Irina Guseva: Random Thoughts on CMS, WCM, ECM and Other Acronyms

It is an exciting time for SaaS content management: both in the WCM and ECM spaces.  End of the year — logical time to reflect on the year passing by and trend out the year to come. 

I recently pondedred about the future of  SaaS Content Management myself. The Lamborghini of Web CMS researchers, CMS Watch, also announced their take on trends in SaaS Web Content Management for 2009 in conjunction with their 2009 Web CMS Report.

While CMS Watch acknowledges consistent growth in the acceptance of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) models, at the same time, Jarrod Gingras refers to major SaaS-based Web CMS vendors — Clickability, CrownPeak and OmniUpdate — as “relatively small players” that still need to evolve to meet the changing customer demands.

Major 2009 SaaS Web CMS Trends according to CMS Watch:

1. Customers Want More Than Just Software

2. Vendors Turn More to Implementation Partners

3. Vendors Pay More Attention to Developers’ Needs

Full article on CMSWire: 2009 Trends in SaaS Web Content Management

I still think CMS Watch (out of the blue) was too nice to CQ5. But that’s OK. A demo over lunch sounds much more lekker (my fave word in Dutch) than getting your hands dirty with the new release. 

InformationWeek is also hyped about CQ5. Hagopian is quoting me again (thanks, Peter):

For an in-depth overview of CQ5.1, check out Irina Guseva’s detailed piece on CMSWire.com. She also features a review of the release on her personal blog as well as a run-through of the installation experience. Together these pieces offer a hands-on uderstanding of the ups and downs of CQ5.1.

What I am really curious about is how upgrades from CQ 3.5.x and CQ 4.x are going with that “update tool”/update wizard still in beta. If, of course, customers are, indeed, jumping into the upgrade so soon after the release.

I couldn’t agree more with CMS Watch’s Theresa Regli about loving all things Italian, including the gorgeous Lamborghinis (Yes, revving engines is my other passion right next to CMS). Yum! Even when they come as my playful reference to CMS Watch as “The Lamborghini of Web CMS Researchers“:

At CMS Watch we love Italy and many things Italian. Our Founder Tony Byrne spent time in Italy as a student, my maternal grandparents were born in Italy and I keep my pasta machine at the ready in my kitchen, Kas Thomas is married to a fellow Italian-American, and Alan Pelz-Sharpefell in love with his Italian wife of 20+ years in London, when he was but a young lad. Adriaan Bloem has been known to drive from his home in the Netherlands to speed through the rolling hills of Tuscany, and earlier this week, upon the release of our Web CMS Report 2009, we were called The Lamborghini of Web CMS Researchers. Bene…molto bene!

Full article on CMS Watch:

http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1390-Friends,-Romans,-Countrymen…?source=RSS

I came across an interesting interview today: CrownPeak CEO Jim Howard talked about WCM and SaaS to FCM. Apparently, SaaS is really an industry to watch in the future. FCM says:

But the growth and acceptance of SaaS, not coincidentally, has mirrored CrownPeak’s growth. In the past seven years, CrownPeak has experienced explosive growth, with over 90% year-over-year revenue increases.

Those are some impressive numbers. Let’s see if the trend continues this year.

In Howard’s opinion, SaaS is advantageous in a tough economy due to three main reasons:

1. Low upfront or no upfront fee
2. Turn the contract off on short notice
3. High levels of service, regardless of the state of IT budgets

Yes, the IT budgets are a tough subject nowadays, so SaaS may as well be the cure.

At the same time, CNN Money quotes Gartner saying that “Software as a service is forecast to have a compound annual growth rate of 22.1% through 2011 for the aggregate enterprise application software markets, more than double the growth rate for total enterprise software.”

And this is just days after CMSWatch released the 2009 Web CMS Report, and I said that:

SaaS-based CMS models are the red-hot, next new thing. Or not… The next year should tell us which vendors can really deliver on the promises of SaaS, as CMSWatch’s Thomas points out.

