G00219744
Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management
Published: 10 November 2011
Analyst(s): Mick MacComascaigh, Jim Murphy, Gavin Tay
Today, enterprises expect Web content management to provide measurable
business benefits, not just to improve productivity. Therefore, many
enterprises must look for new WCM offerings. This Magic Quadrant
evaluates the key vendors within this new context.
What You Need to Know
Web content management (WCM) shows the dynamism of a much younger market than its age would suggest. The WCM market continues to grow rapidly, and new technologies continue to emerge. This dynamism has occurred because enterprises today expect WCM to do much more than simply manage the content of their websites. Enterprises want their websites to optimize interactions with visitors, whether that means selling more, engaging more or informing more. These requirements for WCM mean that WCM systems must understand who a visitor is and what he or she needs, and then offer the visitor relevant content and functions to fulfill those needs, regardless of where that content comes from (inside the WCM application, outside it or even outside the enterprise). The solutions needed will be different for every enterprise, depending on the nature of its business. Thus, not only do enterprises have to replace older WCM applications that can't meet the new demands, they also need different kinds of WCM applications. In addition, WCM achieves its greatest value as part of a wider strategy of online channel optimization (OCO) for maximizing the value of customer interactions across all channels. As a result of OCO, four major trends are
shaping the WCM market:
■ The need for business impact, not just productivity. ■ A focus on technology that works across channels. ■ Integration with related technologies.
Magic Quadrant
Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management
Source: Gartner (November 2011)
Market Overview
WCM Market Is Growing Fast
The WCM software market achieved total worldwide revenue of $1 billion in 2010, despite recessions in many major economies, and Gartner forecasts that it will reach $1.2 billion in 2011 (see "Market Trends: Worldwide Web Content Management Market Is Driven by Enhancements to Online Channels, 2010"). North America accounts for 61% of revenue, EMEA 28% and Asia/Pacific 11%. Gartner projects that the WCM software market will see a compound annual growth rate of 14% from 2009 to 2014, approximately twice that of the overall enterprise software market. This growth has led WCM to constitute a greater proportion of the overall enterprise content
management (ECM) market than ever. In 2010, WCM accounted for more than 27% of this market.
WCM Now Focuses on Online Channel Optimization
WCM reaches its full potential in OCO (see "Project Overview: Optimizing Your Online Channel With Web Content Management"). OCO is the discipline of maximizing the impact of engagements with
target audiences over a variety of communications media. OCO involves real-time, multidirectional communications and requires quantitative measures to assess and improve such communications. Therefore, this year's Magic Quadrant evaluates how well vendors apply their WCM offerings to OCO. Vendors do not need to provide all the components required for an OCO strategy — such as Web analytics, digital asset management, CRM and sales force automation — but their WCM offerings must work with those technologies to allow enterprises to build OCO gradually. WCM vendors use a number of terms similar to OCO to differentiate themselves in the market: ■ Web experience management.
■ Web engagement management. ■ Customer experience platform.
Vendors have started using these terms because they have extended their WCM products beyond core WCM capabilities, in part to appeal to business managers who increasingly influence buying decisions and expect greater business impact. An emphasis on the customer makes sense, particularly where WCM first gained its foothold many years ago in retail, media and consumer packaged goods. But WCM can also benefit:
■ Nonprofit organizations.
■ Government agencies and departments. ■ Higher education.
And WCM can help with intranets and extranets, as well as external websites.
Four Trends Affect the WCM Market
The shift toward OCO has largely driven four new trends that shape the WCM market and vendor strategies today:
■ The need for business impact: In the past, WCM buyers primarily wanted to improve their internal efficiencies and overall productivity. Now, WCM buyers increasingly emphasize business outcomes — revenue and profit — as a result of improvements made to an online strategy.
■ Technology that works across channels: Awareness of mobile and social channels has driven enterprises to incorporate multiple touchpoints into their online strategies. However, beginning a conversation with a visitor each time he or she uses a new device or channel results in a poor user experience. Increasingly, WCM buyers want to optimize interactions over multiple channels and increase the intelligence exchanged between them. In many cases, enterprises will also try to cross the border that has traditionally existed between the online and offline realms.
■ Integration with related technologies: Interoperability has become a critical selection criterion and its importance will continue to increase. Typically, a WCM offering was coupled in some
WCM will become a critical component in a larger OCO environment and will, therefore, have more touchpoints with adjacent technologies, including CRM, ERP and ECM. In addition, WCM will also need to respond to events or user behavior that the enterprise will pick up through a multitude of information-gathering and analytics sources.
■ Growing interest in cloud-based WCM: Companies such as CrownPeak and Clickability (now part of Limelight Networks) have highlighted the benefits of software as a service (SaaS) for many years, yet vendors and enterprises largely took a "wait and see" approach. Enterprises considering the risk of "ripping and replacing" their existing WCM systems were sometimes not ready to take the additional risk of embracing a new delivery model. Now, enterprises in many industries are more open to an off-premises or hybrid option for their WCM solution.
Market Definition/Description
WCM is the process of controlling the content to be consumed over one or more online channels through the use of commercial, open-source or hosted management tools based on a core repository. We exclude products such as portals and e-commerce engines, even though these technologies have overlapping functions in areas such as personalization, content management and content delivery (see "Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals" and "Magic Quadrant for
E-Commerce").
Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria
Our assessments take into account the vendors' current offerings and strategies, as well as their future initiatives and product road maps (see Note 1 for a sample list of vendors not in the Magic Quadrant that may suit some clients). We also factor in how well vendors drive market changes, or at least adapt to them. WCM vendors must meet the following criteria to appear in this Magic Quadrant:
■ Revenue: Total WCM software revenue (including new licenses, updates, maintenance, subscriptions, SaaS, hosting and technical support) for 2010 must exceed $10 million.
■ Geographic presence: The vendor must have been in business for more than five years, with a multigeographic presence for at least a year and a strategy that supports further geographic expansion. It must actively market its WCM offering in at least two major regions, such as North America and EMEA.
■ Vertical and horizontal capabilities: The vendor must actively market its products in more than two major industries and in more than one horizontal application category (such as e-commerce and customer self-service).
■ Ecosystem activity and market interest: Marketplaces, community forums, books, seminars, and partners and channels (IT service firms, system integrators, distributors, Web interactive agencies and advisory firms) must show interest in the vendor. We also consider the level of interest shown by Gartner clients, based on the number of client inquiries.
■ References: The vendor must have WCM software commercially available and active
scale, with the number of contributing authors exceeding 50 and the average monthly number of page views comfortably exceeding 500,000, though we prefer deployments supporting even larger numbers of users.
