After several months, I am back into the blogging scene. Definitely after attending Bangalore Teched, I wanted to catch up with a blog on the concept of content and container
Content and Container What is it? One is long term and the other is short term or evolving. As explained very well, content is the knowledge that was created for ages and container is how we present this content. Let us take a non IT example to discuss this. I would like to bring the great Indian mythology that was known as Mahabharatha. So the content is the great war between dharma (justice) and adharma (injustice) and it had several preachings that laid out the dos and don’t of human life. The content is timeless, it has been existing for several 1000 years and would continue to exist for ages to come. Now coming to the container, mahabharatha was originally written in sanskrit as scriptures was presented as poem. Today you can google mahabharatha to read it in English. Between these times the method of carrying Mahabharata has evolved from scriptures in sanskrit, to English books, to digital devices to now available in English on the internet. This is basically the container. So the content is the epic story and container is the mode of delivering the content. From my opinion the natural conclusion would be to ensure the content is constantly enhanced by pouring in more wisdom and knowledge, while the container goes to present the content in the most intuitive fashion.
Now that we have an understanding of content and container, how is this relevant to software, in the context of SAP BusinessObjects. There is a natural fit between SAP and BusinessObjects with respect to the content and container concepts. While SAP is rich in content, BusinessObjects is the new mode of delivering the content, in a very presentable container. Another analogy between content and container is the distinction between applications and tools. While applications like Enterprise Performance Management are rich in content, the platform that is used to contain/present the same is the business intelligence platform. So the marriage of SAP and BusinessObjects brings a great combination of content and container coming together and therefore providing a great deal of value to customers. While content needs to be enriched with new needs (read enhancements), container needs to adapt to the changing times and way people would like to use information (web, mobile, ipods so on and so forth).