Darwin said “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” Following this principle, it will be interesting to see how SaaS Web CMS vendors survive in the tough economy.

Hot Banana has been quite cold lately. No media coverage since March 2008, and no internal press since May 2008. Are they still alive?

Clickability and Spring CM seem to be doing quite well. Spring CM mostly deals with Document Management and workflow though, and — in the light of eDiscovery and compliance — that’s a hot market.

Not much I’ve heard lately from OmniUpdate or Marqui. The latter was bought out in August 2008 by “a group of private investors” for an undisclosed amount. The former mainly caters to the educational sector; it’s latest product release — v8 — goes back to May 2008. This was the most recent bit of news the company has released since.

The question of security of SaaS CMS can certainly be argued. In most cases, the odds are in favor of SaaS vendors claiming they are stable, low-cost and low-risk way to do Web CMS — and they have their grounds. Your Web sites are outside the firewall in many cases anyway, so what is there to worry about? Low-cost is true in most cases compared to the often cost- and resource-burdensome implementations of non-hosted WCM vendors. Low-risk — not so much, SaaS CMS or not.

However, when a SaaS Web CMS vendor goes out of business, what will happen to your Web site and your content? Content migrations could be the answer. But this just all sounds a bit painful. Plus, not everything can be migrated by running a myriad of DB scripts. There are also templates, workflows, dependencies, content types, user groups and permissions, media libraries, etc.  — these guys are your manual work candidates in most cases.

As with any vendor, there are numerous pros and cons to SaaS CMS. This topic would probably not even be a topic for discussion, has there not been an unpleasant change in the global economy.

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.

Full article on CMSWire here:

2009 Web CMS Report From CMS Watch Has Arrived

At least, that’s what it looks like… Just came across several posts on various job sites about SDL Tridion looking to hire a Software Developer for its San Jose, CA, office.

Pieter may come and go, but the show must go on.

The new venture is positioned as part of the SDL Tridion Development Lab, headquartered in Amsterdam and supported by guys in Kiev, Ukraine.

The Ukrainians are hiring, too, by the way. They lure folks in with:

1. “Good, totally official ‘white’ salary”
2. “Business trips to Holland”
3. “Free lunches, corporate parties, picnics, sport programs”

Awww, how very post-Soviet, makes me want to tear up Some things just never change.

OK, let’s get back on track with the SDL Tridion Development Lab:

Our Development Lab is an international blend of ambitious software engineers who take pride in developing products that facilitate the business-critical processes of our customers. We create Content Management software for multinational business communication. We choose technology to match not just the problem at hand, but also the infrastructure requirements imposed by our customers.

Currently, the San Jose office houses mostly SDL Tridion U.S. Professional Services staff, with R&D — it looks like — to come very soon.

So, if you’ve got skills in Microsoft .NET and/or Java, sounds like you can get a job with the SDL Tridion Development Lab. Oh, and some knowledge of XML, XSLT, DHTML, AJAX, DOM won’t hurt either. Trust me on this one

If you’re a fan of the Agile software development methodology, you definitely sound like the right match for SDL Tridion that says:

We do all of our software development using a Scrum process. This means that the team is largely self-organizing and, within a clear, small set of constraints, is left to optimize its own work. Scrum also means that every month, your product manager can expect to see new product functionality that adds value to our customers.

Speaking of skillsets… Leads me to think of an opinion by Adriaan Bloem posted on CMS Watch not so long ago. He was poking fun at this job post for a Boston Ad agency (Ummm, I wonder who that could possibly be…) looking for a Trdion developer with “Strong .Net Skills, XSLT, JSP, UNIX and Java.” All of that? In one person? Right… Good luck with that

SDL Tridion’s R&D presence in the heart of the self-proclaimed capital of Silicon Valley surely seems like a logical progression of the company’s U.S. expansion. The question is who will lead the effort? Clearly, there will be someone magical to take on the R&D effort a la Californie.

Tot ziens!