Ektron News & Articles

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.

From East to West… Ektron is now ready to jump into those cowboy boots and embrace the oh-so-desired Bay Area. The Web CMS vendor (quite predictably so) announced the opening of two new offices — in San Francisco, California, and in Austin, Texas.

The addition of the new offices will extend Ektron’s market reach and provide additional support and services critical to the company’s expanding customer base and partner channel.

Ektron reports increasing demand for its products and services over the past 5 years. It also shows the revenue growth rate of over 400%.

During the past two years, due to the consistent increase in sales and ongoing development of the company’s partner channel, Ektron grew staff levels to approximately 200 employees and opened offices in Toronto, Canada, Sydney, Australia and the U.K.

The new San Francisco office will serve as a services and training facility. The Austin office will provide additional sales and services resources.

Coming on the heels of the September announcement of Ektron CMS400.NET v7.6 and Ektron’s new deployment options, Ektron is expanding big time. No wonder — it’s cheap, flexible, gets accolades every now and then and demos well.

Sitecore, a famed .NET Web CMS vendor, announced that its 2008 revenues have grown by over 100% over the prior fiscal. Reportedly, 95% of revenues are coming from new license sales, 4% — from training and less than 1% — from Professional Services.

While this kind of revenue percentage distribution may seem kind of funky to some, knowing Sitecore’s focus on software development and exclusive outsourcing of PS and related implementation activities to its third-party integrators and partners — we are not surprised.

MResult Corp. released its new Hospital Portal Starter Site based on the Web CMS Ektron CMS400.NET.

The Starter Site includes a customizable information architecture, content templates and pre-defined functional modules designed to help hospitals quickly implement consumer-facing Web sites.

It’s that time of the year again. It’s time to shop for those shiny and new 2009 Lamborghini models, as well as for the new 2009 Web CMS report from CMS Watch.

The Lamborghini of Web CMS researchers, CMS Watch works diligently every year interviewing customers, vendors, partners and all sorts of other people on the CMS street to get the skinny on the Web CMS ecosphere and to give selected vendors an A or a D, depending on how well they did during 2008.

Brace yourselves and read on…

Ektron, a Web CMS vendor, released feature-packed Ektron CMS400.NET version 7.6. Many of the new features and pricing structure changes were made to improve performance and affordability. Other new features like multisite support ensure that the scope of Ektron is virtually unlimited.

Ektron is getting some love… again. The Web CMS vendor has made it to the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing private companies for 2008. This marks Ektron’s second consecutive appearance on Inc.’s annual list – this year, at # 1,607.

Another one bites the dust — er — makes the list. KMWorld’s List of Trend Setters for 2008 also includes Ektron and their CMS400.Net content management solution.

Now you all know who Ektron is, they are the little guy that beat out the likes of Vignette, Microsoft, Open Text, Oracle, SDL Tridion, Sitecore, EMC and others for top spot in Gartner’s MarketScope for Web Content Management 2008. The only one they didn’t “beat” was Interwoven.

According to Hugh McKellar, KMWorld editor-in-chief, “Ektron has proven that they are committed to providing both quality and excellence in their solutions that benefit the customer experience.”

Other than winning all these awards, Ektron’s been pretty busy this year. They opened offices in Canada, brought social networking into the office as part of their solution offering, integrated CMS400.net with Silverlight, launched a new partner portal and more. Whew…busy little beavers aren’t they.

Now on version 7.5 of the web content management solution CMS400.Net, we expect to see even more from these guys over the next little while.

While we don’t argue with these vendors making the list — in fact, in most cases it’s easy to see why they do — it would be nice if KMWorld was a little more specific on what “trend setting” really means and how it applies to each vendor. Maybe we’ll see more detail in the Septemeber issue of the magazine when the list is released in full.