The latest WCM Wave from Forrester has hit the market and the key focus is on integration. It's time for a vendor deep dive.
Forrester's report, "The Forrester Wave™: Web Content Management For Digital Customer Experience, Q2 2013," was written by Stephen Powers and David Aponovich, both long-term followers of the web content management market.
We've seen key aspects of the web content management market change over the years, especially with less focus on "web content" and more on "customer experience." Now, Forrester refines the discussion a little bit further to talk about "digital customer experiences" and hence another new industry acronym may have been born (DX). We don't want to dwell in terminology though, instead getting on to the meat of the report findings.
The vendors were evaluated on three levels:
- Current offering, based on the following criteria: 1) content management; 2) websites and layout; 3) globalization and localization; 4) content targeting; 5) multichannel; 6) social and community controls; 7) publishing and deployment; and 8) measurement.
- Strategy and the path to execute on that strategy
- Market presence
Let's take a look at what each Wave vendor has brought to the table.
Forrester's Wave for WCM: The Vendors
The WCM Wave Leader: Adobe
Adobe tops Forrester's Wave and it's been at the top of both the Wave and Gartner's Magic Quadrant for a few years now. Adobe ranks #1 for both its current offering, which is a pretty solid list of digital marketing elements, and for Strategy. I'm not sure how many people actually still equate Adobe with the Flash Player, the PDF viewer and the Creative Suite, but many organizations see there's so much more than that to Adobe (and we've watched that evolution over the last few years).
Adobe acquired Day Software for CQ5 web content management, Omniture for testing and analytics and a few other companies for complementary solutions. Forrester notes the lack of e-Commerce functionality, but Adobe's been pretty clear about its tight relationship with e-Commerce provider hybris. We also know that Adobe's marketing automation capabilities including integration with Eloqua (which we mentioned when we looked at Adobe's Marketing Cloud).
The WCM Wave Strong Performers: SDL, Sitecore, Autonomy
What is SDL's primary differentiation? It excels in localization and globalization. That you can't deny. But SDL's pretty strong in a few other areas as well, including it's targeting and personalization with SmartTarget, it's social media marketing with the Alterian acquisition and it's new mobile delivery capabilities with the Bemoko acquisition. SDL ranked third for strategy, and #2 for current offering in Forrester's Wave, showing that the WCM vendor is working hard to pull together all the components of a digital experience platform.
SDL recently introduced the latest version of its WCM product: Tridion 2013, which has a strong focus on delivering the right content to the right people. A redesigned workflow engine, the bundling of processes and a new connector framework were highlights of this latest release (note that the Wave was based on the last version of SDL).
Forrester does note that SDL lacks the momentum that a number of other vendors on the list have. I expect that's a matter of working much harder to get its name out there in the CXM market, and a little bit related to a traditional view of SDL as a translation and structured content technology vendor.
Sitecore also makes the strong performers list, and interestingly, it's the only vendor on the list that sells itself as a complete "suite." Sitecore offers all the necessary goods for CXM including web content management, marketing automation, analytics and e-Commerce. This is good, according to Forrester, and hits the mark for companies who don't want to worry about integration, and look for a consistent user experience on the backend. But it also means that Sitecore may not be as advanced in some areas as other vendors who have integrated offerings that came via specialist acquisitions.
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Source : cmswire[dot]com
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