The WEM Marketplace: Blueberries and Ricotta As Web CMS products reached maturity, a standard set of features became core for most vendors (i.e. templating, workflows, in-context content preview, integration APIs, scalable architectures, delivery and caching, etc.) Things are different with Web Engagement Management. The industry is still trying to figure out what this WEM thing is [...]
Sitecore Intranet Portal 3.1 Includes Ready-to-Run Features and Fully Customizable Page Layouts
San Francisco, April 28, 2010– Sitecore, the leading provider of .NET Web Content Management System (CMS) software, today announced the new release of its Sitecore Intranet Portal solution. Built on Sitecore’s Web CMS platform, Intranet Portal 3.1 helps organizations build an intranet that serves as the communications hub for the entire organization.
Corporate intranets can help build employee loyalty and break down traditional organizational barriers. In addition, Sitecore Intranet Portal makes it easier and more efficient to manage and monitor compliance and standards processes with structured publishing and workflow that can adjust to any business logic, with security available at every level.
With a Wizard-driven starter kit, Sitecore Intranet Portal features a highly intuitive editing interface, which dramatically reduces the need to train content managers, including full integration with Microsoft Office® applications. Moreover, managers can easily customize their department’s intranet desktop to fit specific business needs.
After a recent briefing with a Danish system integrator, I started speculating on whether Umbraco CMS might be on track to steal market share from Sitecore in the marketplace for .NET-based content management systems. Others have mentioned the possible trend to me in the past, but is it really happening?
Comparing open source Umbraco and proprietary Sitecore has been the norm for a couple of years in Denmark, the home market for both vendors, but we are increasingly seeing the two vendors on the same shortlists far beyond Denmark.
The question is, whether the “friendly CMS” really will be able to win business from Sitecore?
Here’s why Umbraco will beat Sitecore in the long run:
Open source: This evergreen mega-trend is a big plus for Umbraco in terms of attracting developers, press and customers.
Partners: Umbraco is very popular with system integrators. Nearly 60 people signed up for the LBi-hosted Umbraco 2009 UK Meetup in London. Since then we’ve heard of several consultancies that used to be faithful to Sitecore, but are now winning their bids with Umbraco. Without license costs there is more budget left for the partners.
Price: You can download Umbraco and get started free of charge. You can buy a year of support starting at €3k. To compare, the cheapest Sitecore license starts around €10k and quickly goes up from there (and then you still need to buy support).
Community: Umbraco has a strong, happy, positive, enthusiastic and growing community of developers.
Simplicity: Many customers don’t require online marketing, all the different interfaces and bells-and-whistles offered by Sitecore. Several partners claim that Umbraco is simpler and hence also easier and cheaper to implement.
Here are a few good reasons why Sitecore will continue to do well, even though Umbraco might continue to gain in popularity:
Analysts: Umbraco is not covered by any traditional industry analysts, including CMS Watch. Sitecore is covered by all the main players and Gartner even crowned them as “very innovative” in most recent Gartner Magic Quadrant for WCM (Aug 2009).
Partners: Building a network of experienced integrators is not easy and Sitecore has been at it for many years. With well-developed skills and a traditional kick-back the partners have good reason to stay with Sitecore.
References: In both North America and Europe, you can easily find an existing Sitecore customer. This is very helpful to further increase adoption as it means that new customers have some experience they can tap into. In addition, Sitecore has many government references where Umbraco has almost none.
Finance: A quick look at the recent Sitecore annual reports shows they are doing extremely well. Sitecore has demonstrated that they are capable of earning money in a competitive market and posted record-numbers again back in December 2009.
Global footprint: Sitecore is an established global player; much more so than Umbraco. Sitecore is in particular strong in the important and highly competitive US and UK markets.
Complexity: Many customers have started to realize that they do indeed have complex requirements. Sitecore has targeted the higher end of the market for quite a few years now, which has made the product more complex and capable towards the demanding, global enterprises.
My take: If you do a proper CMS vendor evaluation, you will probably find that the license cost is only a fraction of the overall project costs. Your criteria should really be to look at which system will meet your requirements most efficiently.
I’ve regularly covered annual reports, earnings announcements and other financial news about software vendors. These commentaries tend to stir debate and I am frequently asked why I bother to look behind the numbers. Is it really important?
Many vendors, in particular privately-held US-based ones, don’t publicly release audited numbers. Instead they carefully select a few positive numbers to share via a press release. An example of this is seemingly successful CMS-vendor Ektron, which claims to be open and transparent, but will tell you only that their sales grew 38%. If you are willing to sign a non-disclosure agreement, they’ll share more details on profitability, but can a vendor really claim to be transparent when you need to sign a contract to get some fundamental numbers about the financial health of the vendor?