■ Functions: The WCM offering must be available as a stand-alone product, or suite of products, and include the following capabilities:
■ A content repository with basic library services, such as check-in/check-out and versioning. ■ Authentication of users (authors, editors and reviewers) and assignment of permissions. ■ Content authoring through browser-based (industry-specific) templates or via conversion
from a word processing application.
■ Workflow sufficient for content review and approval.
■ Conversion to HTML or XML and support of templates for Web rendering. ■ Managed delivery of content to Web servers or site management systems. ■ Capabilities for multisite and multilanguage management.
■ Web analytics and reporting capabilities.
■ "What you see is what you get" design capabilities, with the ability to modify and customize look and feel independent of content.
■ Support for developer, administrator, editor, marketer and author roles in a distributed contribution environment.
■ Support for content aggregation and syndication (via APIs, representational state transfer [REST] interfaces, RSS or similar).
■ Ability to manage rich media in the context of Web efforts.
■ Ability to publish content for consumption on various devices; for example, tablets, smartphones, TVs.
Added
Vendors added since the "Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management" published in 2010 are: ■ Adobe (though its acquisition of Day Software in 2010).
■ e-Spirit (its revenue now reaches the required threshold). ■ eZ Systems (its revenue now reaches the required threshold). ■ GX Software (its revenue now reaches the required threshold). ■ Limelight Networks (through its acquisition of Clickability).
Dropped
We dropped these vendors from the Magic Quadrant: ■ Clickability (acquired by Limelight Networks). ■ Day Software (acquired by Adobe).
■ FatWire Software (acquired by Oracle).
Evaluation Criteria
Ability to Execute
Ability to Execute measures how well a vendor sells and supports its WCM products and services globally. The following list provides details of the specific evaluation criteria we used to assess Ability to Execute.
Product/service evaluates product functions in areas such as: ■ Multisite and multilanguage management.
■ Web analytics and reporting. ■ Design.
■ Content modeling. ■ Metadata management.
Overall viability includes an assessment of the vendor's financial health and the success of the company overall, together with the likelihood of the vendor or business unit continuing to invest in the product.
Sales execution/pricing evaluates the vendor's success in the WCM market, including: ■ WCM revenue and the installed base.
■ Pricing.
■ Presale support.
■ The effectiveness of the sales channel. ■ The level of interest from Gartner clients.
Market responsiveness and track record evaluates how well the WCM offering matches buyers' requirements at acquisition. We assess the vendor's track record in delivering new functions when the market needs them. We also consider how the vendor differentiates its offerings from those of its major competitors.
Marketing execution evaluates the clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of the vendor's efforts to market its WCM offerings. We examine aspects such as thought leadership, word of mouth and sales activities.
Customer experience evaluates functions or services within production environments, including: ■ Ease of deployment. ■ Operation. ■ Administration. ■ Stability. ■ Scalability. ■ Vendor support.
We assess this criterion via qualitative interviews with vendor-provided reference customers. We also use feedback from Gartner clients and other sources that use, or have completed competitive evaluations of, the WCM offering.
Operations evaluates the vendor's service, support and sales.
Table 1. Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria
Evaluation Criteria Weighting
Product/Service High
Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial, Strategy, Organization) Standard
Sales Execution/Pricing High
Market Responsiveness and Track Record Standard
Marketing Execution Standard
Customer Experience High
Operations Standard
Source: Gartner (November 2011)
Completeness of Vision
Completeness of Vision focuses on the vendor's potential and points to its future likelihood of success. A vendor can succeed financially in the short term but won't become a leader without a vision or strategic plan. A vendor with average vision will anticipate and respond to change by
direct and initiate market trends, particularly if it integrates its vision into a broad range of areas, and capitalizes on product and service development. The following list details the criteria we used to assess Completeness of Vision.
Market understanding evaluates the ability of the vendor to understand buyers' needs and translate those needs into vertical and horizontal WCM products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those wants with their added vision. WCM vendors that show the highest degree of market understanding adapt to customer requirements in areas such as SaaS, dynamic contextualized delivery and ease of use for nontechnical staff.
Marketing strategy evaluates the extent to which the vendor articulates a differentiated message and communicates it consistently throughout the organization and through its website, advertising, customer programs and positioning statements, as well as statements of direction and product road maps.
Sales strategy evaluates the vendor's use of direct and indirect sales, marketing, service and communications to extend the scope and depth of market reach.
Offering (product) strategy is the vendor's approach to product development and delivery that emphasizes functions and features as they map to requirements for WCM. We also evaluate development plans for the next 12 to 18 months.
Business model evaluates the soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business proposition and whether it offers synergies with other ECM components, such as digital asset management, records management and document management.
Vertical/industry strategy evaluates how the WCM vendor uses its direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, such as the media industry. Innovation evaluates the vendor's development and delivery of differentiated WCM technology that addresses critical customer requirements. We evaluate product capabilities and customer use in areas such as:
■ Templating.
■ Workflow and change management. ■ WCM repositories.
■ Library services.
We also look at other capabilities that are product specific and that are needed and deployed by customers.
Geographic strategy evaluates how the vendor meets the specific needs of geographic regions outside its home territory. We assess whether the vendor's partners, channels and subsidiaries are appropriate for those regions.
Table 2. Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria
Evaluation Criteria Weighting
Market Understanding High Marketing Strategy Standard
Sales Strategy Low
Offering (Product) Strategy High
Business Model Standard
Vertical/Industry Strategy High
Innovation Standard
Geographic Strategy Standard
Source: Gartner (November 2011)
Leaders
Leaders should drive market transformation. Leaders have the highest combined scores for Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. They are doing well and are prepared for the future with a clear vision. They have strong channel partners, a presence in multiple regions, consistent financial performance, broad platform support and good customer support. In addition, they dominate in one or more technologies or vertical markets. Leaders are aware of the ecosystem into which their own offerings need to fit. Leaders can:
■ Demonstrate enterprise deployments.
■ Offer integration with other business applications and content repositories. ■ Provide a vertical-process or horizontal-solution focus.
Challengers
Challengers are solid vendors today and can perform well for many enterprises. The important question is whether they have the vision to succeed tomorrow. A Challenger may have a strong WCM product but may have a product strategy that does not fully reflect market trends, such as the increasing importance of the user's context, multichannel output or interoperability with adjacent technologies (for example, CRM, digital asset management and multichannel campaign
Visionaries
Visionaries are forward thinking and technically focused. For example, their products may have unique multilingual capabilities or set the direction of the market through their innovation and product development. To become Leaders, they need to work on some of the core aspects of their offerings and increase their Ability to Execute. They may need to build financial strength, functional breadth, service and support, geographical coverage, or sales and distribution channels. Their evolution may hinge on the acceptance of a new technology or on the development of partnerships that complement their strengths.
