Saas Cms News & Articles

Today the news dropped that San Francisco-based SaaS Web content management vendor, Clickability, which had previous raised more than US$ 15 million in backing, was purchased by Limelight Networks for US$ 10 million. Ouch. 

Announcements are often timed for the beginning of conferences, and Drupalcon Chicago 2011 is no exception. In addition to the official launch of Acquia's Drupal SaaS offering, Drupal Gardens, Buzzr (news, site) has also announced that their SaaS Web CMS -- a Drupal derivative -- has officially exited from beta into full production release. Let's take a look.

Acquia (news, site), the commercial open source company offering Drupal Web CMS (news, site) support, products and services, has been busy solidifying its position as the first option everyone thinks of any time the words "cloud" and "Drupal" are used together.

OmniUpdate (news, site) -- the makers of the OU Campus Web CMS primarily targeted at the higher education market -- released version 9.3. The highlight of which is the ability to publish content to Twitter.

In the hyper-competitive market of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) web content management, vendors are desperate to stand out. Squarespace (news, site) differentiates its offering through in-line editing capabilities, an extensive embeddable widgets library, strong iPhone support and dynamic scalability behind the scenes. Sound like your cup of tea? Read on.

Web CMS vendors’ affection for web engagement is spreading faster than I can say WEM. SaaS CMS provider Clickability (news, site) is heading that direction as well with the release of Website Marketing Acceleration (WMA) module.

I have given up trying to figure out if there is a limit to the number of products that can co-exist in the hosted web cms landscape. Just when you think the category is saturated, along comes an offering like Osmek looking to differentiate itself from the myriad of competitors.

 A new partnership between cloud content management provider SpringCM (news, site) and technology consulting company Acumen will bring cloud-based solutions to government agencies, particularly document management and workflow solutions.

If you don’t remember when CrownPeak (news, site) added their own testing, targeting and measurement tools last November, then don’t worry. They’re adding similar tools -- again -- but this time it’s via integration with Omniture (news, site).
 

Crisis, what crisis? Almost every Web CMS vendor who has to or chooses to publicize their 2009 financials is reporting growth and bright future. Some are even going public. OmniUpdate (news, site) joins this joyous bunch and says 2009 was a success in its higher education focused web content management segment.

Last year was marked for OU as a year of record sales revenues. Other 2009 highlights include:

• 28 new clients
• Existing customers increasing/renewing their service levels/terms
• 12 product releases with 16 additional capabilities and feature enhancements (e.g. multi-language preview, global find and replace, garbage can, Serena Collage conversion tool, Live Delivery Platform and others)
• Onboarding of integration partners
• Ability to deploy OmniUpdate's CMS -- OU Campus -- either traditionally or as SaaS

As with all privately-held companies, the amount of financial information being released is limited. For buyers looking to evaluate Web CMS products for higher ed verticals, record sales is probably a little too ambiguous to indicate the overall viability and stability of the company.

While growing revenue is good news, we’ll continue to watch OmniUpdate and update you on where these folks are headed.

Web content management got a lot of attention in 2009. The old way of doing things was declared over and a new way of thinking declared necessary. Many things changed, from the economic environment to the way Web CMS products are being built and deployed.

What we started seeing is that systems can't just slide by with basic functionality, or traditional deployment models. And one of the things we did before skipping out for our holiday break was to talk about the current trends in web content management.

Here's a recap:

• Platform vs Specialization: We are seeing the division of WCM platforms and vendors offering specialized WCM point solutions. We are also having great discussions on the beloved WCM acronym and where its future lies.
• Integration of Web Analytics: The needs to provide engaging user experiences is more important than ever before. But do we really need our analytics solutions to be tightly integrated? The debate is on.
• Tightly Integrated Search: We've always had some kind of search within our WCMs -- or at least we should have -- whether it was part of the solution or third party. But now the move towards tighter integration is upon us.
• Cloud Hosted vs SaaS: The battle for the cloud: is the best approach cloud hosted or SaaS? Some vendors will straddle the fence, while others will stand their ground.
• Integration of Social Media: Lots of social media functionality in WCM systems, a little bit of WCM in social computing apps. Are the two converging? Or just battling for prime time real estate?

You can read the full article Emerging Trends in Web Content Management to get more detail, but we are curious to know:

It was a relatively good 2009 for many web content management vendors and Bridgeline (news, site) was no exception. The company announced record revenues and a nice increase in customer base for their fiscal year ending September 30, 2009.

SpringCM (news, site) has brought out a new version of its SaaS based enterprise content management system today, adding features and functionality designed to support records management and make the lives of application developers a little bit easier.

CrownPeak (news, site) recognizes the importance of URL shortening for social media and social networking, while retaining the ability to measure that content through web analytics tools.

The news release of the CrownPeak URL Shortener allows CrownPeak CMS users to take advantage of the automatically generated short URLs, or modify them manually to create a customized URL. Voila, and we are social media-ready.

A job that can be done by services like bit.ly and 3.ly, is now handled within the CMS itself to generate CPeak.us and alike URLs.

Some of the uses of CrownPeak’s new URL Shortener include:

• Web and social media content publishing with CrownPeak CMS ability to automatically publishe content directly into some popular social networks.
• Web analytics integration (with CrownPeak Analytics, WebTrends, Omniture’s Site Catalyst, etc.) can be used to track both regular and short URL-ed pages with a breakout of the traffic.
• URL illustrations for highlighting available content in CrownPeak CMS Social Networking Tools for further dissemination and re-use.

Being a module of the SaaS CMS, The CrownPeak URL Shortener is available to all current customers as part of their existing SLAs with no extra licensing fees.

Yes, one of those “strategic partnerships” was announced between hosted Web CMS vendor OmniUpdate (news, site) and Noel-Levitz, higher education web design and development firm.

Under the mantra of “holistic approach” to website development and web content management, the two aim to bring OmniUpdate’s CMS, OU Campus, closer to those in hi-ed.

OmniUpdate is well known for its affection for higher education, with many of its customers being in this vertical. The joint effort is focused on helping hi-ed clients build websites using OU Campus as the CMS of choice.

Last we’ve heard from the Saas CMS vendor was when it released version 8.6 of OU Campus with improved editorial usability. In 8.5, it was mostly about proper garbage disposal and controlling those random delete-all bouts.

Like Day Software, OmniUpdate also courts the Serena Collage unfortunates wanting to migrate away towards brighter days of web content management.