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Gilbane: Hot Banana is Top Banana for Usability, Integration

It’s all about Gilbane this week, of course. The latest news from the Boston conference relates to Hot Banana’s Web CMS, which topped the poll for Overall Ease of Use in Gilbane’s “Survey on Web Content Management User Experience.”

More than 20 top Web CMS products were surveyed, and Lyris’ flagship product came out tops in “interaction with other systems” and “application design.” It also scooped up “overall ease of use.”

For its part, Hot Banana ranked in the top three for navigation, feature functions, and incorporation of rich media. (Indeed, a number of its offerings have attempted to merge the world of IT with that of marketing — not a bad value proposition.)

A key Hot Banana feature that users find particularly useful is the ability to create content in Office applications and Adobe Photoshop, then port it directly to the Web. Other integration features cited for praise were the linking architecture with CRM, ERP and business intelligence systems.

“Hot Banana did well in the survey,” said Tony White, Gilbane’s Lead Analyst for Web Content Management. “Ratings in categories such as ease-of-use and application design often have an inverse relationship with ratings in other areas like application integration. But Hot Banana users gave it top ratings in all three. That’s rather unusual.”

The 2007 Gilbane Group Survey on the Web Content Management User Experience ranked nine commercial CMS vendors including Acumium, CrownPeak, EMC, Interwoven, Oracle, OpenText, Percussion and In-House.

Hot Banana is a Web CMS aimed at web marketing users, offering web content management, web site optimization and marketing automation. The product is available as a SaaS offering or on-site multi-user proprietary product, and also comes in an Agency edition (marketing agencies, that is).

In June, Lyris released Hot Banana v5.6, which offered a range of new features including integration with ColdFusion 8 and various enterprise software packages.

Find more details (and request a 1-on-1 demo) on by visiting the Hot Banana website.