Niche Players
Niche Players focus on a particular segment of the market, as defined by characteristics such as size, industry and project complexity. This narrow focus can affect their ability to outperform or to be more innovative. Niche Players often support only those applications that apply to the particular segments on which they focus.
Vendor Strengths and Cautions
Adobe
Adobe acquired Day Software in October 2010, which provided it with the products and positioning necessary to make a stronger impact on the core WCM market. In February 2011, Adobe released its Web Experience Management solution, formerly known as CQ 5.4. (See "Vendor Rating:
Adobe.")
Strengths
■ The acquisition of Day makes Adobe a leader in this space. Its solution's look and feel make it one of the best Java-based products in the WCM market. Non-IT users like its usability and give it consistently positive reports.
■ Adobe has prioritized close integration between its WCM technologies and the analytics capabilities from its acquisition of Omniture. The inclusion of technologies from Day has given the market clarity and direction. The pursuit of a "customer experience platform" pits Adobe squarely against other large companies in this market.
■ Adobe has embraced its mobile strategy. Adobe's additional capabilities and excellent reputation in the area of mobile technologies will enhance its ability to support customers as they strive for more relevant, context-aware, cross-channel interactions with audiences. Clients can build out their online channel, and key verticals can include their plans for mobile
applications into this more cohesive strategy.
Cautions
■ When Adobe targets marketing, including chief marketing officers (CMOs), it must do a better job of differentiating itself from best-of-breed vendors, as well as from stack players. Its
messaging is trying to catch up with the market, whereas Adobe should try to drive the market further. This shortcoming may confuse the market and unnecessarily extend sales cycles in a market where sought-after solutions are becoming more complex.
■ Adobe needs to improve its sales strategy and execution. It needs the right type and number of personnel who can articulate the value of an optimized online strategy for specific industries and then guide customers to success.
■ Many customers are confused about how they can build broader, more effective strategies that incorporate more of Adobe's capabilities. Gartner still receives inquiries from clients who use Omniture but who have not been contacted by Adobe to help them exploit synergies with CQ5. Adobe has announced, however, that it has merged the business units that managed Omniture and the CQ5 (and other enterprise products for customer experience) product families. This should help, but it remains to be seen how quickly this alignment will address the challenges mentioned and enable Adobe to be more aggressive in competing against the interoperability capabilities of best-of-breed WCM vendors.
Alterian
Alterian offers Alterian Content Manager (ACM) — formerly called Morello — and promotes a combination of WCM and social- and marketing-based products for companies that wish to cover multiple bases of a more holistic strategy for inbound/outbound marketing. In this regard, Alterian has also appeared in other Magic Quadrants that relate to multichannel campaign management and marketing resource management.
Strengths
■ Alterian has invested heavily and successfully in the past year in presenting prospects and clients with a more cohesive suite of capabilities that allows its WCM offering to become more integrated with other offerings connected with marketing, such as campaign management, social media monitoring and marketing resource management.
■ ACM, now in its seventh major release, and the Alterian Alchemy product, used to increase the quality of engagement with online visitors through persona-based content tailoring, can be considered as some of the best-in-class products in terms of usability. The interfaces are designed well, with rich graphics, clearly with non-IT users in mind. The resultant set of easy-to-use capabilities allows marketers to achieve more effective communications over their online channel without the software development life cycles required by some competitors.
■ Alterian is one of the few vendors in the WCM market that is successfully applying the concept of persona-based engagement into both its own messaging and its products. While others are focusing more exclusively on a more granular approach, many decision makers will welcome the combination of detailed insight into individual interactions over the online channel, as well as the more advanced capabilities to attribute specific experiences to such personae.
Cautions
■ Ironically for a company that specializes in the marketing domain, Alterian needs to improve its own marketing execution. It rarely appears on longlists or shortlists presented by Gartner clients.
■ Despite having a flagship WCM offering that fits well into the .NET and Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) environments, Alterian has not executed well on gaining traction in the
Microsoft SharePoint ecosystem. Gartner regularly sees a core group of its .NET-based
competitors shortlisted in this regard. If Alterian is to compete more effectively in this market, it needs to focus not just on core, well-defined marketing scenarios, but on the broader solution landscape that contributes to the discipline of OCO.
■ Alterian continues to lag behind the market in terms of some of the capabilities now desired by its target audiences, particularly regarding the ease with which tailored experiences with differing components can be designed for individual audiences. In the past, it had multiple WCM products and this hampered it in this regard; calls made to Gartner still suggest confusion and possible replacement (for example, with Immediacy) in some cases concerning such
products. Alterian needs to invest heavily in its road map and execute more effectively in
product development, particularly in the area of consumability, if it is to leapfrog its competitors and make up for lost time.
Atex
Atex has a long history in the newspaper, media and publishing sectors, particularly concerning editorial content management, advertising, subscriptions and supporting digital strategies.
Strengths
■ Atex has made significant efforts to expand the quantity and diversity of its partners for its sales, advisory and implementation channels. This partnering strategy will give Atex more OCO capabilities and help it achieve significant interoperability in the broader ecosystem of
technologies required for OCO.
■ Atex has the expertise, reputation in advertisement placement technology and intellectual property needed to help clients achieve multichannel experiences that are context aware. Atex needs to translate this messaging to verticals beyond media, such as gaming, entertainment, travel and leisure.
■ Atex has emphasized its relatively new Atex Tablet Publishing (ATP). Although promoting one channel in a market that focuses more on multichannel or cross-channel engagement carries risks, the popularity of the iPad for which ATP is designed will help Atex gain visibility and traction, particularly in the media industry where clients are eager to find new ways of making money from content that now appears "free" on their websites.
Cautions
■ Atex has not yet expanded its reputation significantly beyond the media industry. It does have reference customers in other verticals (a requirement for inclusion in this Magic Quadrant), but it still runs the risk of its client base eroding before it gains traction in neighboring verticals. ■ Gartner rarely sees Atex (Polopoly) shortlisted — even where it would provide a good functional
fit. Atex has improved its overall marketing, but its messaging and execution trail those of many competitors.
■ Atex claims to have a cohesive strategy for companies to manage their online and offline channels together, rather than in silos or integrated through custom code. However, interactions between Gartner and such companies suggest that these claims are either overstated or that Atex has not communicated exactly how clients can achieve this with the latest technology offered. Atex must be clearer about what components it can provide and more pragmatic in helping these clients execute on such a vision.
