Mark Fasciano explains FatWire's inside edge with UpdateEngine Version 6.0 InfoWorld: What makes FatWire different than the other companies in this space? Fasciano: We started the company with the idea that content management wouldn’t be just about managing assets on a Web page, but would be about managing the flow of content going into Web sites and more importantly into content-rich applications. We built the entire architecture with the assumption that you’re basically injecting content from business users and other sources into applications with the same set of tools and substructure as you are putting it into actual Web pages. In the future, no one is going to think about static content management anymore; they’ll always think about [content management] in terms of dynamic content management. Whereas now, that’s what most people are doing. InfoWorld: What is the core platform you use? Fasciano: When we built up this company, we made some long-term bets. We made a 100 percent Java bet. We offer an open Java architecture that makes the CTO much more comfortable in general with our architecture than someone that has warmed over a document management solution, especially because we didn’t build our entire technology on top of proprietary application server. InfoWorld: Why is your support for Java-based application servers significant? Fasciano: In the end, it means we don’t have to burn through as much money building technologies that become obsolete almost instantly. It also doesn’t provide something the marketplace doesn’t want, which is proprietary technology. InfoWorld: What’s new in Version 6.0 of your product? Fasciano: Its focus is on being able to supply greater ease of use for the business users. It also has a set of tools that enables you to build applications faster. InfoWorld: A lot of customers already have content management systems. Why would they switch? Fasciano: Internet projects have evolved from brochure sites that have limited complexity that lend themselves to a document-centric way of thinking about content management. Later-stage applications are transactional and are integrated with other enterprise applications. So the products that solved the early-stage problems don’t scale up to solve the later-stage problems, which is supporting a content-rich transactional applications. There’s more to this than just publishing to static Web pages and managing HTML files like documents. We see bigger companies generally looking for a system that’s got an architecture that can basically incorporate the content that’s embedded in their legacy content management systems. Content management as a standalone application doesn’t make sense. InfoWorld: What role do you see Web services playing in the distribution of content? Fasciano: We have a very data-centric view of Web services, which ends up providing the ability to create a “listener” for XML requests for the content, [the ability] to be able to search and turn that content into XML and then basically send it out to the requesting application. That’s Web services for us. We have a tool that enables you to create a Web service. InfoWorld: Where do you see the integration points between content management systems and corporate portals? Fasciano: The future that we see is embedding content management into the portal server. The portal server is emerging as the presentation layer and a single sign-on for many of the applications. We’ve been able to take a limited version of content management and embed it into the portal server. This gives companies the ability to build the portlets and the applications behind them much faster. InfoWorld: So what should people remember most about FatWire? Fasciano: When you think of content management at FatWire, think about being able to shorten the time to assemble content-rich applications. A lot of times when you think of content management, you don’t think about building applications at all. But by providing the architecture that we do, we’re able to cut the time to build these content-rich applications in half. The reason why you’re able to do this is that you’re providing an abstract layer to access your content, [so] you’ve got fewer lines of code to write. Secondly, you’ll automatically get workflow and version control all handled out of the box. Software Development