Private company spotlight: Mark Logic

Jason Wood is starting to show a pretty good batting average with his “private company spotlight” posts. First Wily was bought by CA, now Akimbi (a brilliantly useful testing technology) has been acquired by EMC’s vmWare subsidiary. Feeling the peer pressure, I wanted to do a spotlight on Mark Logic which I think is a tremendously interesting software company.

Product / Applications

In business since 2003, Mark Logic is defining a new market category for “XML Content Servers.” What this means specifically is a server that lets a customer can take some type of content (a document, a manual, a web page, etc) transform it into XML, store it, support various queries/manipulations of the content and eventually export it back out into various formats.

Why is this cool? Well, most important business content requires lots of rules and stakeholders to develop and maintain it. For example if Jet Blue needs to update its flight operations manual, it might need someone from EH&S to develop/maintain certain sections on takeoff procedures but someone from the pilot’s union to work on the section related to working hours. Similarly, when IBM develops an RFP response for a major customer, someone from Global Services needs to develop the description of their implementation capabilities but someone from the software division to write about Tivoli. Quite often there are policies that enforce what stakeholders can touch what bits of content. Because Mark Logic handles all the content as XML-native, you can do clever things like take the entire flight manual and identify a section as a “safety expert section” or a “union section.” In this way you can decompose a big, complex piece of content, apply rules to various sections and allow them to get updated independently.

This also means you can find and reuse content much more easily. Today when IBM has a new RFP, it’s a pain to find reusable content because no one wants to sift through 200 pages of some former RFP to find the good bits. If all the past RFP’s are XML-native you can just query: “show me all the Tivoli descriptions we’ve sent to insurance customers” and get back a list of just those sections, ideally with some added context like whether or not that deal closed.

Traditional content management is more of a “version control engine” that does check-in, check-out, access rights and the like. This misses the higher order capabilities described above that can make content management useful for applications other than archiving.

Mark Logic’s product is the classic “thneed.” It has little intrinsic value, but applied to one of a thousand different applications (like the ones above), it becomes quite useful. This makes it a product marketer’s paradise, having to create the “whole product” for each new application area. No accident then that Mark Logic is led by David Kellogg, former head of Product Marketing for Business Objects. David also writes a great blog that’s equal parts technology, product/market strategy and industry observation.

Momentum

Today Mark Logic has about 25 customers which is not a bad showing for 3 years in business. They’re mostly “power users” with nichey applications for the extremely complex content needs of technical journals or large regulated chunks of content like flight manuals. If Mark Logic crosses the chasm, you’ll start to see it in all sorts of different more “everyday” business scenarios like the RFP example I mentioned. I suspect it will take a channel heavy approach to let Mark Logic hit this kind of mainstream usage.

Competition

What’s particularly nice about Mark Logic is they seem to have a tremendous amount of free air. While I can easily name 10 photo sharing companies or 8 enterprise information integration companies, I can’t think of another XML content server company. This is pretty surprising in today’s world of over-funding and hypercompetition.

Improvements

Being an enterprise apps guy, I’ve got users, roles and processes on the brain. I wish I saw a little more of this in Mark Logic. Unifying XML content management with business rules, authorizations and BPM seem like an essential step to make this sort of content management relevant for more mainstream applications.

Final Analysis

Ultimately I think content management will go the way of business intelligence: out of the realm of the back-office specialist and instead surreptitiously inserted in between different steps and actions in larger business processes. Mark Logic seems to understand this shift and Kellogg makes frequent reference to Mark Logic’s platform aspirations. With their team, technology and investors, I think Mark Logic has a good shot of becoming the vendor that helps this transition toward the ubiquity of content in the enterprise.