Autonomy
Autonomy entered the WCM market in March 2009 with its acquisition of Interwoven. Since then, it has enhanced its technology set and provided additional capabilities through integrations with its search and analytics platform. An early and strong focus on specific business scenarios (such as interactive marketing) and the provision of enterprise-class technologies to improve usability have earned Autonomy a strong position in this market. On 3 October 2011, HP announced that it had completed its acquisition of Autonomy (see "HP Must Overcome Risks to Realize Potential of Autonomy Acquisition").
Strengths
■ Autonomy has done very well to integrate its Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) platform into its Promote suite of products that include its WCM capabilities, particularly with regard to TeamSite for the more fundamental facets of WCM and LiveSite for the dynamic delivery of relevant experiences. In doing so, it has established a strong position of placing powerful analytics and pattern recognition at the heart of achieving such relevance and effect, all of which are key elements of a successful OCO strategy.
■ Autonomy has also achieved recognition in the market for innovation and thought leadership. With its original acquisition of market-leading Interwoven, it inherited a high level of recognition in this regard. However, with its ongoing development of products such as Aurasma, which offers promising augmented reality capabilities, it is forging differentiation in the extended market, particularly along the "graying" borders that typically separate the online and offline channels.
■ While TeamSite is a good offering, contacts with whom Gartner has spoken over the past year continue to praise the additional technologies that Autonomy offers for the broader OCO solution landscape. In particular, Virage MediaBin and Optimost receive high accolades. On a
more technological level, OpenDeploy is still regarded as one of the best products on the market for the syndication of content — and sometimes code — to multiple servers.
Cautions
■ For more than two years, Autonomy has pursued a messaging tagline of "Meaning Based Marketing." Although this can be understood in terms of the advanced technology it continues to develop and in the context of the differentiated capabilities of IDOL, this messaging does not resonate well with its core target audience for Promote. As a result, Gartner has seen a
reduction of occurrences in the past year where Autonomy's Promote set of capabilities has been shortlisted, even for planned solutions where it might have represented the best functional fit.
■ Recurring comments made to Gartner by clients and prospects of Autonomy point to a lack of knowledge on Autonomy's part of the specific business context and needs of the client
organization. This disconnect can lead to difficulties in Autonomy proposing the appropriate products for a client, specifically in the Promote business. In some cases known to Gartner, such an occurrence has prompted Autonomy clients to initiate a "rip and replace" procedure for their existing WCM software. Autonomy therefore needs to pay closer attention to its sales strategy in this regard.
■ Autonomy's WCM offering continues to be one of the most highly priced in the market.
Although investment is growing in this market, and decision makers are willing to allocate higher budgets to achieve an online channel that has greater impact, bids seen by Gartner show that Autonomy's pricing is sometimes 50% to 100% higher than that of its nearest competitor. In surveys carried out by Gartner year over year, respondents cite price as the main reason why they did not choose Autonomy. If the company is to leverage the excellence of its overall technology and its reputation for advanced technologies, it needs to improve its understanding of OCO at the level of sales execution, be much more client centric in its core culture and help its prospects build an appropriate business case for the higher investment.
CoreMedia
CoreMedia's flagship content management system (CMS) is in its sixth major release. CoreMedia, which was a Niche Player two years ago, has become a provider of scalable, robust solutions in multiple regions with an impressive customer base and a high retention rate. Its improved scores in innovation, market understanding and marketing strategy have enabled it to strengthen its position as a Visionary.
Strengths
■ CoreMedia has made significant improvements in the past year in terms of its marketing position and it has followed up on that positioning with a good, solid release of CoreMedia 6 in January 2011.
■ CoreMedia has done well in expanding its footprint in North America. Contributions to its overall software revenue from this region have risen from 3% to 17% year over year. It is also placing
the appropriate emphasis on building its partner ecosystem, both in terms of an implementation channel as well as technological partnerships, such as those with T-Systems and SAP.
■ In a market that focuses strongly on both usability for internal, non-IT users and agility in the delivery of experiences, CoreMedia has appropriately placed a large emphasis on both areas in terms of overall product development. The release of CoreMedia Studio represents an
environment for business users that has a very appealing look and feel, while its Content Application Engine is well architected and provides for a high level of interoperability with adjacent technologies.
Cautions
■ With its key marketing message of "context aware computing" (see Note 2), CoreMedia is resonating well with the primary developments in the broader solution landscape concerning OCO. However, it will soon need a stronger foothold, particularly in the U.S., to compete effectively against larger vendors that already have more "pieces of the puzzle." Decision makers will need a clearer overview of where they fit into such a landscape if they are to compete effectively in this area.
■ CoreMedia is still relatively small and will need to grow its support organization and partner ecosystem further to allay the concerns and change the perceptions of some larger Gartner clients about postsales interactions.
■ Being Java based and well architected, CoreMedia has a high potential to tap into the Microsoft ecosystem around SharePoint, particularly where organizations have a hybrid or heterogeneous architecture and are trying to bridge the Java world with that of .NET. However, it has not yet exacted this potential and developments in this direction have been slow.
Dynamicweb
Dynamicweb markets products that focus on WCM and e-commerce. Although it has traditionally focused on small and midsize businesses (SMBs), it has steadily increased the interoperability of its offering to be considered by large enterprises that require more complex solutions. Its flagship product is now in its seventh major release.
Strengths
■ Dynamicweb's products are based on the .NET stack and can integrate well with Microsoft technologies. If it can execute on its sales and marketing strategy, it will provide the midmarket with a cost-effective offering where interoperability trumps advanced capabilities.
■ The latest version of Dynamicweb's flagship product shows significant improvements in ease of use and has closed the gap with some other vendors. Its Online Marketing Center, scheduled for release later in 2011, should provide higher usability, which marketers of companies with a B2B e-commerce emphasis will welcome.
■ Dynamicweb has refocused on larger enterprises. In 2010, Dynamicweb reported that 10% of its revenue came from large enterprises, while as much as half came from the midmarket and higher. If Dynamicweb builds a good repertoire of case studies and reference customers, it can shift toward a more industry-specific selling strategy with contextually relevant, scalable
solutions, particularly for manufacturing, wholesale and retail, and professional services.
Cautions
■ Dynamicweb needs to expand more aggressively beyond its core region of EMEA. Previous efforts to expand into Asia have not been as successful as expected; its efforts to expand into North America continue, where competition is extremely high, requiring strong differentiation. ■ For acceptance in the North American market, Dynamicweb will need to be more transparent and aggressive with its technological road map. Other vendors with which it will be compared have richer functions and higher usability.
■ The combination of Dynamicweb's WCM and e-commerce capabilities is likely to prove less compelling for midsize and large enterprises, as trends point more toward best-of-breed offerings and ensuring interoperability. Dynamicweb can achieve good traction with smaller businesses, but it will have to target market segment verticals to build the brand.