In my view financial numbers and annual reports are a great way to gain insights about a vendor. These are the numbers you should indeed care about:
Services revenue. A good example of this is FatWire, where your local key account manager might have told you that they are very committed to their partners, when in fact services bring in about 30% of the company’s total revenue.
New license sales. If this is down, it will tell you that the vendor is having difficulty signing up new customers. This can be a sign that an acquisition is lurking around the corner, which is what happened to Vignette as they got acquired by Open Text.
Maintenance and support revenue. If this makes up a large part of revenue, it means that the vendor has many customers who keep using the product. If you can get hold of a renewal percentage or average customer lifetime, it will tell you something about how long the customers stay with the product.
A break-down of revenue by product will tell you which products are really strategic to the vendor. IBM and Google are examples of big vendors, to who far from all products are equally important. This might reveal which products are likely to become discontinued. This happened with Microsoft CMS
Cash is king. Look at the cashflow to find out whether the vendor might be facing survival problems or is sitting on a pile of cash.
After looking at a few vendors, you’ll discover that the accounting models tend to differ hugely. Some will list licence sales straight away, while others will break it down and only list it partially over a given period. Some might also divide their revenue between a corporate entity and different geographic regions, e.g. CMS vendor Sitecore. Details like this obviously make it difficult to compare the numbers.
Finally, I would say that the past decade has showed that positive financial numbers by no means guarantee that your favourite vendor will not be acquired or that your favourite product will not be discontinued. 2009 saw quite a few acquisitions, most notably Adobe’s acquisition of Omniture and Opentext which bought Vignette. I’m sure we will see more in 2010. These might not impact customers in the short-term, but down the road, they always also have significant impact, e.g. with closed regional offices, a new partner strategy or a cut in engineering spending.
Recently, I got an e-mail newsletter (from: company name redacted) – one of those that goes almost immediately to trash following a quick scan. What made me ROFL was this line: Blogging is easy, usually free, and most importantly, fun! Now, I am not perfect (well, am nearly ) and could use more self-blogging discipline, [...]
I have been catching up on product demos recently and have seen some really elegant functionality for marketers. Several products have introduced modules that allow CMS users to plan, implement, and measure multivariate testing, search engine optimization, and personalization without the continued support of a developer. A developer has to put the [...]
Earlier this month Danish CMS vendor Sitecore released their annual report showing record profits and revenue. Compared to last year (see our comment), revenue went up from DKK 56 million to DKK 79 million and profit increased from DKK 20 million to 25 million. Sitecore has also grown from 120 to 160 employees worldwide.
For some reason, the Sitecore press release is currently only available in Danish and the annual report is nowhere to be found on the English version of the Sitecore site. Apart from the numbers, Sitecore uses the press release to make some other statements:
Sitecore is among the global CMS top 3
Analyst firm Gartner has crowned Sitecore as the most visionary vendor in the world
CMS consolidation will continue in 2010
I’ll simply say that I suspect the lack of translation is not to hide the annual report from competitors, but rather to avoid global ridicule with these hard-to-believe claims.
I have taken some time to study the annual report and the numbers contained in order to explore what is in store for Sitecore customers. Here my comments:
License sales is almost DKK 76 million out of the DKK 79 million revenue, with the majority of the remaining revenue being training courses.
Sitecore is far from the only vendor doing well in the current financial climate. US direct competitor Ektron is also doing very well and so are Java-based alternatives Day Software and FatWire
According to the annual report, Sitecore has used the past year to set up shop in The Netherlands and in Sweden. With strong local competition (Tridion and EPiServer respectively), the new office in Sweden lost DKK 500.000 while the Dutch subsidiary was profitable
In the coming fiscal year, Sitecore is planning to continue the quest for world domination and establish themselves in Japan
Throughout 2009 Sitecore have also worked hard on addressing shortcomings when it comes to cross-browser support. According to Sitecore, the desktop interface, which has previously only worked in IE, will soon be released in an updated version with support for the Chrome and Firefox browsers.
Finally, I suspect Sitecore will have a more difficult year ahead in 2010. The Danish home market is seeing increasing Umbraco adoption, an open-source .NET alternative, and I suspect many loyal Sitecore partners will be tempted to offer Umbraco and get a bigger chunk of the budget for implementation. Outside Denmark every major competitor already has OMS-like offerings, so unless Sitecore can come up with a real differentiator, I would recommend that buyers look at the price. At the moment Sitecore is substantially more expensive than competing vendors such as Ektron, EPiServer and Kentico and I’m wondering if this will continue throughout 2010?
