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Get the NewsletterOpen Source CMS Jahia Gives More Control to Partners
Jahia (news, site), an open source content management system vendor, is on a quest to further penetrate the U.S. market (among others) in addition to its French operations. The new global Jahia Business Partner Program gives partners more control and flexibility with free pre-sales support and various levels of certification, including those for VARs and SIs scenarios.
According to Jahia, they don’t want to compete with their partner network when it comes to CMS implementations. Hence, the “non-compete guarantee.” That means Jahia plans to refer almost all of the integration work to its partners — around 70 of them in 15 countries around the globe. Some of Jahia’s partners are in the U.S., the market to which Jahia is paying more and more attention.
"Being open source and not competing with services partners is unique within the open source industry… We are focusing on software and its related support…," said Emmanuel Garcin, Jahia's VP and GM for North America.
While having an implementation partner network is a common approach in the industry, why not do that work in-house? Why not move toward a native Professional Services approach? Sure, it’s more costly and requires you to have, grow and nurture the in-house subject matter expertise. While it’s certainly not a deal-breaker in many CMS selection processes, different organizations may feel differently about partner vs. vendor implementations.
[Editor's Note: See our recently released report on the top 20 open source content management systems (including Jahia).]
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“Being open source and not competing with services partners is unique within the open source industry” - not quite so unique. Magnolia has been doing this for a while as we see this the only way how to handle the partner relationship with integrity and sustainability.
We are a recently new US-based partner of Jahia. We've been working with the software for about a year now and have a number of people on our staff that love the software. Coming previously from a Commercial CMS space to becoming a partner with an Open Source vendor, we very much expect the type of relationship Jahia has proposed/introduced.
That doesn't mean that the two can't co-exist. Plenty of Commercial vendors have Professional Service arms that do task-based/hourly work for a specific need for a customer (which we tend to shy away from). However, once something is larger in scope than a certain size or interconnects with other systems, changes business processes or contains more than just a CMS implementation (such as a website redesign, rebranding, content migration, training) as many CMS implementations tend to do, the PS team of the Vendor is ill-equipped to handle the workload.
Also, for a vendor who is trying to grow rapidly, one of the fastest ways to do it is to sign up as many partners as possible that advocate for your product. If you are the only one that knows how to implement your product, you will be limited to how many implementations you can do each year.
So, in short, I think their model IS smart and will work (but hey, I'm obviously biased :) )