Ektron Pulls Accolades for Web Content Management Functionality

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Jul 7, 2008

4 comments

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.