European Market
Marketplace Realities: A European Perspective
by Janus Boye
14-Dec-2006 --
As 2006 comes to an end, it's worth examining the content technology landscape from the perspective of a European customer. Current trends reflect more than the arrival of new features but also how projects are getting implemented.
So much is happening in this still-young marketplace, and while there is an excellent case for prudently sticking with battle-tested approaches, that’s not what many buyers are doing at the moment. Instead many European enterprises find themselves implementing beta software, using inexperienced implementation partners and disregarding established project management methods. Surely, a more sober view of the marketplace is needed.
Understanding how the marketplace is evolving can help guide your investments in enterprise portals, Web CMS or enterprise search. Some marketplace phenomena are universal around the world, while others are most germane to European technology buyers.
Based on my research I’ll discuss:
- the immature and fragmented state of the current market
- experimentation with new user interfaces
- accessibility and standards focus.
And then I'll close with some of key debates going on in the market.
It’s still early days
A good place to start is to remind you, the buyer, that this market remains quite young. With the "Web 2.0" phenomenon rising globally, web technology has become hot again, but as they say, “not everything that shines is gold.”
One sign of the times: many enterprises have been undertaking implementations of beta software in 2006. Most notable here is the much delayed new SharePoint release from Microsoft. Many other vendors are pushing out new versions and successfully convincing buyers that new and relatively untested is better than old and more tested.
Many American CMS vendors are prolonging their release schedules amid customer requests to slow down upgrade frequency. Conversely, several European vendors -- e.g., Immediacy, Sitecore, and Synkron -- have spent 2006 going through major technology refreshes followed with multiple dot-releases, challenging their customers to stay updated.
For me the true sign of an immature market is less the plethora of hungry vendors, but that most implementations fail to meet their objectives, which unfortunately is also the case in our market. While budgets are up, still most enterprises continue to overspend on content technologies. To be fair this does not just reflect problems with the tools, but also the lack of standards and established best practices.
It is indicative of our industry that we cannot even agree on basic terms. The word portal is famously overloaded -- but not alone in that respect: Ask any content management project team for a definition of CMS and you will likely get many different answers. With confusion at this level, it should come as little surprise that buyers continue to miscommunicate within their enterprise, and externally with consultants and vendors alike.
So consider some practical ideas for getting the most out of a young market. Enterprises should remember that it remains very much a buyer's market, but only if buyers choose to treat it this way. Both local and international vendors in Europe can be very flexible on pricing, if you choose to negotiate. Nevertheless, it can be hard to find experienced partners for any given tool across multiple countries, especially in Southern Europe.
Experimenting with new user interfaces
Having talked about usability for the last couple of years, many vendors are now actively doing something about it. That's good, but your colleagues – super users or just casual contributors – will need to get up to speed on potentially several new user interface paradigms (including AJAX and Office2007-like metaphors). As always, make sure to test carefully. What works well on a laptop in a sales meeting may not work so well in every day use.
In recent articles (here and here) I’ve questioned whether portal dashboards represent a productive interface for everyday information workers. In the last couple of months, new portal software releases from IBM, JBoss, and even SAP have introduced significantly enhanced user interfaces. They're making strides in mimicking desktop behavior inside the browser (primarily via AJAX), but they've all kept the dashboard concept.
Moreover, problems continue to surface with some advanced browser features. Enterprises have reported incompatibilities using the new IE7, with some vendors going as far as to caution their customers to hold off on the update. Another common but unsolved glitch is that some vendors have released administrative interfaces that are simply too wide to fit within a typical screen resolution.
Effective localization of user interfaces remains an unfinished prize. European vendors have remained ahead of their US competitors in this area, but still have a long way to go, with many vendors only providing editorial interfaces in few languages, often poorly translated. Even where the user interface may be localized, many important details can go lacking, such as translation workflow support.
Where many of the more established international vendors publish guidelines for safely modifying user interfaces many of the smaller or more regional European vendors lack such guidance. So buyers modifying the system's user interfaces can easily open Pandora’s box. To be sure, customers frequently need to make significant user interface changes, but this can make it prohibitively difficult to upgrade to a newer version.
