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Ektron Pulls Accolades for Web Content Management Functionality

Gartner’s MarketScope for Web Content Management 2008 has hit the press and there’s an impressive list of WCM vendors rising to the top. Ektron is considered by Gartner to be one of the strongest vendors in the marketplace today “offering a high-quality offering for lower-budget needs”.

Overview of 2008 WCM MarketScope

According to Gartner, the market for web content management has changed significantly in the last year and a half becoming much more mature in its offerings. As it has become more mature the things that vendors used to differentiate themselves are changing dramatically moving towards demonstrating the ability to solve specific business objectives.

Technology Influences the List
There are three primary flavors of WCM including those based on Java EE, .Net and Php (LAMP). You won’t see a lot of LAMP based solutions in this marketscope however as Gartner indicates they only make up about 3% of total WCM software revenue.

You also won’t see any Open Source solutions. Gartner has chosen to leave these vendors off this list for two reasons: the different business model and comparison to more established offerings with traditional or SaaS models didn’t seem fair. They do however believe that Open Source solutions like Alfresco and Drupal are “increasing influence on the WCM market in terms of culture and technology”.

WCM Market Strength
Gartner notes that the WCM market, a component of the ECM market, is achieving revenues of US$ 750 million with an annual compound growth rate of 15% between 2007 and 2012 — faster than the overall ECM market.

The overall market rating is positive. Some comments included:

• WCM is being linked more to business success
• Seeing a wider use of Web 2.0 in WCM solutions
• Open Source Solutions are gaining ground, but need to switch their focus from technical to business to be successful
• SaaS is gaining ground but will never overtake traditional models
• Replacement of systems is generally in the realm of 4-6 years and for many organizations, that is very soon

Key Trends for WCM
There are a number of key trends for WCM — too many to list here. A couple of notable trends include:

• Move from talking about visitors to actual users - which is where all this Web 2.0, social media stuff kicks in
• Move from proprietary to open source — watch out for Alfresco and Drupal, two vendors that Gartner likes to mention frequently
• From complex to uncomplicated
• From Global to local

Ektron Takes Top Honors in MarketScope

There are five ratings for vendors in this marketscope including: Strong Positive, Positive, Promising, Caution, Strong Negative. Only two vendors hit the top rating: Ektron and Interwoven.

For Ektron, offering a .net based WCM solution called CMS400.net, this is good news. According to Gartner, “Ektron is a prime example of the bifurcation in the market that Gartner is currently observing, offering a high-quality offering for lower-budget needs”. There are over 20,000 organizations using components of Ektron’s extended product set and has over 340 channel partners in 40 countries.

Some of the notables that Gartner mentions regarding Ektron are as follows:

• Strong brand with consistent growth in the past five years (increased operational revenue of 55% in 2007)
• Intuitive user interface and ease of use
• Integration with SharePoint
• eWebEditPro html editor
• Good collaborative functionality using Web 2.0 and social software technologies

Gartner places Ektron as the leading solution offering for small to medium or departmental sites and educational or government sites stating that it still has much to prove before it can be considered an enterprise level solution that requires “deep support of e-commerce, personalization, metadata management and advanced analytics.”

Ektron is definitely happy with the placement stating, “… Gartner’s findings directly reflect Ektron’s success in providing the world’s leading organizations with a superior product offering and affirms our ongoing commitment to support our expanding customer base.” Rogers continued, “I feel that the Strong Positive rating not only confirms Ektron’s ability to address the rapidly evolving needs in the market place…”

How Did Other Vendors Fair

There were 17 vendors mentioned in the MarketScope. In the Positive Rating were: CrownPeak, Fatwire, Open Text, Oracle, SDL Tridion, Sitecore and Vignette. Promising vendors are strong in multiple areas and have the means to innovate and keep up with market demand.

In the Promising rating were SharePoint, Clickability, Day Software, EMC Documentum, EPiServer and Percussion. Promising means they have potential but have some growing to do. They are also usually innovators, working with the latest technologies.

And in the Caution we see Mediasurface and IBM (Lotus). Caution generally means the vendor has some challenges to overcome or is troubled in some other way - such as financially. We should note that for Mediasurface the caution is not exactly product related but reflects their “…core strategy and financials”.

Pick up a copy of the complete MarketScope — it’s a good review of web content management today and of a number of key vendors we talk about regularly.

[Editor’s Note: See our coverage of Interwoven’s placement in the MarketScope report here.]