In retrospect though I still believe it was the right time and place to make such moves.

Having subsequently spent a year implementing Immediacy for multiple websites and then returning to the company to help push forward product management and strategy, I learnt a lot about what were the customer pain points and top priorities for ongoing development and spent many hours understanding how and where Immediacy could be developed further to address usage scenarios beyond those seen as its core strengths. It's at times like those that you recognise what CMS Watch are now describing as 'complexity versus flexibility' and how it is difficult to achieve one without the other. In reality, Immediacy was only going to achieve more complex scenarios and greater flexibility with a radical overhaul of its underlying architecture and that anything else was really going to be  in the words of the developers themselves as 'hacks' and 'fudges'.  I understand that this was the type of decision taken by longer standing CMS providers such as EPiServer who re-wrote their original ElectroPost application substantially following the arrival of .Net.

I think it was the realisation that the lower tier of the content management arena was going to get even more crowded and that simpler Open Source solutions were going to become more widespread and popular that prompted the founders to drive for an exit strategy. I know they've debated themselves whether they did the right thing at the right time. Having seen the fallout from the global financial crisis that came after the Mediasurface acquisition and now recently  information about the latest CMS Watch report and the way they have re-categorised the market place I have to say I believe the Immediacy founders certainly did do the right thing at the right time.

To be honest, they only had the opportunity to do that by getting a lot of other things right in the proceeding years. That focus on trying to achieve the best possible user experience within the confines of earlier browsers was fundamental to the uptake of the product and I'd personally love to see a new generation of CMS developers take a radical view of the market and use the very latest Rich Internet capabilities to revolutionise the user experience once again with a laser sharp focus on productivity.

Although the essence of the product still remains for now, the Immediacy name is disappearing fast. Of all the Content Management product and company names around, Immediacy remains my favourite. In fact, when you look at how the market has evolved in recent years with the growth of social networking, user-generated content and increasingly mobile content then 'immediacy' is an even more relevant term for content creation and management than it was 10 years ago. Maybe Alterian will revive the name at some point for some product specific branding and we will see the Immediacy name rise again. Until then, goodbye old friend.