In this session at CTC 2005 today, Chris Cummings (Interwoven), Kevin O’Connor (EMC/Documentum), Mark Fredrickson (NextPage), Mark Levitt (IDC), Jared Spataro (OpenText) and Darrin Wood (Vignette) talked about content management and collaboration (check the wiki for more info). Stowe Boyd sums it up.

Interesting, how big a strategic role email plays still. I don’t agree with the notion that “email has simply won.” Who would argue the fact that email has some pretty big downsides to it. There just don’t seem to be any real alternatives available today that actually work (i.e. that offer a better overall user experience at a lower cost). People will probably continue to use email until that day when - eventually - more effective tools/processes have been invented.

Allegro has had a good year. The company, founded and managed by industry veteran,
Mr. Eldon Klaassen, with headquarters in Dallas, Texas, has announced several new
customers for its energy trading, transaction and risk management software this year. As I
learned at Allegro’s recent 2005 Customer Summit, however, these announcements only
tell a small part of the full story. Allegro has actually signed many more customers, and
furthermore, is quite an interesting company. It has been a vendor in the space for more
than two decades and has remained fiercely independent when many of its competitors
have engaged in merger & acquisition activities or have raised capital to fund operations
from Venture Capital firms. In the last two to three years, the company has re-architected
its entire solution set (which is one of the most comprehensive in the industry ranging
from E&P software through solutions for the refining and petrochemical segments) onto a
service-oriented, MS.NET, n-tier platform as a suite of components. This year the
Company announced and delivered another significant breakthrough—an enhanced user
interface aimed at making Allegro the most flexible and easy-to-use software now on the
market. Additionally, Allegro now has offices in Europe and in Asia as well as Houston,
Dallas and Calgary.

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