Fatwire is waiving licence fees for clients who migrate to its CMS from Vignette or Interwoven. Both these vendors have traditionally had quite expensive licensing models so there are potentially big savings to be made, although FatWire has a feature set that is probably closer to Vignette than to Interwoven.
The catch is that you need to procure migration services through FatWire, but they’ve partnered with content migration specialists who you’d probably use anyway. You just lose some flexibility on negotiating the price, but you’re going to be saving money anyway.
But does that make it a worthwhile exercise? As Irina Guseva points out, the project inevitably costs more than the licence, so the cost of migrating may well be more than your existing Vignette or Interwoven maintenance costs.
More importantly, the reasons for migrating are wrong. You shouldn’t abandon your CMS just because you can get a better deal elsewhere. It’s not like switching an electricity supplier to get a better rate. Just moving from one CMS platform to another is unlikely to resolve the content management issues you’ve been experiencing. You need to think about which problems you’re going to solve then pick the processes and technologies that will address these.
FatWire’s rescue package doesn’t make a business case to move away from Vignette or Interwoven, but it does put the product on the shortlist if you are migrating. For dynamic-driven Java websites, you have to consider FatWire, but it’s not a shorlist of one. Remember, open source products don’t have licence costs either.
So let’s commend FatWire for their marketing effort, and if you’re looking to migrate from a platform other that those mentioned, ask FatWire if they’ll cut you the same deal. But don’t trade in your existing CMS just to get a better price. Address your issues, conduct due diligence and pick a product that meets your requirements.
A couple of useful links: