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Jahia is getting a $22.5 million cash infusion from Invus, a New York City-based investment firm, the Geneva, Switzerland-based open source content management system (CMS) vendor announced today.
The funds will help CEO Elie Auvray grow Jahia's customer base, especially in the enterprise space. Auvray told CMSWire the company plans to further develop its user experience platform to improve integration with third-party platforms — an apparent sign of more more technology partnerships to come.
Jahia’s Portal
In Gartner's most recent Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals (registration required), Jahia was rated a Niche player for its Java platform that pulls together Web CMS, document management and portal capabilities.
Gartner described Jahia as one of the few vendors that offers a unified portal and Web CMS, built from the ground up with enough flexibility to enable enterprises to build and scale portals, websites and applications. In terms of bang for your buck, Gartner added that it saw Jahia’s platform as better value than many other vendors.
So why has it not grown as quickly as you might expect? According to Gartner, Jahia’s focus on product development has limited both its market visibility and its growth.
In fact, these were the only two criticisms Gartner could find. It argued that Jahia needs to gain market and mind share to assure customers and prospects of its long-term viability. It also needs to develop in terms of size and revenue to make an impact in the enterprise space.
Still, the platform has its admirers. Just last month, Jahia won a Critics' Choice CMS Award for the best JAVA CMS for Small to Midsize Businesses, as well as the Critics' Choice for Best Enterprise JAVA CMS.
The awards are given by a panel of judges who are not directly affiliated to or with, any CMS vendors competing in the awards. This year, the awards recognized platforms by programming language, enterprise size and additional qualities.
Jahia Form Builder
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Jahia’s Funding Round
Jahia has been in talks with Invus for some time to raise the funds to tackle the issues Gartner noted. Auvray told us the company selected Invus because of its commitment to the long term development of the company. "Invus shares Jahia's vision of sustainable success. It's not looking for a quick exit. It will help us do whatever it takes to make Jahia a leader in the User Experience Platform segment,” Auvray said.
Auvray said Jahia needs a marketing drive to push its portfolio deeper into the enterprise space, noting:
We've enjoyed an amazing customer transformation rate, but with no means to reach out to our market. In other words when an organization needs a solution and they find Jahia, chances are they will adopt it: this is why we would like more businesses to be aware of the existence of our product."
From a broader perspective this means the development of a number of products dedicated to making marketers more effective with online content, connectors to third-party, complementary technologies and a reference implementation for commerce, he added.
2014: A Good Year
Jahia is looking for attention in the enterprise space, and it’s going about it in the right way. It just wrapped up a busy year of releases,the most recent of which is Form Factory, which it boasted is designed to free digital marketing teams from the constraints of IT by enabling them to create and monitor the effectiveness of their own forms.
This follows the release of Jahia 7 in April. That was a significant milestone for the company, not just for the release but also for the elucidation of its "digital industrialization" concept.
Digital industrialization involves the development of an uninterrupted, optimized and continuous workflow of digital experiences, from the identification of a business need to the delivery of a solution to meet that need, Jahia noted. This new round of funding will help Jahia develop this concept, which it claims offers organizations the ability to respond to business needs quickly and automatically.
Auvray said at least some of the funding will be used to hire more people in the US and, to a lesser extent, in Europe. He said he is looking for new talent that is interested in pushing the company's vision forward — people who are “motivated by building long term and sustainable success.”
