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Get the NewsletterReport: U.S. CMS Market to Explode, Open Source is the Catalyst
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| Published Oct 12, 2009
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That is a conclusion Basex, an analyst and research firm, came to in a (at times, admittedly questionable) report entitled Content Management Systems: The New Math for Selecting Your Platform released in September 2009.
The researchers are saying the content management market is set to explode in the next several years, and open source CMS vendors are contributing to this growth, as well as to how customers are changing their CMS selection processes. Let's take a look at details — some of them you may find quite amusing.
Open Source as a Driver in the CMS Market Explosion
Basex estimates that the U.S. market for content management reached about US$ 4.1 billion in revenue in 2008. By 2014, they estimate that it should jump to US$ 10 billion.
While we’ve seen many top-tier consolidations in the market recently (Autonomy, Open Text), which Basex says is a sign of proprietary CMS market maturity, mid-tier vendors (FatWire, Day) are thriving for the most part.
Meanwhile, open source content management projects (Joomla!, Drupal, Plone) are getting more attention as well and see rapid growth. It should be noted, though, that some organizations lack understanding of how exactly open source works (in terms of reliability and licensing, for example), or don’t even consider it for “political reasons,” according to the firm.
Basex says that Alfresco and Bluenog are “leading the charge” in the commercial open source market. Umm, many may not agree with this stance. What about players like Nuxeo and Acquia? If we were to judge market leadership by the number of customers and license deal sizes mentioned in this report, the math wouldn’t be the same. But let’s go on.
Open Source Affecting the CMS Selection Process
Basex says that open source is significantly changing the process of selecting a content management solution. With content getting out of control, Basex says it’s more important than ever to have “the right content management tool” for your company.
Then the research firm adds that “Fortunately, it’s gotten simpler to find the right [CMS] tool.” Umm, really? We do like this wording (found in the same report) better: “Choosing the right content management system is far from straight forward.”
While the report is profiling 16 CMS vendors, the most mentions seem to be given to Bluenog and Alfresco (approximately twice as many, compared to other open source or proprietary CMS vendors). If, in fact, certain vendors were involved in the makings of the report as underwriters, it would be nice to disclose that.
The vendor profiles include Autonomy, Acquia, Alfresco, Bluenog, Day Software, EMC, EPiServer, FatWire, Hippo, IBM, Microsoft, MindTouch, Nuxeo, Oracle, Open Text and Xerox.
Choosing the Right CMS Report
This report is part of a report series and costs US$ 1,799 special, or US$ 1,999 regular price.
We would suggest to carefully check information in the report against other sources. If you want to get a bit more depth. It probably wouldn’t be sensible to use the report as your sole reference when selecting a CMS, or when trying to get a general feel of the content management landscape.
Small (or big?) things like referring to CMIS as “the new standard… announced in September 2008,” whereas CMIS is not yet an official standard and only very recently got to the OASIS public review step, makes us wonder. We don’t question that CMIS may become a standard one day, but we do like to clarify “small” details like this one.
Furthermore, the breakdown of CMS vendors into tiers in this report is slightly unconventional — with Microsoft ECM and SharePoint sitting right next to Percussion and Alterian. Not to mention there is a lack of clear differentiation between on-the-premise and hosted/SaaS vendors. One could imagine this distinction being an important one to many organizations in search of a CMS.
Leaving out DotNetNuke and eZ Publish from commercial open source CMS vendors seems like a significant omission. Some might also question Basex putting Bluenog into the commercial open source box — actually, we’ve heard that debate before — with its mix of proprietary code, Apache and other open source software.
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Durpal (my current CMS) is great, but has taken many months to deploy and some rather large dollars to consultants. People should be aware that open source does not equal quick deployment or easy management. We had a customer recently turn us on to Platformic and looking to use them on future engagements. I see you have positive remarks on your site, hope it will meet our needs.
Basex is one of the oldest analyst firms in the U.S. and has been producing independent research for over a quarter of a century. The company prides itself on its independence and has been recognized for its separation of church and state many times over the years, most recently by an article in CIO magazine. The company does not write or publish commissioned research reports..
The fact that several companies are mentioned more frequently than others in the first report in the Content Management Systems series, a report that mentions and covers 32 vendors and 43 platforms, is a statistical footnote hardly worthy of mention. The mass of vendors and platforms covered makes it all the more curious that the author of the (above) article questions whether the report might have been underwritten by one or more of these vendors,
“Content Management Systems: The New Math for Selecting Your Platform” is the first report to appear in our report series, “The Definitive Guide to Today's Content Management Systems and Vendors.” In addition to what is covered in the initial report, the series includes vendor profiles for 16 companies, namely Autonomy, Acquia, Alfresco, Bluenog, Day Software, EMC, EpiServer CMS, FatWire, Hippo, IBM, Microsoft, Mindtouch, Nuxeo, Oracle, Open Text, and Xerox.
End-users have already found the report helpful in understanding the tremendous change that is taking place in the content management space and we applaud CMSWire for the parts of the above article that support this.
I use Dotnetnuke for myself and my clients. TO me it is so easy to set up. I can have a clients website up and running within hours.
It's open source, took 3rd place in the 2008 OpenSourceCMS awards.
Yes it's .NET based and MS based, but hey it's a good CMS
I think everybody agrees after reading this article that Basex should be on the blacklist and not taken seriously anymore ;-)
I would love to see a 'not paid for' report in which the Enterprise CMS really compete between closed source & open source.
I think systems like Alfresco, Hippo CMS, Nuxeo, etc. do well against the systems which are bought solely because they have good salesmen pushing them: Fatwire, Documentum, SharePoint, Tridion, etc.
This is especially true when you consider how little innovation has been done by the closed source vendors. They bring out new components, but are far behind from a technology standpoint of view (JSR-170, templating engines, user generated content in secure environments, scalability, open standards, etc.)
Most reports are checklist about components like, can you build a poll, do you have a forum, etc. They don't understand the real challenges which you face during a large CMS project.
Hello
Buying a CMS is not just buying a technology. You can have the best CMS but the wrong service provider. As Greg Monet says, a project may take time and that will depend a lot of services provider's expertise. Plone has hundreds of companies which provide support worldwide, as you see at http://plone.net but that's not always the case for Open Source CMSs. Therefore, a CMS report could be just the beginning.
The license cost vs cost of services required to deploy a CMS solution is a point in favor to open source CMSs, just compare these between Plone, Alfresco and SharePoint: http://robertoallende.com/emprendedor/licencias-plone-alfresco-y-sharepoint and the same happens with innovation, when you've a distributed production ecosystem as in open source, improvements won't depend just on one vendor.
Weird that the best open source system in the world — Plone — does not get a mention?
Nasa, Nokia, Oxfam and ten of thousands of others rely on it from businesses to governments and NGO's. So no real discussion of high level, open source content management systems can be complete without it. This is a pure marketing move an not a real research.
Actually they do mention Plone along with others that they say are seeing “rapid growth”. Does anyone know if the report pinpoints the drivers of this “new” demand for CMSes?
David,
According to the report, one of the key drivers in open source popularity is the cost/TCO. Open source, they say, is “free.” With closed-source vendors, you have to pay for licensing and maintenance, for example. Which, according to Basex, is not the case with OSS. Basex does mention that orgs should expect to pay for consulting even with OSS CMS vendors.
Hope this helps,
Irina Guseva
Stats, like surveys can be configured to not tell the complete story and make a report show what they want the consumer to see. The report may have started with honest and good intentions but now it appears to be a means of profit for both those who produce the report as well as those whose profile is in the report and that can be a receipe for greed and then corruption.