Ektron
Ektron's WCM platform, Ektron 8.5, was released in September 2011 and has focused on enhanced usability, enterprise scalability and interoperability. Ektron's platform is based on .NET and it also provides products for marketing optimization, analytics, e-commerce and social media.
Strengths
■ Ektron's WCM platform integrates well with Microsoft SharePoint as well as Java portal platforms, a key differentiator for some organizations that have more heterogeneous
environments. Ektron offers a SharePoint connector with a "publish to Ektron" option, which automatically updates Ektron when changes are made in SharePoint, and renders SharePoint lists and documents inside an Ektron page through widgets. Ektron also offers Web Service for Remote Portlets (WSRP) to render Ektron content into any Java portal supporting WSRP, including IBM WebSphere, Oracle WebCenter and WebLogic, and Liferay.
■ Ektron was quick to combine social media functions into WCM. Ektron includes activity streams, status updates, networking, ratings, comments, reviews, moderation, forums, blogs, wikis and user profile/group spaces to support collaborative, community-oriented sites.
■ As a small vendor, Ektron has done well to focus on WCM, while partnering and integrating with third parties to increase its footprint in the broader OCO landscape. Examples include:
Omniture, Webtrends and Google for site analytics; Baynote for adaptive targeting and recommendations; Marketo for marketing automation; and salesforce.com for CRM.
Cautions
■ Ektron's "out of the box" support for portals helps enterprises looking for easy starts, but some customers report rigidity and inability to conform to unique user and workflow requirements. ■ Ektron's easy-to-use interfaces may belie the technical complexity of its solutions. Several
customers report frustration with frequent and buggy updates, spotty experience with features such as SharePoint synchronization, dissatisfaction with customer support, and longer-than-expected implementation times. The Ektron 8.5 release promises to address these concerns, as it went through extensive beta testing before its official release. Customers must manage Ektron planning and deployment with as much attention as with any other WCM platform. ■ Despite some successes with larger enterprises, Ektron is still regarded as primarily a
midmarket solution. Feedback from some Gartner clients reflects Ektron's inability to provide suitable, industry-specific references for larger deployments, particularly outside its home region of North America. Partly due to this, while Ektron has made recent gains in EMEA, its penetration in the region significantly trails that of some immediate competitors.
EPiServer
EPiServer's flagship CMS offering is based on .NET, has been on the market for 12 years and is in its seventh major release. The company continues to add marketing and sales functionality to its WCM product that is leveraged across its related social software and e-commerce products. Recently, EPiServer introduced contextual content delivery across its core products.
Strengths
■ EPiServer offers a modular, well-architected set of capabilities, the ease of use and rich functions of which are among the best in the market. Business users in particular will like its graphical user interface, along with the ease with which they can tailor experiences to different touchpoints, such as tablets, smartphones and traditional websites.
■ EPiServer is popular in the midmarket but has long established itself as enterprise class with clear, highly competitive pricing. The modular architecture will allow enterprises to build their OCO strategies in an agile way, while investing incrementally in extensions to increase their ROI.
■ EPiServer has expanded regionally since 2008. Already a favorite in the Nordic countries and the U.K., it has had good success in Western Europe and North America, and has expanded both the proportion of its revenue arising from those areas and its partner ecosystem.
Cautions
■ EPiServer's technological alliances have been more insular than the market requires. Its offering includes modules for e-commerce, community and marketing. Some prospects that speak with Gartner express confusion about the completeness of these modules in a "suite" approach
■ The announcement in November 2010 by IK Investment Partners, a private equity firm, that it was to acquire EPiServer has created a perception of uncertainty about the company and has, based on feedback from some Gartner clients, sometimes contributed to its exclusion from shortlists where it would have otherwise been a good functional fit. EPiServer has not been emphatic about how the takeover will help it adopt a more aggressive road map or penetrate the North American market faster.
■ Some North American customers who have spoken with Gartner still view EPiServer as being "remote." Its overreliance on indirect sales has led to early exclusion from selection processes, as its more technology-oriented partners are not as adept at helping prospects build their overall OCO strategy and explaining how EPiServer supports that strategy.
e-Spirit
Based in Dortmund, Germany, e-Spirit's flagship product is FirstSpirit CMS, a Java-based WCM offering now in its fourth major release.
Strengths
■ e-Spirit has come out of relative obscurity in recent years to promote its solid, enterprise-class offering as one that rivals those of competitors for ease of use and interoperability. FirstSpirit's functions hit the sweet spot of the trends in the WCM market and the requirements that clients tell Gartner about during most selection processes.
■ e-Spirit's messaging resonates with enterprises in multiple industries. e-Spirit has positioned itself well for prospects that wish to build a user experience platform, not just implement WCM. ■ e-Spirit has a strong and convincing story regarding portal integration in a market that seeks
synergies between horizontal portals and best-of-breed WCM.
Cautions
■ e-Spirit has only started to gain traction in North America, where most WCM revenue is generated. Ten percent of e-Spirit's revenue comes from this region, but further growth will prove challenging, as other Java-based offerings from more dominant players and best-of-breed offerings have established a strong foothold.
■ e-Spirit must be more aggressive in developing its partner ecosystem, as well as its direct sales channel, in North America. A comprehensive set of partnerships to cover multiple phases of the solution life cycle will be difficult to achieve in this competitive landscape.
■ e-Spirit's messaging remains predominantly technological, while a growing percentage of decision makers are nontechnical business users. e-Spirit will also need to tailor its message more effectively to specific industries to make its offering seem more relevant.
eZ Systems
Norwegian company eZ Systems offers its WCM platform based on the commercial open-source paradigm. Its flagship product, eZ Publish, now in version 4.5, is based on the LAMP stack. In August 2011, it added recommendations and personalization to its portfolio through its acquisition of the German firm YooChoose and, in October 2011, Web analytics through its acquisition of odoscope.
Strengths
■ Since 2010, eZ has taken important steps to realign its business model and core product with the extended solution landscape in which WCM finds itself today. eZ has made it easier for its partners and prospects to understand the relevance of its offerings.
■ eZ meets a much-needed demand in the WCM market for a quality open-source offering backed by a vendor. Decision makers with whom Gartner has spoken have highlighted the growing need for support services beyond what are usually provided by an open-source software community.
■ eZ has started a form of "partner crowdsourcing" to develop functions for its core offering more quickly, while ensuring that functions will be integrated into the core technology and receive the same support services. This approach will attract users of a LAMP stack that can already build their online strategy in a modular manner.
Cautions
■ eZ has only recently managed to revise its messaging and positioning in the market, and it will take time for this new emphasis to gain traction and credibility.
■ Penetration into North America will prove challenging, as eZ tries to set up a "beachhead" in an already crowded, competitive market.