These be seven curses on a judge so cruel:
That one doctor will not save him,
That two healers will not heal him,
That three eyes will not see him.
That four ears will not hear him,
That five walls will not hide him,
That six diggers will not bury him
And that seven deaths shall never kill him.
- SEVEN CURSES
Better late than never. I promised I’d scribble something about the Web Idol Competition at JBoye 09. The competition involved 6 vendors each presenting a fast paced 7 minute demo to the crowds, mimicking something like Pop Idol. The judging is done by an “expert” panel of 3 judges who offer inane commentary. The audience vote holds all the power over the final outcome.
I was lucky enough to be asked to be one of the three judges on the panel. Teaching me the ropes were Erik Hartman, a grandfather of Content Management, and Sara Redin of JBoye. The night before, I was out drinking with a Dutch guy called Erik and was enormously impressed by how much he knew about all the CMS products out there. Idiot that I am, I didn’t put two and two together and only realised that he was the Erik when I sat next to him on the panel. I’ve been a fan of his for ten years.
Anyway, the participating vendors (in the order they presented, from our right to left in the picture) were Microsoft, e-Spirit, Kapow, TERMINALFOUR, 23 Video and Sitecore. So 4 content management vendors, a content migration vendor and a video startup.
First up was Microsoft, presenting a Web Content Management interface in SharePoint 2010. I think it is a massive improvement over the monster that is MOSS 2007, but my fellow judges didn’t think much of it. The much hated Ribbon interface (as featured in the new versions of MS Office) received scorn. The demo didn’t show anything profound. While it is true that we didn’t see anything that other systems haven’t been doing for years, at least it brings SharePoint into the ballpark. I’ve been violently opposed to the idea of using MOSS for public facing sites, but the new version might warrant a rethink.
We have a lot of customers using SharePoint in Internet sites, and with the capabilities of 2010, we expect to see that explode. But it wasn’t the initial design point for SharePoint.
Wait, Steve, did I hear you right? After The Righteous have been fighting (and losing) the SharePoint For Public Facing Sites for many a long year, you suddenly say that Internet Sites were not a design goal of the initial SharePoint. No shit. But why couldn’t you have saved everyone a whole lot of pain and said this when MOSS was released. And if, in 5 years time, you end up saying the same thing about SharePoint 2010, I think I’ll kick you in the starboard testicle.
Next up was e-Spirit, showing off the FirstSpirit CMS. e-Spirit aren’t a vendor I know much about. They’re really big in Germany, and are trying to get into other markets. I actually quite like the interface we were shown, although it does look rather complicated. It’s always hard to judge as we were show the interface as seen by an administrator. Maybe it’s simpler if you’re logged in as a lesser mortal. The drag-and-drop of multiple objects looked rather nice. That said, the demo didn’t go well at all. The connection to the interwebs was very slow which screwed the demo badly (my comment about everything being run on local machines was wrong). And the choice of things to show wasn’t great either.
Third on was Kapow, doing a content migration demo. I thought the demo was decent, taking content from the conference site and sticking it into SiteCore. However, I suspect that most of the audience probably weren’t sure what they were seeing. For me, the demo was a lot more interesting than the rather dry Kapow presentation the night before. They showed the web interface for scripted remote control of a browser for migrating content. If I understood it correctly, it’s a bit like the Selenium IDE. Seeing as I’m more a fan of coding/scripting than pointing/clicking, it didn’t do much for me. I’m sure there is a scripting interface too, but we never saw it. I know the Vamosa product suite far better than I know Kapow, and the demo I saw didn’t allow me to compare the two.
TERMINALFOUR was fourth. Piero showed a nice solid demo of the interface with a bit of WebDAV thrown in, but again nothing profound. Later that beer-fuelled evening, Janus introduced Piero to someone from the Danish digital agency 727 online, and we all spent the next half an hour talking shite about 727 landing on TERMINALFOUR. You probably had to be there.
Fifth was 23 Video, a startup that also produced the video for the conference. While the previous four demos were feature showcases, this demo was scenario based, which the judges preferred. But as the judges are all CMS geeks not Video Sharing Sites geeks, there weren’t too many questions. For example, my company uses the YouTube API and Viddler at the moment. The demo didn’t convince me to consider changing. I’d also have loved to see a video upload, but I guess the restrictive conference bandwidth probably meant they were clever to avoid this.
