The Web Content Management vendor market anno 2010
The Web Content Management software market has been quite stable in 2009. Which actually is a good result considering the economic downturn of the last 18 months. As a matter of fact, many people expected some kind of shake-out in the WCM market; with over a thousand WCM software solutions to choose from, the WCM-business is still a crowded, scattered environment and the vast majority of the players are relatively small companies with less than 50 employees.
Luckily, the shake-out didn’t happen and most vendors seem to be doing pretty well. But then again, it remains difficult to get a clear view on the financial status of most companies; these are mostly privately held so they don’t publicly release audited numbers. And if they do, the numbers are often carefully selected to support some PR message. So in the end, the harsh truth of the early 2000’s hasn’t repeated itself. WCMS owners didn’t have to worry too much about the continuity of their WCM platform; only a few WCM vendors went out of business or got swept away in an acquisition. And although the acquisitions of Vignette by Open Text and Interwoven by Autonomy were major news, it didn’t mean their WCM flagships were discontinued.
One of the reasons for the ongoing success of WCM vendors is the fact that good solutions for managing web content are still in demand. Even in times of (or maybe especially in times of) economic downturn, companies are shifting their communications, transactions and operations to the web in order to become more agile and efficient. Due to this strong demand, we have even witnessed new commercial players popping-up, existing local players expanding to other geographical areas and open source projects flourishing.
However, all of this reassuring news doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be careful when selecting a WCM tool. The criterium which is mostly overlooked from a buyer perspective is the local ecosystem of the WCM tool. You might have checked out the vendor financials, have done a successful proof of concept and negotiated a good licensing price - but if you cannot rely on a broad base of esteemed local consultants or implementations partners who are committed to the WCM platform, you will run into serious operational problems sooner or later. For sure!
In our experience , that is the most common reason for abandoning an old WCM platform and purchasing a new one. If you need to fly in expensive consultants from Scandinavia, UK or South-Africa for every change or fix to your system, you will soon realize that the absence of a local ecosystem will cost you a fortune and cause major project management headaches.
Just a random check on the Belgian Monster CV database showed we could find CVs for the following WCM vendors (dd 1st of February 2010).
1. Joomla: 278 CV’s
2. Drupal: 125 CV’s
3. SDL Tridion: 62CV’s
4. Interwoven: 26 CV’s
4. Typo3: 26 CV’s
6. Sitecore: 9 CV’s
7. Ektron: 8 CV’s
8. Smartsite: 6 CV’s
9. Fatwire: 5 CV’s
10. OpenCMS: 3 CV’s
Although this is a snapshot and by no means an indication of the actual qualifications of the candidates, it provides a rough idea on how large the expertise ecosystem for different vendors is.
So if you are in the market for a (new) web content management system, you will find many different and valuable options, but please make sure you look beyond the product and check out their ecosystems too!