■ eZ will find it difficult to attract partners to its LAMP-based product, as communities such as Drupal, Zope and Joomla have already generated large followings.
GX Software
Based in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, GX Software offers two Java-based products relevant to OCO: WebManager, a WCM offering, and BlueConic, a product designed to help increase engagement across multiple online channels.
Strengths
■ GX has developed a good set of offerings based on a state-of-the-art architecture, including the Apache Jackrabbit Content Repository API for Java (JCR) and OSGi components for
WebManager. In addition, GX has chosen Apache Cassandra as the basis of BlueConic, which allows for a scalable, cloud-based solution for profile information.
■ GX articulates a clear marketing message that conveys a good understanding of important components of OCO and the role that WCM and analytics play in it. GX has made consistent progress in developing core functions for OCO. If GX continues to execute effectively, its offering will remain a compelling option for many shortlists.
■ For a vendor with just over 100 employees, GX has done well to compete in enterprise-class contexts and develop a respectable set of high-profile reference customers across multiple industries. GX has a strong opportunity to expand regionally and into other verticals if it can develop the necessary partner ecosystem to accommodate all aspects of the solution life cycle.
Cautions
■ To sustain its growth and gain visibility and market share, GX must execute more effectively on marketing and its channel strategy. It must also forge more high-profile, reliable partnerships with vendors that have adjacent technologies.
■ Its full set of capabilities available to non-IT users represents only a modest subset of those provided by competitors in this market.
■ Many marketers will find BlueConic's user interface less intuitive than those of competitors, despite some good graphical visualization. GX must improve the overall look and feel.
IBM
With IBM Web Content Manager 7.0, IBM seeks to expand its influence and appeal to marketing executives and other influential business roles. Though IBM continues to offer Web Content Manager as a stand-alone product, its Customer Experience Suite combines WCM with portal, e-commerce, analytics and application integration, among other capabilities, including FileNet Content Manager.
Strengths
■ IBM Web Content Manager's integration with WebSphere Portal enables customers to integrate applications and data sources via a wide range of mechanisms, including through prebuilt portlets and widgets, specific connectors, packaged adaptors, development tools and
standards support. The WebSphere Portal integration also allows enterprises to use a common personalization engine and shared authorization repository that applies to both content and applications, thereby avoiding the redundancy and conflict often created when companies implement separate WCM and portal software.
■ Web Content Manager already has a large, active customer base. It has undeniable growth potential due to its bundling with WebSphere Portal and other assets, IBM's large ecosystem of partners, its global presence with operations in 170 countries, and expert sales and consulting relationships with large financial services, government, telecom, retail and healthcare
companies.
■ Web Content Manager is architected and instrumented for analytics, whether the analytics comes from IBM or partners. Web Content Manager and WebSphere Portal work with
Omniture, Webtrends, and IBM's own Coremetrics and Unica subsidiaries to deliver "Active Site Analytics." This enables enterprises to track data about user behavior in the site examined and send it to a partnering service for analysis.
Cautions
■ Customers continue to report usability issues with Web Content Manager. With v.7, IBM has managed to close the gap somewhat in this regard between it and other offerings in the market. However, in Gartner conversations with clients that removed IBM from their shortlists, we observe that the vast majority did so because of usability. As IBM adds product capabilities and builds Customer Experience Management, the vendor is hard pressed to create both a
seamless experience for business users and a cohesive, easy-to-deploy platform for IT organizations.
■ For some customers, Web Content Manager is hitched too firmly to the WebSphere Portal Platform. A unified portal WCM platform may be valuable to enterprises with complex needs, but those with investments in other portal platforms may find the combination unnecessarily burdensome and expensive.
■ Web Content Manager comes up in fewer than 5% of Gartner client calls as a shortlisted option. Even in contexts where the IBM offering might be a potential fit, it tends to be excluded because of price and lack of functions.
Limelight Networks
Limelight Networks entered the WCM market through its May 2011 acquisition of Clickability, which provides SaaS-based WCM, and markets this offering as Limelight Dynamic Site Platform.
Limelight's product portfolio also includes small-object delivery, video content management, website and application acceleration, mobile delivery and monetization, electronic software download, and live and on-demand media delivery.
Strengths
■ Limelight-Clickability has traditionally relied on its SaaS model for differentiation, but has done well to incorporate into its messaging components targeted at key decision influencers, such as marketers and other business users. The acquisition by Limelight is likely to put more power behind such messaging for enterprises that take a more holistic view of WCM, rather than make discrete technological choices.
■ Limelight-Clickability has a good reputation as a provider of solutions for the high-tech, finance and media industries, and some customers have praised its ease of deployment, overall offering and customer service. The combination of Limelight-Clickability's other components, such as interactive advertising and media delivery, will help the vendor in an industry placing more emphasis on OCO.
content delivery networks and WCM required ongoing optimization and often suffered from poor integration and poor user experiences. Limelight's compelling, differentiated offering could eliminate this challenge.
Cautions
■ Limelight-Clickability still falls prey to its traditional categorization as a SaaS-based WCM platform. SaaS offerings account for less than 8% of the WCM market, so Limelight will need to build on its messaging to allay buyers' concerns about SaaS.
■ Limelight-Clickability's deployments are primarily at the departmental level, partly because the market perceives SaaS offerings as more suited to small organizations and not appropriate for large, cross-organization efforts — Limelight's competitors profit from this perception. Limelight will need to be more aggressive in penetrating this upper tier.
■ With just 60 to 80 enterprises as customers and a narrow focus on selected industries, Limelight must penetrate other critical industries more deeply, such as consumer packaged goods, retail, government, life sciences and higher education. Limelight will struggle to catch up with some competitors, which have many times its number of enterprises in their installed base. Many new investments in WCM seek to replace, not just upgrade, older technologies.
Reference customers are often needed to allay the concerns of decision makers. Since 2010, Gartner has seen Clickability excluded from shortlists because of a lack of such references. Gartner expects this to improve with the more holistic story that can be told since the
acquisition. However, this is an area on which Limelight will need to focus strongly and with a high priority.
Microsoft
SharePoint 2010 and its predecessor's near ubiquity continue to generate massive interest in the product's WCM capabilities. While the product has been used most frequently to support internal content management and collaboration, Microsoft's customers and partners continue to apply the platform to customer- and partner-facing websites.
Strengths
■ More than 38,000 enterprises use SharePoint for a wide range of purposes. A small portion use SharePoint for their external Web presence, but SharePoint has become the center point of many enterprises' content management and collaboration strategies. Whether provided by Microsoft or its continually growing ecosystem, SharePoint continues to evolve toward enterprise-class solutions.