Last were defending champions SiteCore, presented by the defending champion Lars Birkholm Petersen. This was probably the most feature poor seven minutes of all of them. The whole demo consisted of creating a form with a CAPTCHA, and trying to fill in the form. There was a peak at the newly released Online Marketing Suite. They cleverly did not ever actually show the SiteCore interface which some of you will know also contains an Office-style ribbon.
However, it was a brilliantly presented featureless demo. Lars had hats representing conference organiser Janus, and CMS Analyst Adriaan Bloem (who wasn’t at the conference because he wasn’t capable of passing the CAPTCHA). He told a great story and got lots of laughs from everyone. You can watch the all the demos below.
The results:
3rd – TERMINALFOUR
2nd – 23 Video
1st – Sitecore, defending their title
Unsurprisingly, the votes went according to the quality and style of the demo, not according to what was actually demoed. And the best demo certainly won. But none of the vendors showed any profound features. Throughout the conference everyone was talking about The Next Big Thing, Social Media, Engagement, Web 3.5, etc, etc. Yet all the CMS vendors simply showed their content entry forms! If I’d had a vote, I think I’d have voted for Microsoft (shock, horror!) based on a Most Improved Award mentality.
The whole event was great fun. The other two judges were mean – Erik being the hardest to please. I’m told that Erik looks like a kitten compared to Tony Byrne, who makes vendors cry. Finally, I often wonder how important the “sizzle” factor is in demos that are part of formal RFPs. I hope the buyers judge on more than the audiences at Web Idol do.
Congratulations to the Sitecore team who defended the prestigious Web Idol competition in Aarhus at the J. Boye Conference last week and once again took home the enormous trophy.
Sitecore beat competing CMS vendors e-Spirit, Microsoft and Terminalfour as well as data migration vendor Kapow and video start-up 23.
Just like in 2008, it was a refreshing, funny and well-prepared demo, even though the Sitecore rep managed to say “CMS system” at least once. The demo focused on a non-sexy sign-up form with a complex captcha and finished up with an example of behavioural targeting.
Sitecore entered the Web Idol competiton for the first time in 2006, but were beaten by Norwegian open source vendor eZ Systems. However, they returned in 2008 to claim victory for the first time. Sitecore decided not to defend their title at our Philadelphia conference earlier this year, where eZ Systems won again.Perhaps the 2 winners will manage to meet at Web Idol 2010 for the ultimate showdown?
You can watch the full 7 minute winning demo, including the comments from the 3 judges:
Among the comments from the judges (fast forward to end of video), note the comment from Jon Marks, Head of Development at LBi, who liked the fact that the Sitecore representative showed some of the new stuff from Sitecore Online Marketing Suite. My colleague has previously questioned whether the upgrade is worth it, something which was certainly not answered in the 7 minutes.
If you watch the other Web Idol videos you’ll see examples of what vendors like to demonstrate in late 2009, including a Microsoft representative who showed SharePoint using Firefox.
In my view, the Sitecore demo was certainly the most humorous. The audience voted and decided it was also the best demo, and while it might have been better than the other contestants, I did not see much which couldn’t have been shown by most vendors in 1999! This might be a sign that requirements in general have not evolved much, or perhaps that vendors are not all that good at doing sales demonstrations? Either way, I don’t expect vendors to improve much, until buyers become more critical and start asking for more demonstrations and less slides.
Let us know if you have ideas for future Web Idol competitions; which contestants would you like to see? Do you have ideas for improving the format?
Well, early in the mornin’
‘Til late at night,
I got a poison headache,
But I feel all right.
- PLEDGING MY TIME
I managed to get to the EPiServer Customer and Partner Day in London on Tuesday. I presented there last year, but this year could relax and go to lots of sessions. There were over 250 people, a big increase. They’re doing rather nicely in the UK, and everywhere else. They claim to have launched 500 new sites in the last three months. Personally, I hate the number of sites metric. I wish vendors would use number of new clients. For a nice, general overview of the day read James’ blog post. I’m just going to ramble a bit as usual.
EPiServer are still moving extremely quickly, which I talked about six months ago at the Swedish event. The main goodies on the roadmap are the new Marketing Arena, and EPiServer 6. And I stayed till far too late and still have a headache two days later, but that’s a story for another time.
The CMO has two parts. The Landing Page Optimiser (LPO) performs A/B Testing and has a nice interface. It is an entry level product that doesn’t include demographic information in the A/B testing which, for me, is something they need to introduce before I’d consider using it. The tool needs to be able to say, for example, “Page A performs best for US customers and Page B for European customers”. It also doesn’t perform Multivariate Testing but who know what the future holds. It provides basic web analytics, but wouldn’t claim to complete with a niche analytics product. In summary, it’s a nice entry level tool.
