FatWire Software

» see fatwire.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Mineola is a village on Long Island with a courthouse and a train station, which is not where anybody pictures a web company. FatWire Software started in New York City in 1996 under Mark Fasciano and Ari Kahn, with John Murcott the third name on the founding line, and ended up out there running a content management business for large organizations.

Its own software was called UpdateEngine. PC Magazine reviewed version 5 in the summer of 2001 under the headline "Elegant Content Management," which was a rare compliment for enterprise publishing software in 2001. It also marks the high point of FatWire as a product company rather than an acquisition company.

In 2003 it bought the thing that would shape everything after. Open Market's enterprise web content management holdings, Content Server among them, came up for sale inside divine's bankruptcy proceedings, and FatWire took them. From that point on its flagship was code it had inherited rather than code it had written.

The last independent phase started in August 2007 when Yogesh Gupta came in as president and CEO. He bought a company called Infostoria in October and put out a Web Experience Management strategy in November. The next three years were spent positioning FatWire as the thing you bought once your website was big enough to need a department.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the code it inherited ~

Content Server has a longer pedigree than the company that sold it. It was built as FutureTense, acquired by Open Market in 1999, and carried along when Open Market itself was bought by divine in 2001.

divine went bankrupt in early 2003, roughly sixteen months after that purchase, and the pieces were sold off separately in the proceedings. The ecommerce half went one way. The content management half went to FatWire, which extended it and kept serving the customers who had bought it from two previous owners.

So FatWire was not a startup that grew into an enterprise vendor. It was a maintenance home for software whose original authors had already failed twice. That was a real business, because the organizations running Content Server could not simply stop.

~ the enterprise years ~

By 2008 it had around 200 employees and analysts put its 2009 revenue near $40 million, which is a serious company nobody outside the job would recognize. In 2010 it signed a partnership where EMC resold FatWire as its strategic web experience product and FatWire got to resell EMC's digital asset management in exchange. These are the arrangements that decide what a corporate website runs on, and they happen entirely between vendors. I have almost certainly read pages served by this software without any way of knowing it, the same as anyone else who used a bank site or a newspaper site in that decade.

~ where fatwire.com points now ~

Oracle announced it was buying FatWire on 21 June 2011 and said the deal should close by mid-2011. Terms were not disclosed, and the only price figure in circulation, $163 million, traces back to a release from the law firm that handled the closing rather than to either company. The acquisition completed in July.

In February 2012 Oracle shipped WebCenter 11gR1, and inside it was WebCenter Sites, the new name for FatWire Content Server. That is where the software still lives. The old fatwire.com redirects to Oracle's WebCenter Sites page, and as of this writing that page returns a 404, so the chain of custody that started with FutureTense now ends in a redirect to nothing.

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