Ektron News & Articles

Ektron (news, site) released some of its 2009 financials and announced sales growth of over 38%. That’s about the only number released by the privately-held Web CMS vendor, so now onto the end-of-year highlights, of course.

As we told you last year, some of the biggest achievements for Ektron were the release of version 8 of CMS400.NET along with some known in the industry geometrical magic.

Also in 2009, Ektron decided to take Professional Services even more into its own hands and gathered about 50 people together for the job. Without, however, leaving the partners hanging. “Ektron’s professional services organization helps AKQA ensure the successful delivery of web solutions to our clients, and is more evidence of Ektron’s commitment to its partners’ success,” said Douglas Smith, technical director at digital agency AKQA.

The company also reported expansion in the U.K. (where the camp was set up in 2007) and APAC markets with a goal to acquire more customers in those regions in 2010.

Martin Aspeli of the Plone (news, site) project recently sat down and evaluated a "whole slew" of web content management systems. From there, he's digested his observations and shared them in the form of a fairly extensive writeup. While it's obviously Plone-centric, there's a lot that applies to anyone who's trying to choose what Web CMS they want to work with.

The long-awaited and rather-delayed release was prematurely leaked a little while ago, but now it’s all official. Ektron CMS400.NET version 8 is live and brings a slew of new features, including usability enhancements, integrated web analytics, API changes, first attempts at CMIS support and new social media capabilities.

In addition, Ektron (news, site) reports growth this year and plans a takeover of the enterprise-level market.

With the M&A activity in the content management space not dwindling down despite the economic crisis, it’s only natural to see the content management industry talent hop around. At times, that happens in a fashion resembling the game called “A Cold Wind Blows.”

Recently, web content management system vendor Ektron (news, site) announced that Tom Wentworth joined them as VP of Business Development. Wentworth comes from the Enterprise CMS player Interwoven (news, site), where he was evangelizing various web solutions that fall under the Autonomy Interwoven ECM suite roof for the past 2 some years. Before that, he worked for over 6 years in Interwoven sales engineering roles.

In the new role, Wentworth will report to Ektron’s founder and CEO Bill Rogers, who is counting on Wentworth’s “experience in driving corporate strategy and revenue.” For Wentworth, working for a much smaller vendor should be a welcome change in scenery.

We’ve seen a slew of Interwoven employees leave for other companies before, so this announcement doesn’t come as a surprise. Yet, it does spur a few questions.

Are things that bad at Interwoven that even the most passionate evangelists are looking for the exit sign? Is it the Autonomy acquisition fallout and the inability to effectively use the acquired talent? Is it because of Autonomy’s reportedly far from nurturing corporate culture and the “fear-and-intimidation style of upper management”? Are we about to see Interwoven navigate the CMS waters a la Titanic?

Expect to hear more from Ektron soon. The recently leaked version 8 should officially be making its entrance any day now...though, ahem, some delays there have been raising eyebrows.

Apparently, there was a little mishap with Web CMS vendor Ektron's (news, site) scheduled publishing process. Not that we're one to be calling a kettle black -- this sort of thing happens around here more than we'd like to admit.

The new v8.0 release of CMS400.NET wasn't supposed to see the light of day for about another week, yet surfaced late yesterday in its full video-and-all glory via a company microsite. In case it's no longer available when you read this, we've got a few screenshots below.

Ektron (news, site) found its sweet spot as one of the Visionaries in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management. We've seen Ektron on other "lists" before, including Gartner's MarketScope. And now, hello, the Magic Quadrant.

Partially, Ektron attributes this positioning to the ability of their CMS product -- EktronCMS400.NET -- to deliver on the Web 2.0 capabilities front. Web 2.0, as Gartner says, “is… breathing new life into the WCM market.” Just when we thought that Web 2.0 was oh so 2007.

The CMS vendor has been working on several strategic initiatives over the past year, so it really should not come as a surprise that Ektron gets a nod from Gartner. We told you about many of Ektron’s happenings, including:

• Ektron’s CMS deployment in the Amazon Cloud
• Professional Services growth
• New offices in Texas and California
• Stronger focus on sales
• Enhancements and updates to EktronCMS400.NET
• Revenue growth in Q1 2009

Ektron thinks that some of the differentiators they have in the competitive Web CMS market are their core CMS product, social networking modules and the professional services group along with partner engineers.

The fact that Ektron is not a sole owner of the Visionaries Magic Quadrant should inspire the company to work even harder and build on the current momentum. Let’s see what they come up with. It's probably not the best time to rest on laurels.

