Who is in charge of RedDot anyway? Four acquisitions in 4 years means that answer is no one
2004: RedDot – a private, German-owned web content management company
2005: Hummingbird, a publicly traded Canadian company purchases RedDot
May 2006: Hummingbird is purchased by Symphony Technology Group and goes private
Aug. 2006: OpenText purchases Hummingbird and adds RedDot to its portfolio of 3(!) existing web content management systems
You got all that? Able to keep track of the players? No? Neither is anyone inside RedDot.
You have to feel sorry for the employees. Who the hell is in charge anyway? Is it any wonder that RedDot’s best and brightest have fled to the competition?
Why This RedDot Acquisition Madness Matters
Customer Confusion
OpenText’s reputation for clearly communicating with customers in legendary. NOT!. As CMS Watch says “the level of clarity in the communications from Open Text about the future of what had been its main WCM products leaves a great deal to be desired.”
So unsurprisingly, RedDot clients have been given little information at all about what the acquisition means. Unless you count this miracle of obfuscation released shortly after the announcement.
Caring About $$ More Than Customer Success
OpenText is a public company with an obsession for hitting revenue numbers. Which is fine. But this crazy focus on meeting quota means sales guys will do anything to make their number, including selling LiveServer as a Search Engine and shooting partners who won’t give their clients bad advice to help RedDot make quota.
Loss of Product Vision - Blindness to Customer Needs
With product managers jumping ship, there’s been no vision for the future of RedDot (or any of the other web content management solutions owned by OpenText.) The product is old and rapidly getting older.
As CMS Watch points out: “products change over time -- or rather don't always change with the times. So it is with RedDot CMS, whose European customers tell us that its localization capabilities are aging, and its globalization facilities surprisingly underdeveloped”
You can see this lack of vision shining through with the recent “Web 2.0” release of RedDot. In September 2007, RedDot finally woke up to this whole “social web thing” and announced:
“RedDot now makes the integration of interactive applications and Web 2.0 functions possible in all Web-enabled media with new modules for Web 2.0.”
Absolute genius – if this was 2005.
And RedDot still can’t provide – out of the box – the more important CMS microapplications of calendars and end-user form creation that even junior products like Ektron have offered since 2004.
1 comment:
Once again, your information is incorrect and you are proving that your reading comprehension skills are at the level of a single-celled organism...
RedDot was NOT aquired 4 time in 4 years. It was technically only sold once in it's entire history, and that was to Hummingbird in 2005 (Possibly 2004 as I am not sure when the sale was actually finalized).
Hummingbird was then aquired by OpenText, RedDot was not sold as a seperate entity. And if you had taken the time to read the material you were referencing, you would have seen that the Symphony sale was never executed "with its pending acquisition by Symphony Technology Group (Hummingbird's board has approved the deal, but its shareholders could theoretically veto it). ".
While I have no love for RedDot, you are simply an ignorant fool with an axe to grind. But at least I understand why you kept your identity hidden, OpenText can easily sue your ass for slander.
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