■ SharePoint constitutes a comprehensive platform that spans formerly separate categories, including content management, search, portals, collaboration, social computing, business intelligence and composite applications.
■ Microsoft has the largest and most vibrant ecosystem of consulting, implementation, system integration, independent software and infrastructure partners of any WCM provider.
Cautions
■ SharePoint remains a general-purpose technology. It lacks refinements geared to specific business scenarios and influencers, such as marketers, who often lead online initiatives. SharePoint's personalization and content-targeting features, which are urgent needs for external websites, are still largely geared toward internal scenarios. The success of other .NET WCM systems, such as those of Ektron and Sitecore, indicate that Microsoft less readily suits the needs of online marketers.
■ Although the SharePoint for Internet Sites edition makes licensing more attractive in externally facing situations, enterprises looking to provide collaborative, social, advanced search,
analytics and business process facilities to external audiences will pay a relatively high price. The most advanced deployments will require SharePoint for Internet Sites, Enterprise, as well as a separate license for FAST Search. These substantial license costs — in addition to
implementation, customization and design services to equip SharePoint for an advanced and readily consumable WCM platform — will make cost higher for many customers than
competitors with more specialized and out-of-the-box WCM capability.
■ SharePoint's WCM capability does not match well with some established third-party portals and e-commerce platforms that are often crucial to customer-facing sites, especially Java EE
offerings from providers such as IBM, Oracle and OpenText. While SharePoint has improved interoperability with support for standards such as WSRP and Content Management
Interoperability Services (CMIS), SharePoint is rarely used as a WCM system in those
environments. SharePoint is, however, being used increasingly as a document management system for some Java-oriented sites. Customers looking for cohesive and uncomplicated integration between WCM and Java-based portal and e-commerce platforms should look to other providers.
OpenText
OpenText has two primary WCM offerings: Web Site Management and Web Experience Management, based on its acquisitions of Hummingbird-RedDot Solutions and Vignette, respectively.
Strengths
■ OpenText has grown substantially through acquisitions in recent years and it has added
components to its portfolio that serve enterprises building their online strategy. Enterprises that also emphasize a broader ECM strategy are likely to want to consider OpenText, with its WCM offerings well integrated into its ECM suite.
■ OpenText continues to have a global reach and a strong partner ecosystem. Although it is a North American company, it can also regard EMEA as home ground through its numerous acquisitions, while other North American vendors sometimes struggle with differences in culture and messaging in other regions. Strong relationships with SAP and Microsoft also help
■ OpenText has more recently emphasized the role of WCM in customer experience
management. Although OpenText could make this vision less technical and more visionary, enterprises will relate to the customer focus and view OpenText's portfolio as compatible with their WCM plans.
Cautions
■ OpenText needs to become more effective in addressing marketing roles, especially the CMO, to explain the full value proposition of OCO. Traditionally, OpenText focused on a
well-integrated platform, a pitch that appeals more to technology-oriented roles. OpenText also needs to appeal to other roles driving demand, such as business roles, which it could do by emphasizing interoperability with analytics, CRM, sales force automation and e-commerce, as well as support for multiple horizontal portals.
■ OpenText has invested so heavily in integration between the Vignette technology it acquired in 2009 and its own stack that it has lost ground to other vendors in the overall set of functions offered. Web Experience Management is easy to use but not as intuitive as the products of many competitors. Web Experience Management also trails the offerings of OpenText's closest rivals in giving business users greater control over their online channels.
■ Gartner clients often criticize OpenText's dual strategy of Web Site Management and Web Experience Management. Users of previous versions of Web Site Management are unsure how appropriate that offering is for their OCO initiative. As OCO strategies become more ambitious, customers often prefer to replace Web Site Management with a competitor's offering than move to the more capable Web Experience Management. In addition, OpenText must divide R&D resources between two very different offerings, so it has a much less aggressive road map than some of its closest rivals. OpenText's market share is likely to suffer in the long term if it does not address this issue.
Oracle
Oracle's WCM offering has recently been rebranded as a constituent component of its broader Oracle WebCenter, a user engagement platform. WebCenter, in turn, contributes to the broader Oracle Fusion Middleware, which ties together Oracle's information management, portal and business application portfolios, among other products. In August 2011, Oracle acquired FatWire Software, a vendor that was classed as a Leader in the "Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management" in 2010. See "FatWire Purchase Adds Web Experience Management to Oracle's Strategy."
Strengths
■ Oracle's massive acquisition strategy has expanded its content management reach and foothold in large enterprises. Its infrastructure, middleware and business application presence has brought its WebCenter (formerly Universal Content Management [UCM]) platform with its WCM capability to the attention of many influencers in large enterprises. With the acquisition of FatWire, Oracle now has the capability to play the "specialist" card, in addition to offering a broader set of platform capabilities.
■ Oracle WebCenter features a built-in ability to turn on and perform functions for which many other WCM systems require third-party software, such as document management, digital asset management, search, records and retention management, archiving, and backup and recovery. In this regard, Oracle has the potential to leverage the good reputation established by FatWire among marketing departments and help enterprises build their OCO strategy incrementally, as required.
■ Oracle Real-Time Decisions, which works with WebCenter's content repository and
Personalization Server, can exploit a broad range of user attributes to provide personalization and context awareness. Profiles in Real-Time Decisions can employ a combination of user data from systems such as Siebel to optimize content and presentation. Real-Time Decisions also provides cross-channel optimization beyond the online experience.
Cautions
■ Oracle's many acquisitions require the vendor to rationalize a large mass of overlapping products and enable customers to migrate easily toward the go-forward platform. This applied to its multiple portal offerings and now applies to its overlapping WCM capabilities. In the near term, Gartner believes that Oracle has downplayed WCM innovation and instead is betting heavily on its acquisition of FatWire to fuel its efforts more explicitly in the direction of OCO. ■ Oracle has less presence in collaboration and social media than other vendors. People don't
immediately think of Oracle when they think of social or people-centered computing.
■ Oracle has yet to act on some compelling integrations with its business application portfolio. It is only now, concurrent with its acquisition of FatWire, that it is emphasizing such synergistic couplings with CRM, ERP, e-commerce and Real-Time Decisions.
Percussion
CM System, Percussion's flagship, Java-based product, is now in its seventh major release and is augmented by CM1 v.2, a product specifically aimed at nontechnical users but which allows organizations to leverage their existing applications via integration.
Strengths
■ Percussion has done well to consolidate its sales and marketing resources and to focus on four main verticals — government, Internet content providers, high tech and education. In all these verticals, investment in WCM is high and this should provide Percussion with a base on which it can continue to expand in subsequent years.
