Looking at information about the new CMS Watch report, it has the potential to become a watershed in the Industry. The re-classification of products into 5 new tiers makes some significant statements about how the industry has been evolving.
My instant reaction to the re-classification was that it reflected my thoughts and experiences in recent years on a number of areas such as how Open Source and SaaS should no longer be segregated and how the middle tier categories in particular deserved more clarity and emphasis.
I’m sure there are vendors and practitioners the world over taking issue with certain aspects of the re-categorisation. Naturally, when you spend a lot of time developing and using these tools it is understandable that you create different ‘thought worlds’ based on your own field of reference and it’s sometimes difficult to step back from this and take different perspectives.
I thought I’d throw a few observations into the mix based on my own field of reference. That reference is as a one-time product manager for Immediacy (Now Alterian CMC 6.2), an Immediacy customer and implementor, an ecommerce orientated Joomla implementation I have done on a personal project and being a customer and implementor of EPiServer over the last two years.
After careful consideration, the one aspect of the re-classification that I would take issue with is the positioning of Alterian CMC 6.2 alongside Joomla in the Simpler Products category.
Based on experiences of using Joomla quite deeply over the last year and a full understanding of Alterian CMC 6.2 (from background knowledge and studying the latest documentation and release notes on the Immediacy support site) I believe that the Alterian product sits more comfortably and relevantly in the Mid-Range Products category.
In my opinion, the investment and innovation made in 4 key areas of development separate the Alterian product from the Simpler range of products
- Web Asset Management ( a lighter-weight Document Management capability)
- Taxonomy and Categorisation
- SharePoint Connectivity
- Administration and Deployment Capability
I believe that these capabilities are of a sufficient maturity to provide a clear distinction between the capability of Joomla for example and the Alterian Corporate product and general awareness of the other products listed in the Simpler Products category also underlies my view on this.
The maturity of the former Immediacy Editor application, a broad range of plug-in solutions and the additional capabilities I’ve listed above make it a comparable, and in several areas, more capable solution to a number of products listed in the Mid-Range product categories. I would be very interested to hear, for example, a justification for why GOSS in particular is categorised as having broader capability than Alterian CMC 6.2?
No doubt the Alterian acquisition has impacted the roadmap of the corporate product more so than other areas but I think that sufficient investment had been made prior to both the Mediasurface and Alterian acquisitions to justify CMC 6.2 being categorised as a Mid-Range product.
If indeed, the consensus is that Alterian CMC 6.2 is categorised correctly then I raise the question from this post’s title – Is there a market for simpler proprietary CMS’s? Will organisations be prepared to pay $10 – $20,000 for a proprietary licence when they can get an Open Source option for free or does the product maturity (documentation, install base, partner experience) and support that solution provides justify that level of investment?
Beyond 2020 Visions ... 
Hi James,
You’re right, you can’t look at the products in a specific category and then say that among each other, all of them are comparable. This is both true of Alterian CMC and Joomla (they’re completely different), but also of, for example, Alterian CME and Plone. I don’t think these will be on the same shortlists a lot.
The point is this is a categorization of complexity (to implement.) The more complex will often be more flexible, but that flexibility comes at a price (a much more complex implementation.) If our readers are looking for a longlist or shortlist of products to consider, they should start by analyzing their scenarios — and comparing those to our scenarios, and the scenario fits we rate for each product.
They’ll probably find out that for their scenarios, they can find products in several categories. This means they’ll have a choice of going with the more complex, or the more productized options.
Hope that makes sense 😉
As for your last question — yes, I think organizations would still be willing to shell out the money if they think through the bigger picture. The total of a project will run up a lot more than the licensing fee alone, especially if you factor in all costs (like the often conveniently forgotten FTEs of in-company resources spent on it.)
Not having to pay for a license might save you 10-50% of your total costs; then again, having a system that’s not a good match to your scenario might run it up by at least as much. So in the end, it’s much more about selecting a good fit.
Being “penny wise, pound foolish” is the real risk there. (Even though I realize that $10K is a lot of pennies.)
