Forrester recently release their Web Content Management Wave. It’s striking less for the rankings and more for the information about trends and why they ranked the vendors the way they did. I won’t reveal the Wave itself since I don’t have rights to distribute but I will note a few key findings.
Welcome to CXM
One of the key things they note is that WCM has evolved. I’ve blogged before about WCM evolving towards portal. Forrester takes a larger view and show how WCM includes much more than just some portal and WCM functionality. It also includes search, analytics, campaign management, and even some commerce functions.
Forrester's expanded view of web content called customer experience management (CXM)
So Customer Experience Management (CXM) definitely takes a large view and it’s one I’m seeing with a lot of customers. They demand a lot more from a customer facing web site. They want things like:
So who is important in the Wave?
The two key winners in the wave are SDL Tridion and Adobe CQ5. I don’t have much information on either but here’s a quick view into what Forrester says,
SDL and Adobe lead due to breadth of functionality, market momentum, and track record. Both Adobe and SDL provides a solid set of tools aimed at enabling business users to manage experiences. SDL’s globalization and localization functionality remains a differentiator and has the potential to be an asset for mobile website management. Adobe has an excellent offering in terms of technology and features, and its integration with other Adobe-owned CXM
components shows potential.
Personally, I’m seeing a lot of interest in Adobe Cq5. It represents about 5% of the search hits on our blog site for example.
It’s interesting that IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft were all ranked lower as strong contenders but they were not as strong as CXM vendors. I find this funny because both IBM and Microsoft actually had some major updates to their WCM tools in 2010. IBM specifically upgraded WCM a lot just to make it a viable vendor in the marketplace. It’s just that once it was released, the marketplace started asking for a lot more than just web content management. Now the big three vendors are strong and have substantial R&D dollars ready to plow into this space. IBM bought core metrics and Unica as well. Microsoft will doubtless evolve Sharepoint in it’s next major release in 2012 or 2013. I suspect both of them will be able to show CXM functionality quite nicely soon.
Anyway, You can get the full Forrester report at Forrester.com
