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:
- Low upfront or no upfront fee
- Turn the contract off on short notice
- 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.
Irina Guseva 