The Top 12 Options for Web Content Management

Written by Steven Walling / August 11, 2009 1:05 PM / 12 Comments

Gartner has published its Magic Quadrant for Web content management in 2009, to help CIOs and IT decide just what will meet the needs of the enterprise. Web software is now the fastest growing sector of the enterprise content management market, according to Gartner, and was valued at more $3.3 billion last year.

This annual report identifies the leaders in the industry. We've picked out the top dozen vendors aimed at enterprise content management on the Web. Here are their strengths and weaknesses, to let you get a handle on what's best for your business.

Leaders

While there's some overlap with generally popular offerings — Drupal-based solutions and open source are getting more attention than ever — most of the top dogs in ECM on the Web are specialist vendors who focus solely on the needs of enterprise. Gartner's choices for who fits inside the Magic Quadrant bear this out.

Oracle remains one of the biggest players in this area, despite being better known in many circles for its databases. What really brought them on the scene was the acquisition of Stellent in 2007, and since then their strength has been integrating WCM into their wide-ranging offerings for content management.

Autonomy, which entered the sector through its acquisition of Interwoven this year, tends to appeal most strongly to the marketing side of WCM. While they offer an ability to deliver content that's highly targeted, WCM will continue to be a sideline in terms of profit. While Autonomy can deliver right now, they lack a detailed roadmap for the future of the product.

Open Text is one of the most well-known in this space, and is the top pure play vendor for content management. Despite a close partnership with Microsoft, Garner predicts that Open Text's top competitor will continue to be SharePoint and other .NET software packages.

SDL acquired Tridion in 2007, and since then has shown impressive growth. This is the result of solid capabilities in multilingual and multichannel content management, as well as robust SharePoint integration.

Challengers

While the three companies listed at challengers by Gartner hardly seem like underdogs, software from Microsoft, IBM, and EMC are increasing in importance very rapidly.

Microsoft's SharePoint is growing enormously in market share as a Web content management solution. In addition to feeding off the trust that the Microsoft name inspires in just about every CIO, one of the strengths of SharePoint compared to current leaders is the partner ecosystem that is growing rapidly, and how tightly integrated it can be with Microsoft's other products in e-commerce, Web analytics and search. Of course, as fast as it grows in WCM, SharePoint is hated for its weaknesses as an intranet and document sharing system.

IBM's greatest strength in content management is also its greatest weakness. The fact that Lotus WCM is vertically-focused and is closely integrated with the entire Websphere Portal makes it appealing to organizations who already use the portal. But for those who don't, Lotus seems lacking without the rest of IBM's system.

EMC has been slowly brewing its WCM capabilities since it acquired the fairly popular Documentum in 2003. EMC is especially good in the sense that it works with a broader ECM solution, and can do DAM and records management of Web content too. It's also shown some of the biggest improvements in its latest release, 6.5, through adding technology first used in X-Hive, an XML database and dynamic delivery environment.

Visionaries

A list of honorable mentions shows up in the Visionaries section of the Magic Quadrant. The label might sound fanciful, but most of these up-and-coming vendors are making a real name for themselves.

Sitecore is a Denmark-based company that's also a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. Their .NET CMS is unsurprisingly tied to Microsoft in a multitude of ways, which can be either a plus or a minus, depending on where your enterprise stands technologically.

FatWire Software has a Java software package that focuses on collaborative features and analytics, but suffers from what Gartner calls "costly" customization needs to make it play nice with related technologies.

Ektron is especially famous in the SMB market. Its CMS400.NET integrates relatively well with SharePoint Server.

Day Software sells software based on Java EE, and it's made strides in usability. Despite these improvements sales have lagged, and Gartner predicts that the partnerships with IBM and HP that this Swiss-based vendor has will decline in the future, weakening its position.

Clickability is a pure SaaS vendor in Web content management which is making progress with enterprises fed up with the costs of on-premise WCM, even if SaaS remains on shaky ground.

There are at least a dozen more vendors in enterprise-class Web content management who get short mentions in Gartner's report. Solutions such as Alfresco's open source software or Acquia's Drupal distribution might not warrant inclusion in any list of leaders yet, but they're making respectable gains. For a detailed account, be sure to read the full report.

Comments

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We would love to partner with some of these companies and offer them social web layer on top ;) I was talking to Garner analyst about this yesterday in fact.

Vassil
Blogtronix.com

Posted by: Vassil Mladjov | August 11, 2009 1:49 PM

Obviously most RWW readers would like to see more attention to the open source CMS solutions available. This report, and the Gartner CMS reports of years past, has been misleading to the casual corporate IT leader, due to its inclusion criteria:

"This year, no vendors offering open-source software (OSS) have reached the revenue threshold for inclusion in our formal analysis. Gartner will, therefore, publish separate research to address OSS and WCM."

Because the revenue generated by open source CMS implementations are distributed out to thousands of smaller players, it doesn't show up on the Gartner radar, and thus many corporate IT buyers read the bold print and conclude that Drupal and Joomla aren't up to the job.

They are. Just ask NASA, most every major corporate media company, and the Obama administration.

Gartner says they're publishing a separate OSS report, and I look forward to that. But I wish they'd compare their value alongside their proprietary competitors. They really do provide a better experience, and for much less money.

Posted by: Marcus | August 11, 2009 1:53 PM

I'm sure the Governator had a decent set of requirements, he runs ExpressionEngine just fine ($250).

Posted by: Judd Lyon | August 11, 2009 2:58 PM

With the flexibility that Microsoft SharePoint is provided, I would not be surprised to see it in the top 3 for next year's report.

