Web Content Management Matures

By Toby Ward — “The Web content management market is mature and expanding,” says Gartner’s latest MarketScope for Web Content Management (MacComascaigh, Gilbert, Bell, Shegda, Andrews). “Vendor consolidation has fallen (slowed)… functions such as workflow, ease of use and multi-site management are no longer differentiating factors; they are the norm.”

The MarketScope for Web Content Management report is concise and solid intelligence for a representative snapshot look at the current marketplace. This report is a good starting point to understanding the market, but is not an adequate tool for helping an organization select a CMS.

The Findings:

• Open source solutions (OSS), which represents only 3% of the total Web Content Management (WCM) market are increasingly robust, stable, and growing in market share
• The Web 2.0 phenomenon is driving WCM innovation
• Change management and user adoption will need to be applied to both internal and external users
• The total WCM market, at $750 million per year, will grow at an annual rate of 15% through 2012 (representing 25% of the total ECM market)
  

Recommendations for Implementing a New WCM System (CMS):

• Develop specific business goals and link these to business objectives
• Understand the cultural shift represented by Web 2.0
• Interoperability (multiple systems working together or migrating from one to another) needs to be considered, as does rationalization of multiple WCMs
• Hosted Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions are not growing as fast due to business and technical reasons
• Total cost of ownership (TCO) of OSS solutions should take into account initial price tag
  

Highest Rated WCM Vendors:

• Interwoven (acquired by Autonomy)
  
• Ektron

Lowest Rated Vendors:

• IBM (Lotus)
• Mediasurface

Also of Note:

• Vignette gets a positive rating but with caution due their financial performance (also read Vignette still in transition)
• Microsoft SharePoint (MOSS) is listed as a very average “promising” with lots of caveats and listed weaknesses (see What the experts say about SharePoint (MOSS))
• Gartner estimates a typical lifecycle of a WCM system to be around 5 years
  

My Analysis:

Gartner’s MarketScope is somewhat different from the average Magic Quadrant in that the qualifying vendors must have $10 million in licensing revenue to qualify, and there is no magic quadrant but rather a 5-point rating scale:

• Strong negative
• Caution
• Promising
• Positive
• Strong positive
  

While there are thousands of WCM solutions only 17 qualify.

Additional Notes on Vendors

• Interwoven – Due for a major tech upgrade, Interwoven has evolved in the past couple of years. The updated, AJAX-powered U; the campaign management functions, etc. This is a very powerful system, and can be overkill for an intranet.
• EPiServer – the Swedish-based vendor is a real up-and-comer – and its average contract value is below $10,000, which gives all others a run for its money.
• IBM (Lotus) – despite its caution rating, this is still a reasonable solution, if you’re currently using Lotus and/or use WebSphere. Outside that, there are far too many good-looking alternatives.
• Microsoft SharePoint – I think it’s generous to label SharePoint (MOSS) as WCM. It really is a portal / development platform that is really quite weak bang-for-the-buck for WCM. Garter cites its weaknesses particularly “ease of content reuse, multisite management, workflow and enterprise-level federation capabilities such as replication and multi-farm synchronization.” MOSS is a good enterprise portal solution in a small to medium-size organization.
  

Content Management Interoperability Services
The Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification or standard was ignored in this report.  CMIS defines a model or framework ensuring that content can be used by one or more Enterprise Content Management repositories or systems. Frankly, I wouldn’t buy a WCM (CMS) if the selling vendor hasn’t agreed to implement this standard.

If you have significant experience with WCM (CMS) and have very detailed and documented requirements and plans for WCM, then a better report is the CMS Watch Web CMS Report 2009.

Based on our early adopter knowledge of CMS Platforms, a technology-neutral approach to defining business requirements and a proven methodology for aligning online collaboration needs with organizational goals, Prescient has developed a customizable CMS Blueprint to help client select the best CMS platform for their organization.

For more information on our CMS Blueprint Service, please contact us directly for more information on how to transform your intranet into a high-value employee & business system.

Also free for downloading:
Good to Great Intranet Matrix
Social Media Checklist – Updated
Finding ROI: Measuring Intranet Investments