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

Yes, one of those “strategic partnerships” was announced between hosted Web CMS vendor OmniUpdate 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.

Cross-posted on CMSWire.com

OmniUpdate has been busy as a bee lately. From Live Delivery Platform to their Web CMS conversion tool earlier this year, the SaaS CMS vendor just got its hands around releasing an upgrade to their Web CMS product, OU Campus.

Version 8.5’s highlight is a new Recycle Bin feature. Note that v8.4 came out only a couple of weeks ago.

More on CMSWire: OmniUpdate Web CMS 8.5 Sports New Garbage Can Feature

OmniUpdate, a CMS vendor in the trendy SaaS CMS space, announced a new Live Delivery Platform (LDP) for its core Web CMS product — OU Campus. The goal is to provide a vehicle for delivery of dynamic content that is an essential part of many Web 2.0 applications.

The platform, however, will not be available until May 2009. What’s in it and is it worth the wait?

OmniUpdate’s rivals in the SaaS CMS space like Clickability already offer some social media and Web 2.0 capabilities. Let’s wait and see what OmniUpdate has in store for us.

Full story on CMSWire: OmniUpdate Tags Web 2.0 With Live Delivery Platform

Chatted with Day’s Kevin Cochrane about the announcement early this week. Of course, took me a bit longer to get the news out than I expected. Was a bit busy with infrastructure designs, trainings, project timelines, unavailable resources, lost baggage and other exciting disasters.

Will refer you to CMSWire for this one — there’s a lot more details in that piece I wrote. Just as a side note, I am really curious to see how Day’s new CRX editions will impact the entire content management market, including traditional, open source and SaaS CMS vendors. There is a lot of power in what Day is now offering. Twitter messages indicate that Day’s competition is already afraid of Day keeping them “too busy” this year. Cool stuff

On the other hand, I am also concerned about Day CQ5, which I also covered before. But I guess Nüscheler’s bright mind has got it all figured out.

Oh, and another piece of news from Day, which I normally would not have any interest in, but it was a really feel-good, heart-warming story (I could use one of those with my laptop powerstrip sitting in the bag Delta lost on my flight to SD from GA ) Couldn’t pass on it. Also referring to full coverage of that on CMSWire.

Day Opens Up, Empowers Developers With New CRX Releases

Day Software Awards First JCR Cup Winner (congrats, Russell Toris. I am sure you’re on cloud 9 )

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 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.