The second part, EPiServer SEO, performs good static analysis of your site and provides friendly instructions about how to improve your searchability based on the ever-changing rules of the search engines. It does all the things it should, looking at sematic code quality as well as content quality. It summarises this into a single number (your Digital Visibility) in a similar way to WebSite Grader. It’s a hosted service maintained by a third party. I wish I’d known about this before an we could have tried to set up a partnership with LBi instead – we have a service that’s very similar.
One thing I don’t like is the fact EPiServer SEO also has basic web tracking, to provides things like Heat Maps showing where users focus. Other parts of the CMO already have script based tracking. Two products doing this is one too many. And another trend I don’t like – black seems to be the new white. CMO has a shiny black background on their new “funky” product, while everything else is still white. Vignette did it with their Rich Media product. What’s wrong with white backgrounds anyway?
B2B Adapt
This is cool. Using an enhanced version of the Dun & Bradstreet company database, it maps the visitor’s IP address to their company’s Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) code. From this, the product can tell the vertical industry of the company, the number of employees and even the annual turnover. These attributes are then fed into the rules engine to allow you to target different content to the revelant people. For example, you could show a very different pages to a small Swedish fishing company and a large US pharma. This is a hosted service which contains both the up-to-date database of companies as well as the rules.
I’d really like to use a service like this simply to get the demographic information and then put it to use in my own evil ways. However, I’m told this isn’t legal. There are strict (and somewhat quirky) rules around how company demographic information can be used.
B2B Prospect
This is a lower-cost option using the same technology as B2B Adapt. It simply provides a report of the companies that visited your site, including contact details and other useful things.
From Zero to Hero
Those of you that are wise in the EPiWays will recognise a few of the features mentioned above. EPiServer have a really really strong development community and an extensible API, so third parties are continually adding modules and features. They’ve just taken the first step towards an EPiAppStore with the release of the EPiServer Extra directory which includes free and commercial modules created by EPiServer and third parties. Many of these modules are now in the main product. Some of the extras that have made the big time include:
EPiTrace – this is now bundled in the Marketing Arena.
I really like this model, by the way. All the most of the integrations are loosely coupled, and using partners like this allows the EPiServer guys to focus on the core.
What’s in EPiServer 6
The other big news is, of course, the arrival of EPiServer 6. Technically, this isn’t a massive change and the upgrade from 5.x promises to be trivial. As @rogerwirz pointed out in his closing presentation, it’s more of an “editorial training upgrade” than a technical one. I loved the comedy-act demo from @sunnaster and @mathel, sucking Tweets into the new Dynamic Data Store. I’m slightly uneasy about the Dynamic Data Store “Big Table” architecture, but I think this is because I’m old-school and fear change. But don’t get fooled into believing that this is anything like Google’s BigTable which isn’t an RDBMS and wouldn’t pass the ACID test. The EPiServer “Big Table” really is just a big bastard of a SQL table which sounds pretty hard to index. But I’m sure they’ve got it right. Something to talk to Roger about next time he’s in town.
I liked the demo of the new Dashboard (and how to write extensions for it) from @epirach and @bevan_souster. This Dashboard is based on the new EPiServer CMS Shell framework and provides good Portalesque features. However, I think it also overlaps enormously with many of the features of EPiServer Composer. So much overlap, in fact, that keeping both technologies alive doesn’t make sense. If I was a betting man (which I am) I’ll wager the heart of EPiServer Composer will be ripped out and replaced with a shiny new one in one (or at most two versions) time. At least I hope so.
Some other new features of EPiServer 6 which excite me:
Completely browser compatibility on the editorial site
Complete mirroring rewrite, which is a very good thing
Access rights on page types
Access rights on languages
Drag and drop page tree ordering
Final Thoughts
The thing I like most about EPiServer is their geekiness and honesty. For example, in the keynote, they happily admit which products are simply OEM’ed partner products. Some competitors will wax lyrical about how their product has won Award XYZ, which happened before they even OEM’ed it. The final presentation was a tech demo that everyone was forced to watch. I did hear some less-technical people saying that some of the presentations aren’t slick and “marketeer” enough. Which is great. Keep it up I say.
Here are a few good reasons why Sitecore will continue to do well, even though Umbraco might continue to gain in popularity:
I’ve regularly covered annual reports, earnings announcements and other financial news about software vendors. These commentaries tend to stir debate and I am frequently asked why I bother to look behind the numbers. Is it really important?