Government requirements drive accessibility and standards focus
Less than 12 months ago, accessibility was almost an alien concept to most vendors. This has changed radically during 2006 in Europe, as vendors have rushed out support for reasonable accessibility requirements in the wake of more stringent government and public attention.
In particular the UK and Ireland seem ahead of the pack here, as recent legislation has more or less forced vendors into accessibility compliance for pages rendered by their tools. Where enterprises have traditionally postponed accessibility requirements, vendors are now embracing accessibility to the point where in some web content management systems can restrict publication of non-conformant pages. Still, most vendors don't yet offer accessible administrative and editorial user interfaces.
Accessibility support does not know size of the vendor. The same goes for creating valid XHTML and providing helpful samples. Many large and small vendors alike continue to provide samples that are several years' old and filled with non-valid HTML markup.
For many buyers the problem here goes beyond traditional neglect by vendors, but responsibility falls just as much to uninformed services partners, who -- at least in Europe -- will sometimes charge a higher fee for creating valid XHTML templates than non-valid HTML.
Many European countries have new accessibility and standards legislation on the table for 2007, and as the large government sector moves, so surely will the private sector follow. Buyers should remember that both accessibility and standards are much cheaper to implement up front in the project, than patching on later.
Key Debates
Among some of the important decisions that buyers are facing, some important debates still roil the content technologies marketplace:
Open source platforms vs. commercial packages.
It has become increasingly acceptable to pick an open source solution for web
projects. This has been accelerated by government initiatives throughout Europe,
but has now surely moved into the realm of large commercial enterprises as well.
Open source adherents have cleverly capitalized on the failure rate of existing
projects. Less well known are the difficulties facing large implementations
of some open-source packages as well. In any event, an influx of government
and venture capital into European open source sponsors (e.g. Alfresco, eZ systems,
Nuxeo) have also helped spur their momentum.
NET vs. Java and other alternatives
Microsoft upgraded the very popular .NET platform earlier this
year in its struggle against Java and other mostly open source alternatives.
Unlike North America., European buyers can choose from numerous, well-established
.NET-based Web CMS vendors. The battle is surely not over, but at the moment
.NET seems to be holding the longer end of the stick in European content technology
markets.
Enterprise Portals vs. CMS
We have traditionally contrasted Enterprise Portal software and CMS as
the former addressing information delivery and the latter, roughly, as handling
content contribution. But the difference between the two seems to be dissolving
a bit as the technologies begin to overlap again. CMS vendors are increasingly
beginning to handle basic information delivery and interaction management, where
enterprise portals have traditionally held forth. On the other hand enterprise
portal vendors are aiming to remove the need for a separate third-party CMS
investment by providing basic web content management features themselves.
Hosted vs. Installed
Unlike North America, Software-as-a-Service with dedicated SaaS vendors has
not really taken off in Europe. Buyers tend to choose among traditional software
vendors, but then make the decision whether to outsource hosting or install
the package in their own IT environment. Outsourcing is clearly on the uptick
among IT departments spread thin. Outsourcing application hosting generally
makes sense when the hosting provider has experience with the technology vendor.
Unfortunately this is rarely the case, limiting options for buyers or forcing
them into complex arrangements where the hosting vendors only assumes limited
support responsibility.
Local vs. International Vendor
Across Europe buyers still find themselves in a very fragmented market with
a huge number of vendors (more than 500 Web CMS vendors in Northern Europe alone).
To be sure, many if not most of these vendors operate in only one country, but
still, the typical European enterprise can choose from among more than 100 plausible
CMS vendors. Interestingly local vendors are continuing to resist foreign (mostly
North American) competition, as buyers simply keep supporting their small local
suppliers.
So a content technology buyer in Europe faces a very different set of plausible suppliers than a counterpart in North America. But in one respect the marketplaces are similar: there is a dizzying array of vendor choices.