■ With the initial release of CM1 in December 2010, Percussion wisely and explicitly targeted a growing audience of nontechnical professionals who wanted greater, more immediate control of their online channel. The name CM1 derives from the notion of examining how to make the process of managing content more simple and explicit for users by going back and
development life cycles that would typically be required to achieve the same effect. As CM1 is based on the core CM System, Percussion has also mitigated the risk of a fork in its offering. Instead, it has architected its products to allow future developments in one to be subsumed into the other.
■ CM System is a well-architected, Java-based platform that has long since established itself as an enterprise-class alternative for organizations with requirements for scalability and
interoperability that required them initially to build their own systems in-house. The trend in the WCM market toward "buy" instead of "build," particularly in Percussion's focus verticals, will resonate well with Percussion's overall messaging and positioning.
Cautions
■ Despite efforts to advance the experience for business users, the functionality available in its products still lags behind the market. Percussion needs to be more aggressive and visionary with respect to its overall marketing strategy, and follow up with accelerated improvements to drive its road map forward. Its overemphasis on technological prowess leaves it vulnerable to direct competition with open-source software alternatives and will subject its pricing to intense pressure. Although this is a benefit to some clients in the short term, this phenomenon presents a threat to Percussion in terms of its longer-term viability.
■ Percussion's limited geographical reach remains problematic. Its core region of focus is North America, which is understandable as the vast majority of investment stems from this area. However, the percentage of its revenue coming from EMEA continues to drop. In 2009, EMEA accounted for approximately 29% of its revenue; in 2010, EMEA accounted for just 16%. If a company is focusing on a small subset of verticals, it must be more aggressive with its regional expansion, either organically or through business partners. As one of these verticals is
government, this effect is more pronounced and the challenge more difficult, as solutions tailored to this vertical are often (mis)perceived as being "nontransferable."
■ Percussion needs to embrace more fully the context of OCO, particularly with respect to its technology partner ecosystem. It has excellent messaging concerning interoperability — and this sets it and its client base up well for the kind of synergies with adjacent technologies that will allow such optimization. However, it needs to forge more explicit partnerships with vendors and system integrators that provide and implement those adjacent technologies, so that it can sell a bigger story than just WCM. It will be critical moving forward that prospects understand how Percussion plays in the bigger landscape.
SDL
SDL views its WCM product, SDL Tridion, as part of its broader strategy for "Global Information Management" and increasingly focuses on marketing solutions. The introduction of modules that optimize the online experience has raised the market's expectations of quality, innovation and value.
Strengths
■ SDL continues to expand its footprint in the solution landscape that many enterprises are building around WCM. SDL Tridion is one of the best WCM products for usability and interoperability, both with its own expansive set of capabilities as well as important adjacent technologies.
■ The announcement in March 2011 that EMC and SDL will form a partnership can benefit both vendors. The solution landscape they jointly cover is now large and relevant to decision makers focused on optimizing their online channel. The two vendors must still reconcile their joint messaging, such as SDL's role in XML-based publishing and the overall positioning of its acquisition of Calamares for digital asset management.
■ SDL has greatly improved its marketing to paint a clearer picture of how each of its products fits into a cohesive OCO strategy. In addition, it has done well in recent years to maintain a strong lead in integrating its globalization capabilities into its core WCM products to help users achieve better customer engagement in multiple contexts.
Cautions
■ SDL rarely appears on shortlists of WCM selections for dual-repository solutions alongside SharePoint, even though SDL Tridion is based on .NET. SDL must do better on messaging and sales execution.
■ SDL must be clearer about its strategic direction. Its mobile and social capabilities need better positioning, and SDL risks losing some of its leadership by concentrating on fundamental requirements to the neglect of industry-specific solutions. SDL continues to emphasize "management" as a core goal, as shown by its Global Information Management branding. Online- and cross-channel optimization are decisive for enterprises today and SDL needs to articulate its strengths and capabilities in these areas more effectively.
■ Gartner clients have reported implementation difficulties and prolonged time to production. SDL must increase the monitoring of its partner ecosystem and communicate directly with clients to ensure that both clients and partners succeed. SDL must also step up efforts to ensure higher reuse of intellectual property and assets across its ecosystem to reduce implementation difficulties. Competitors have borrowed heavily from open-source culture to create such an environment.
Sitecore
Sitecore appeals to the needs of online marketers. Sitecore's flagship Sitecore Web Content Management System v.6.5 and Sitecore Digital Marketing System v.2.0 are based on .NET. The Email Campaign Manager enhances its marketing and sales execution capabilities, and facilities for engagement analytics give marketers more autonomy in optimizing customer engagement across channels. Sitecore also provides e-commerce capabilities, particularly to B2B customers, through an OEM partnership.
Strengths
■ Sitecore has shifted from offering a more generic WCM system to a marketing platform for multichannel customer engagement.
■ Sitecore's usability across a wide range of functions gives online marketers considerable power. Integrated analytics, engagement, social capabilities and campaign management make
Sitecore's solution accessible for marketers themselves, rather than requiring the IT
organization's involvement. In addition, Sitecore includes many social components at no extra charge, while providing integration with Facebook and other consumer social platforms. Sitecore also partners with Telligent, a specialist in social mechanisms for customer services. ■ In the past few years, Sitecore has moved upmarket to larger, higher-volume sites. Its largest
installation supports more than 200 concurrent editors and manages more than 7 million components. Its customer base includes well-known brands. This achievement stems, in large part, from its move toward Microsoft SharePoint for internal deployments. This approach appeals to .NET users, while providing content capabilities that complement, rather than compete with, SharePoint. More than 150 of Sitecore's customers integrate with SharePoint.
Cautions
■ Sitecore wins inconsistent customer satisfaction because of partnerships with some system integrators that have not been well monitored. Sitecore is taking steps to address this problem with a two-tier partner certification program, including a new Specialized Sitecore Partner program.
■ Sitecore suits Microsoft .NET environments and requires mainly Microsoft-centric infrastructure and complementary technology. Although Sitecore's WCM product interoperates with third-party systems via its own APIs and XML repository, Java-oriented developers seeking to create unique Web applications and employ Java interoperability standards generally look elsewhere. ■ Some Sitecore customers tell Gartner that Digital Marketing System needs to be more user
friendly.
Squiz
Australian Squiz markets a PHP offering called Squiz Suite, which consists of WCM, search (through the acquisition of Funnelback) and analytics (built on Google Analytics).
Strengths
■ The leadership at Squiz has transformed an open-source company that focused primarily on technology and consulting services into one that is more client centric and focused on providing business solutions. Squiz has also based its business model on high-value, maintenance-oriented services, rather than on a project-based approach to customer interaction. ■ Squiz has been a leader among open-source software communities in marketing and
