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Web Idol 2008

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Thu, 6 Nov 2008 10:39:00 -0500

Here at J. Boye 2008 in Denmark, yesterday we held the 3rd-annual Web Idol, where five vendors got seven minutes each to demo their wares and get critiqued by a set of judges (myself included). Ultimately, the audience voted the winner.

The general crowd consensus was that this set of demos were less interesting and polished than previous years. But I thought the choices vendors made about what to show were revealing. Sitecore, eZ publish, and SDL Tridion all demonstrated rather feature-rich (and daunting) "power-user" interfaces. We see this a lot in demos: vendors trying to appeal to the most sophisticated users in the room -- who presumably are decisive in the final selection. But do you want the most powerful system, or the easiest to use? Different stakeholders are going to have different answers.

All five vendors (including Hippo and e-Spirit) emphasized website management over basic content/information management. This follows an important trend in the industry, but still left some of the audience wondering a bit about how the workaday business contributor would simply edit a single page.

So who won the election? It was close, but no re-count necessary, with the Danish "home team" vendor, Sitecore winning the day.

Web CMS Thoughts from Gilbane Day One

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:48:00 -0400

After participating in the first day of the Gilbane San Francisco conference yesterday, here some short observations in no particular order.

By my count, once-little Ektron has seen four years of hyper-growth. The company says they now have 200 employees. If accurate, I'll guess this head-count puts them at about US$30-40m in revenues, which sizes Ektron in the ball-park of some of the larger standalone Web CMS vendors (like FatWire, or Tridion before the SDL acquisition), or even the CMS product groups of some larger vendors. You're probably not surprised to hear that Ektron customers tell us this growth has not come without associated growth pains.

Forrester analyst Rob Koplowitz, who once worked on SharePoint Portal Server 2003 at Microsoft, called the MOSS 2007 platform a "collection of festering boils." You can ask him for clarification, but he seems to have meant it with love...

Speaking of SharePoint, two channel partners told me that their local Microsoft reps were marketing MOSS for public websites really hard. Evidently Redmond wants to beat the rap that the tool is not ideal for public-facing sites, and doubtless would like to lengthen this customer list. So the integrators are asking themselves, "when Microsoft hands us a great lead to follow, how can we have a candid conversation with the prospect about their real alternatives?" Not a new story in the channel business, but a pressing one right now, and you the buyer should understand the institutional dynamics. See, this presents you a bit of a dilemma as well: ideally you'd find a vendor-neutral consultant to help you sort out your choices, but if MOSS wins your competition in the end, you really want to go with a partner who brings very deep skills in Web Publishing in SharePoint, because it's not a simple beast. If Redmond keeps pushing its partners, then "vendor neutral with very deep SharePoint skills" could become an oxymoron.

If the exhibit hall is any indication, the Web CMS marketplace continues to expand, especially at the lower end -- perhaps dispelling the myth of a SharePoint steamroller, at least in this space. Smaller vendors here -- some of whom have participated for multiple events now -- include Acumium, Bridgeline, Broadchoice, Hippo, Telerik, and The Level, plus many of the other usual suspects we cover in our Web CMS Report 2008.

Of course, exhibitors come and go from year to year. One thing doesn't change though. Despite all the talk about Web 2.0, a lot of customers bring some very basic questions they want addressed about web publishing and CMS tools. I hope I can answer some of them at my tutorial tomorrow.

The Web CMS Scene in Europe

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:53:00 -0400

The fragmentation of the global Web Content Management technology space continues unabated, although we see significant regional differences.

In Europe, the small and mid-sized Web CMS vendors continue to grow and innovate. Honestly, we have to hustle to keep up with them, which means it must be a bit dizzying for you the buyer as well.

With our latest edition of The Web CMS Report we add two new European vendors to our evaluations: Dutch commercial open source vendor Hippo, and the Icelandic-UK mash-up, Vyre. (No lack for interesting names...) Both vendors face some difficult challenges in the coming year, but both have established a decent reputation and customer base to draw upon as well. We'll keep watching -- and explaining...