Posted by: Kanwal Khipple | August 11, 2009 3:56 PM

Marcus,

Some people in government or IT might be willing to give Drupal and Joomla serious consideration. Obviously Open Sourcery wants to cater to those kinds of people.

But the simple truth is that very few enterprises are going to use something without guaranteed support. (You can hardly fault them for that.) That's why companies like Acquia and Alfresco are the ones making substantial traction with open source software for ECM.

Posted by: Steven Walling | August 11, 2009 4:22 PM

Steven, quite so. But Acquia's product, Drupal, deserved to be subjected to the feature analysis and comparisons in this report. Alas, Acquia doesn't charge licensing fees, and leaves implementation to the hundreds of smaller shops like OpenSourcery, so Garter's "gross revenue-based" measuring stick failed to provide readers of this report with the best appraisal of their options.

If Drupal and Joomla are to be kept in a minor leagues on these grounds, then one can't reasonably grant titles to the sluggers from the corporate rosters. Perhaps I'm getting carried away here, but I can see a comparison to minority baseball leagues of the 20th century.

Frankly, most proprietary CMS's can't compete with the value provided by what skilled hands can do with modern, extensible, open source CMS applications.

Posted by: Marcus | August 11, 2009 5:15 PM

Marcus,

I agree that there's a certain bias in Gartner's method, but I think it's a methodology that produces accurate conclusions in this case.

Even if you don't use a revenue-based metric, there is no way that Acquia or other Drupal-based shops are going to top Open Text or SharePoint in a list of leading vendors (if you're talking about enterprise WCM, consumer Web is another story).

Posted by: Steven Walling | August 11, 2009 8:27 PM

As a consultant with a client list that include HomeDepot, MetLife, and DC Comics, I can tell you, two of the three I mentioned use open source CMS. And this is in the retail or service industry where reliability is key.

I would not downplay the effectiveness of open source software.
Yes, Oracle has an outstanding CMS, they also have an amazing DB, both for 'easy' money. But the catch is if you want to run it effectively, you will need to hire an Oracle consultant at $250/hr.... And in some cases, you will have this guy(or gal) for quite a while.

Here are what some smaller companies are considering as well... Do we go open source, and hire a PHP development team at a net cost of $300K/yr? Or do we go with a Java or .NET based 'enterprise' level CMS and hire out a squad for double that yearly cost?

A lot of this stuff is cost benefit, and IT managers/executives need to consider the value add to vying for OS software.

Posted by: Gabriel | August 11, 2009 10:27 PM

When you look at true community open source (companies that contribute back to the community and don't maintain a lock on their own open source distribution), Gartner did include Day Software. Day is a traditional commercial software product based on an open source core (roughly 90-95% of codebase), including:

* Apache Jackrabbit (JCR)
* Apache Felix (OSGi framework)
* Apache Sling (RESTful web app framework)
* Apache Lucene
* Apache Shindig (OpenSocial container)
* Apache Pluto (Portal 2 container)
* Apache Tikka (metadata extraction)
* Apache FOP (PDF generation)
* ... etc.

Basically, we build communities around core infrastructure components and then sell our WCM, DAM, and Social Collaboration apps, which are built atop this open source core. So, to some extent, Gartner's inclusion of Day does include a company whose heart is squarely in the open source camp (like I said, we just contribute most of our open source back to the wider community rather than build a vendor-specific community around it).

I do think Gartner's comments around our partnerships (IBM, HP) should be balanced against our recent earnings, where we highlighted our strongest ever customer growth, revenue growth, and earnings growth. The IBM partnership largely was a legacy from a couple of years ago. It has no impact going forward.

Posted by: Kevin Cochrane | August 11, 2009 10:47 PM

Steven, I question your statement that Drupal can't compete with Open Text or SharePoint in enterprise WCM. I'd love to see an objective, informed, side-by-side comparison.

Posted by: https://me.yahoo.com/a/vDnshIkXteuwfrS_oRjV7lyBPCY-#8c141 | August 29, 2009 10:13 AM

Gartner MQ is a great tool and is thoroughly researched. It is not without flaws, however. One of them is the lack of attention to open-source, which is becoming increasingly the force to reckon with, especially in the small to medium size market segment. The same is true for SaaS, btw.

More importantly though, this MQ is still based on the assumption that WCM is a part of ECM and this greatly colors the conclusions. The majority of the leaders in the quadrant are large ECM vendors.

We all thought WCM to be a part of ECM when we only knew one type of content. We defined content by what we could not do with it. All the stuff that could not be stored in the database was content and had to be stored in an ECM.
Just as Eskimos have dozens of words to describe snow, content management pros now have just as many terms to describe different types of content. Having one jumbo system to manage all of it equally well is difficult and unnecessary.

ECM vendors will be paying more and more attention to what they do best – document management and compliance – while leaving more and more room for the WCM pure plays to grow. We will probably see a reflection of this in the quadrants to come.

Posted by: Dmitri Tcherevik | September 12, 2009 9:29 PM

I'm quite late in the comments here - but I have to agree 100% with Marcus. Especially:

"Frankly, most proprietary CMS's can't compete with the value provided by what skilled hands can do with modern, extensible, open source CMS applications."

There is almost no limit to what can be done with Drupal and Joomla. Try to hold that statement to any proprietary CMS. I doubt it can be done.

Valid argument from all sides above, but I say give the Open Source platforms their due exposure in these reports!

Posted by: Scott Orth | October 12, 2009 12:11 PM