IBM develops its own content management

Teresa Whittle, marketing manager of the IBM Content Management Group explained: “WebSphere does the edge serving and application serving as well as the personalization. We provide the core infrastructure and then we partner with others, like Vignette, Interwoven and BroadVision for the application itself.”

But the company has been developing a new CMS, code-named Franklin, within its Next Generation Internet Group. Whittle said: “Franklin is a technology that is satisfying the needs of IBM internally for our website. We haven't decided where it's going to go - rolling it out depends on the market.”

If Franklin becomes a commercial deployment, it would not be unusual for IBM to have brought it out this way. Whittle explained that a prototype code-named Garlic was developed as an internal search technology portal, that then went to market as part of the Enterprise Information Portal.

One distinct advantage of an IBM CMS would be its tight integration with IBM products like WebSphere and DB2 back-end databases. Businesses would be able to more quickly deploy a one-stop web solution rather than going to other vendors.