Content Management Matters ™

CrownPeak, a Gold sponsor of the Gilbane Conference that starts tomorrow in San Francisco, has announced some major new features for its web content management system that should make both developers and end-users as excited as a school boy in a comic shop.

This new set of features includes support for Microsoft developers, better file management and improved web analytics with the flavor of Web 2.0.

CrownPeak has a little more money in their pocket these days. They have just secured US$ 6m in funding from a second round of venture capital financing bringing the total raised to US$ 10.25m. What are they going to do with all the cash?

The second round brought out a new firm, SunAmerica Ventures, to sit alongside their existing investors - Sigma Partners and Altos Ventures. Troy Fukumoto from SunAmerica will join the CrownPeak board which already has a member from each of the other major investment companies.

So what exactly is a web content management vendor who provides their software as a service going to do with all that money? Well, CrownPeak isn't being explicit about the details, only saying it will be used to accelerate new product development initiatives and spend more money on marketing. It's all about "customer value" they say.

In February, CrownPeak came out with their content management SaaS offering. In January they announced integrated support for Google's Open Social. So maybe we'll be seeing more of a foray into social computing capabilities in their software, especially in the SaaS version of their software.

It looks like there might be a battle brewing in the SaaS Web Content Management world. CrownPeak has decided to go full force in hosted web content management and is now offering a website and product suite on ContentManagement.com for small to medium-sized companies.

Crownpeak has been around for awhile offering content management services, but this is their first foray into the delivery side of the content management equation. Does this solution put them on equal footing with competitor Clickability?

CrownPeak has announced integrated support for Google's Open Social, Google Gadgets and a number of other social networking standards.

CrownPeak customers will henceforth be able to build rich Web applications from within the CrownPeak CMS and share them on other sites including social networking sites like Facebook, Orkut and Salesforce.com.