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the Free CMSWire NewsletterThe Forrester Wave: Web Content Management for Online Customer Experience (CXM) has just arrived and it reads like a who's who of web content management. Seems there are few WCM vendors who don't make some attempt to support the delivery of a complete online customer experience, but most still have a lot of work to do. Who leads and who challenges? Read on.
WCM Breeds CXM
They all pretty much excel at basic web content publishing, which is why most have moved to the next level — the customer experience. Forrester defines CXM as:
A set of solutions which enable the management and delivery of dynamic, targeted, consistent content, offers, products, and service interactions across digitally enabled consumer touchpoints
And while most are working on their solution for CXM, there is still much work to be done. They come from various backgrounds as. Some hail from the world of enterprise content management, like OpenText, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. Others like Adobe, SDL, Autonomy, Alterian and IBM offer CXM stacks. And then there's the list of independents and open source vendors such as Sitecore, Ektron, CoreMedia, GX, Drupal, DotNetNuke, Alfresco and eZ Systems (just to name a few).
Forrester evaluated ten of these WCM vendors against 110 criteria and found that no one vendor offered all the components of a CXM solution. However, that doesn't really matter because most customers are looking for solutions that can integrate with existing solutions already in use (web analytics and CRM software topped the list of apps CXM solutions need to be able to integrate with).
The Components of CXM
According to Forrester there are three primary components of CXM solutions:
- Process based solutions for creating experiences: This is where most vendor focus heavily as it includes WCM itself, digital asset management, customer relationship management, e-Commerce, marketing campaign management and a few others.
- Delivery Solutions: In addition to a content delivery tier that is often coupled with the Web CMS, delivery solutions include personalization, recommendation engines, search, marketing automation and more.
- Customer Intelligence: A/B and multivariate testing, web and social analytics.
In its research Forrester found that there are a number of different initiatives that customers are looking at deploying in the next twelve months. Topping that list is delivery mobile devices, content targeting based on browsing behavior, distribution of content to social networks and analytics in context in the content management system.
The Customer Experience Evaluation
Forrester looking specific elements within the current offering, they looked at the strategic direction of the vendor and at its market presence. Ten vendors, Adobe, Autonomy, Ektron, FatWire, IBM, Microsoft, OpenText, Oracle, SDL and Sitecore, were selected to be evaluated. Each has a strong track record for web content management, has an extended solution for multi-channel, interactive experiences and are of interest to Forrester clients.
They also had to have a minimum of U$ 25 million in annual revenues.
And the Wave says:
- SDL and Adobe lead
- Autonomy, OpenText, FatWire and Sitecore are the immediate competitors
- Ektron is close
- IBM, Microsoft and Oracle offer narrower functionality, but differentiators that could make the difference.
Note that just prior to this report arriving, Oracle made its bid to acquire FatWire, which likely will push it up to the competitor level next time around.
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