Swiss Company Enters U.S. Content Management Market

Obtree Technologies

The onetime integrator, which began packaging its content and knowledge management solutions for European concerns in 1999, said it intends to go to market in the United States exclusively through partners.

"Our approach for the next 12 months is completely indirect," said Jens Rabe, COO at Obtree. "We are interested in building a few, but fruitful partnerships that we can easily support."

The privately held company had about $18 million in sales last year, about half of which came from licenses, Rabe said. He said over the past six months, since the company began building its channel, about half of its sales came through partners, and he expects that percentage to climb to 80 percent of sales this year.

The company is targeting $50 million to $60 million in license sales this year. Rabe said in the Europe company has partnered with IT consulting firms such as Cap Gemini, Ernst and Young, Accenture and Anderson Consulting, as well as applications integrators with Web development backgrounds.

The company was also in negotiations with five vendors interesting licensing Obtree's core technology on an OEM basis to help them Web-enable their client/server applications, Rabe said.

He said a key advantage of the company's software is an ability to dynamically assemble personalized Web pages while maintaining scalability through use of a relational database and various levels of caching. "Our core competency is having made this a realtime process," he said. "We figured out how to make it work."

While the company's content management software natively integrates with Java-based application servers, it does not run on a Java server. "Java is not quick enough," Rabe said.

Obtree also announced availability of new versions of its applications suites, Obtree C4 content management platform and Obtree C4 Portal Suite.

The company says Obtree C4 blurs the line between content management and knowledge management and includes workflow, search, imaging and personalization capabilities.

Rabe said the Obtree C4 Portal Suite is targeted at mining and aggregating information rather than presenting information to the desktop. "We don't want to be the desktop portal," he said.

The company's target market includes large enterprises in the financial, pharmaceutical and government markets. Rabe said Obtree has about 150 clients and 450 to 500 licensed installations.