Quick Take: Clickability's SaaS Web Content Management Platform

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Feb 21, 2008

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Clickability is a web content management provider with a twist. Their product, the Clickability Platform, is provided On Demand and is a full service solution offering starting with Infrastructure as a Service and ending with what the company calls Innovation as a Service. The package covers both the back office content management interfaces and, importantly, the delivery and rendering infrastructure.

While there's much more to the Clickability Platform then web content management, it is definitely the central component.

This Quick Take Review is an overview of the Web CMS portion of the Clickability Platform. For the purposes of this review we have restricted most of our discussion on the Web Content Management capabilities — although we do mention some of the additional components in their Software as a Service (SaaS) solution set, as interesting differentiators.

Overview

It’s safe to say that Clickability Platform — known previously as cmPublish — is more than a simple web content management platform. One look at their offering and you see an integrated solution package that includes content management, web 2.0 capabilities, analytics, email campaigns, advertising and more.

But before we get into all the built-in extras, let’s review the basics.

Clickability Basics

Vendor Name:	Clickability
Product Name:	Clickability Platform
Product Category:	Web CMS
Typical Scenario:	Clickability Platform is the platform of choice for some major publishing and marketing websites

Company & Product History

Headquartered in San Francisco, Clickability was founded in 1999 by 4 Stanford graduates — rugby players. “…nicest guys in the world but you wouldn't want to line up against us on the Rugby pitch.”

They lived and worked out of a 2 bedroom basement apartment for a year (ever shake hands with a business prospect in a ‘fresh from the shower’ towel?), subsisting on Mac 'n Cheese, with tuna on a good night. In their first six months of business they spent US$ 24,000 (including rent, meals, computers, internet access, beer and salaries) — and we're assuming in that order based on the amount of money.

By 2003 they were in beta with their first CMS customer – Gray Television. This turned out to be the single largest SaaS CMS deployment in the world (1700+ seats, 2000+ new pieces of content per week, 30+ sites published).

Today, the Clickability Platform is the platform of choice for sites such as Cantor Fitzgerald, Philly.com, Amcore and of course Gray Television. In addition, the Clickability Interactive Tools are used by clients such as CNN Interactive, The Wall Street Journal and Nascar.com

Market & Pricing

Primary customers for the Clickability Platform are in the Publishing and marketing space. Publishing customers include broadcasters, newspapers, magazine and some pure online publishers. As for marketing clients, these include customers from various industries such as high-tech, manufacturing, financial services, consulting and transportation with marketing and communications sites.

“Anyone who is looking for a scalable effective way to leverage their website strategy in a progressive and innovative fashion is a potential customer of ours.”

Price Range:

According to Clickability, their SaaS solution is 50-90% less expensive than installed software, once you take into consideration all costs associated with an in-house solution.

Clickability has just announced three Product additions: Express, Professional and Enterprise which are described in the following diagrams:

Product Features

Product Pricing

Partners Network:

Clickability has a pretty strong partner network, partnering with some of the top vendors in their area of specialty. Some of these partners include:

Content Delivery:/n Akamai (premium service partners)
Advertising: DoubleClick
Email Marketing: Vertical Response
Web Analytics: Omniture
Website Optimization: Google

Product Root / Original Business Problem

Clickability started by building tools to plug in to major websites. Fast Company was their first customer. Deploying these tools for over 500 sites (including the likes of CNN and Wall Street Journal) enabled them to see what was on the market for CMS products. What they realized was “that the CMS space was completely broken!”

Their take was that it took far too long for companies to implement content management solutions and even longer to implement updates, enhancements and other improvements. They saw software as a service as the solution to these long implementation times.

The diagram below demonstrates that a SaaS development solution can move as quickly as the changing web technology, whereas the traditional software model happens more as a series of steps that can take long periods of time for implementation.

Clickability's Differentiator

Key Features and Ratings

The following sections outline the key features of the Clickability WCM solution. Each section is applied a rating between 1 and 5 (1 being poor and 5 being excellent).

To review a summary table of Features and Rating see the Review Summary section below.

Product Core Technology

Rating: 4
Clickability Platform is based on Open Source technologies such as PHP and MySql and Java. It uses Apache as the web server and Velocity as the templating mechanism. Clickability leverages proven Open Source technologies for “cost effective scale”.

Content Entities

Rating: 5
The root concept of a content entity is an “item”. An author creates a content item by selecting a content type from the navigation. The Content Entry form opens and the author can begin writing the content. Figure 1 shows an example of a content entry form.
Clickability Platform comes with a number of out-of-the-box content types such as blog, Job, press releases, case study, FAQ. The nomclementure can be modified to suit the client. In addition, custom content types can be created.

Figure 1: Content Entry

While an editorial toolbar is available, administrators have the ability to override content formatting using stylesheets in the content templates. Administrators also have the ability to limit the options available in the editor toolbar.
Authors can select a number of categorization properties for the piece of content they create. Categorization is a tiered approach and is defined by the customer. Figure 2 shows a sample categorization page. The fields that can be configured for metadata are limitless and configured for the client.
There’s also a media library that is used to store media assets for the site. A content type can be a media asset or it can contain a media asset. Metadata can be assigned to media assets.
Templating: If the core content entity is a content item, then how does content get into web pages to display on the website? It’s all done by creating templates. You can liken these templates to multi-picture picture frames – giving you the ability to display different content in different sections of one page. The templating environment in Clickability Platform looks pretty straightforward. Novice to advanced users should have no problems using the templating environment.
Developers have an environment for creating and managing templates and other assets like stylesheets. They can also create multiple versions of templates. For example, they can create multiple versions of the home page, each one used for a different purpose.

Figure 2: Content Categorization