The cloud appears to be the new black in the fashion of web content management. One after another, vendors are conquering the cloud in hopes of dazzling their customers with more hosting options and improved scalability.

Ektron’s (news, site) CMS400.NET content management system is now also cloud-friendly, thanks to their eSync technology that can do bi-directional synchronization with the cloud.

Hosting is also part of the offering. Ektron is using the Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) as a hosting option, allowing customers to run and manage their production, development and staging environments in the cloud, in any combination.

Ektron’s eSync technology can be used for bi-directional synchronization between the cloud and a customer’s local environment for the entire web site, specific pages or select pieces of content; giving developers the ability to code locally and sync up with the cloud.

Ektron says it will provide a set of free Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), on which customers can deploy their CMS400.NET instances. Using these Ektron-provided AMIs, new virtual machines can be provisioned with CMS400.NET. Developers can take advantage of the provisioning and automated software deployment.

While the cloud option may not necessarily work for all Ektron Web CMS customers, it is certainly worth looking into.

After what seemed like much deliberation and preparation, EPiServer (news, site) has finally announced its official U.S. presence.

There is a good chance that competitive temperature is going to rise in the North American web content management market.
 

DotNetNuke (news, site), an open source Microsoft.Net web content management provider, offers both a community and professional version of their solution. The professional version contains some features and functionality not available in the community version, features designed for the enterprise.

The latest version of DotNetNuke Professional hits the streets today. Get the scoop on what's new in the Web CMS.

The J. Boye Conference's 2009 Web Idol competition was fiercely fought, with eZ Systems, Ektron and SilverStripe presenting Web Content Management Systems and Isys demonstrating an enterprise intranet search.

While Isys, SilverStripe and Ektron presented compelling demos, Bård Farstad's eZ Publish Web CMS proved the winner, with an elegant drag-and-drop interface and on-the-fly photo integration.

After snapping a few shots of the judges, Bård uploaded them into a gallery he created with a few clicks.

For light- to medium-weight sites and rich blogs -- eZ Publish supports video, naturally -- this Web CMS makes creation, well, eZ.

First a move to the infamous Bay Area, then an addition of professional services, then some double digit growth in revenues in Q1—yes, Ektron is doing pretty well for themselves.

As another of the lucky few Web CMS providers that has refused to succumb to the horrible economy—rather, they’ve flourished in it—Ektron is doing all they can to maintain this wave of good fortune, including beefing up their sales team. Accordingly, Mark Willson, former iCrossing vice president of technology, has joined Ektron as the new vice president of enterprise solutions.

“We have sustained a strong growth rate despite the economic climate and continue to lead the industry in the development of Web content management technology,” stated Bill Rogers, chief executive officer at Ektron. Given Mark’s deep experience working with Fortune 500 clients in the Web solutions industry, he will play a critical role in growing enterprise sales and expanding Ektron’s market leadership.”

No pressure on Mark, right? Just lead the development of the company’s enterprise market strategy, be responsible for enterprise sales, maintain highly important partnerships and shape functional requirements for future product road maps. No sweat.

All jokes aside, there’s currently tremendous growth opportunity for Web CMS. We all know there’s no time like the present, but as far as this niche is concerned,  there’s especially no time like this particular present to make big moves. Ektron seems to understand that, and we expect several other companies will follow suit in the months to come.

With budgets the way they are at the moment, you could not be faulted for a bit of skepticism around Forrester Research’s January report, which said Web Content Management activity remained, and would remain, high for 2009.

But they may have it right because Ektron (news, site), a provider of scalable Web Content Wanagement and authoring solutions, has just reported a 26% growth in year-on-year revenues for the Q1 of this year.

      
Everyone loves to appeal to the non-techie, including Ektron, a player in the Web content management software game. The company is set to unveil its new CMS400.NET PageBuilder technology during the third annual Local User Group tour. The tour starts February 11th and includes 12 cities worldwide.

Ektron has a really good .net Web CMS. At least so says Gartner, KMWorld and Inc 5000. So why would they want to go and add a slew of professional services that may possibly take away from their ability to provide a quality solution? Probably because they know their customers need more than a good piece of technology. They need to know how to properly implement it to support their business requirements.

And so Ektron’s Complete Services Solution was born…

PaperThin, the producer of ColdFusion-based Web CMS CommonSpot, announced that its 2008 Q2 and Q3 revenues shattered all company records, having grown an average of more than 50% year over year. Furthermore, the company’s average deal size increased by more than 30%.

Now, it’s time to update the product, perhaps. And PaperThin plans on doing so in 2009. The last major product release from PaperThin was in October, 2007, when CommonSpot 5.0 came out.