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Hi Adriaan,
I’m very honoured to have a comment from CMS Watch – feels strangely like some sort of ‘rite of passage’ 😉
Anyway, thanks for the clearer explanation of the categorisation. The observation about complexity versus flexibility does make a lot of sense and I can understand why you have made it with regards to both Joomla and Alterian CMC 6.2. This echos my experiences from a semi-technical perspective with recent Joomla and older Immediacy 5.0 implementations – they are/were both relatively straightforward to get under the covers of and understand how to make useful changes at code level if and where needed.
However, the points I made about the greater breadth of capability in the Alterian CMC product set, that were introduced with Immediacy Version 6, were illustrating that the strategy a few years back was to move up the scenario fit ladder and create more differentiation from the type of ‘simpler’ products you are listing in that category. At the time there were great debates about whether to go the revolutionary versus evolutionary route to address the more complex scenarios. The evolutionary approach was chosen (probably for very understandable reasons) and certainly seemed to have boosted product capability in line with, and in some areas, beyond products listed in your Mid Range category.
You make some good points with regard to the ongoing market for simpler proprietary CMS’s but I believe it puts considerable pressure on those proprietary vendors to maintain a viable product roadmap for a ‘simpler’ solution unless they can compensate for lower licensing cost expectations with higher implementation volumes. It does rather raise the question whether Mediasurface’s ‘three bear’ strategy was a sound one and whether Alterian should simplify further on just one, coherent CMS offering.
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The only other thing I’d add is, we debated internally about CMC before assigning them that category, as it wasn’t 100% obvious where it should go. As analysts we need to put the world into neat buckets, but in reality tools and vendors fall across a wide spectrum. If we had a category called “low to mid range products” CMC would surely go there…but then we’d have too many categories….
In any case, thanks for your insightful entry.
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WCM is a strange beast. Today nearly everything is web based. From Social Collaboration tools such as Google Wave to CRM solutions. All also heavily rely on underlying content management systems from one manner or the other.
There is then always this ambiguous question of knowing the difference between a CMS or a WCM especially when everyone is now developing iPhone apps or Adobe AIR rich internet applications on top or beside to their WCM offerings.
We also see more and more a shift between front-end Web facing solutions and Internal-facing intranets. Most classical WCM are now really focus on what I call “Web Marketing Suites” and focus their message mainly on richer personalization, improved customers engagement and better web analytics. On the other hand we also see the fast emergence of several E2.0 focused solutions (still of course web and content based).
For example compare the marketing message from let’s say Percussion (http://www.percussion.com/products/) and ToughtFarmer (http://www.thoughtfarmer.com/) or Twiki (http://twiki.net/). All products are basically WCM and allow some level of “page creation” and heavily rely on their underlying CM platforms. But it looks like the “verticals” are now rapidly diverging in term of built-in features.
This comes back to another CMSWatch segmentation: Social Software vs Portal vs WCM. I think the Gartner is now dividing its MQ in term of Externally Facing Social Software and Internally-facing Social Software solutions. So perhaps we will see in the next years an evolution towards:
– Externally facing content solutions
– Internally facing content solutions
Or rather there will be some consolidations in all these CM offerings to best leverage both types of needs. Who knows?
But this is clear that WCM categorization is nowadays not a simple rocket science exercise. One would certainly need a multidimensional Business Intelligence cube to really try to “visualize” all the possible sub-segmentations. Moreover all this is happening in a very fast-evolving and dynamic market.
Finally I will add a note to what Adriaan Bloem mentioned when he says that more complex (but flexible) the solution is more expensive it is. This is certainly true in term of “advanced features” (personalization features, semantic features, embedded analytics features,…) but not necessarily in term of “content middleware” customization. For instance this will become more and more difficult to say that Magnolia or Hippo are less complex to customize than Day CQ when all of them (tend to) share +80% of their respective codebase in term of number of lines of code (aka the Apache content middleware stack).
In all the cases nobody will ever be satisfied with any type of categorization. So this is just a permanently open and recurring question.
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