Steve Pattison, vice president of alliances and business development at Interwoven, talked to Jack Martin, editor-in-chief of WJ, about the enterprise content management (ECM) provider's relationship with IBM.
WebSphere Journal: All right. What does a typical day look like for you? What do you spend your time doing?
Steve Pattison: I'm responsible for all third-party relationships, including those with systems integrators, and key technology partners, such as IBM.
WJ: You have industrial-strength products and solutions that are well respected in the space and you could have partnered with a multitude of companies. Why did you choose to partner with IBM?
SP: IBM and Interwoven share a common vision for developing applications that are based on J2EE and service-oriented architecture (SOA) standards. IBM is committed to offering extensible and scalable middleware and infrastructure that makes our job of building industry-specific ECM solutions for business a reality for our customers.
WJ: A lot of people partner with IBM and some make a lot of sales and some don't. In your opinion, why is Interwoven doing so well with IBM?
SP: I think a number of factors contribute to our joint success. Interwoven is unique in that we have a native J2EE architecture that allows us to interoperate with WebSphere. As a result, we're able to offer targeted ECM solutions that enable business users to address key content challenges, such as document management and collaboration, productivity, information and process overload, Web change management, brand management, regulatory compliance, and e-mail overload. Additionally, we have a number of OEM VAR customers who build content applications on top of our platform that run on J2EE application servers. Interwoven's business is greatly expanding in the OEM arena and our relationship with IBM has proven to be extremely valuable to that set of OEM VAR customers.
WJ: Why is that?
SP: Customers are looking for superior function and scalability in content applications. For example, OEM customers will use our platform to build content-centric applications like contract management, project management, and client services management solutions. At the same time, these high-function applications are able to leverage the scalability and stability of the IBM WebSphere platform, which is well known to many of our OEM end customers.
WJ: How do you find interacting with WebSphere as a technology?
SP: As a technology we've found the IBM APIs to be very easy to use, especially given the next-generation features of the Interwoven architecture. We've also found that IBM's support organization is consistently there for us in real time, which has been very important as Interwoven continues to push the envelope when it comes to J2EE technology.
WJ: What types of problems do companies have for which Interwoven would be the right choice?
SP: Our customers purchase Interwoven to address specific business challenges that revolve around unstructured content. For example, in areas such as legal departments, where lawyers are working with contracts or other matters, Interwoven offers content applications that map to the unique end-user requirements of legal professionals. So far, the market has innovated greatly when it comes to structured or transactional process areas, such as accounts payable, sales and distribution, and inventory management. However, process areas such as legal, marketing, and engineering project management have historically been underserved. Interwoven is excelling in these types of high-touch content application spaces.
