Forrester Report Finds Enterprise Embracing Open Source WCM

Cloud services provider Acquia has commissioned a Forrester report on open source WCM, and while the results are not overwhelming, it does show more enterprise companies are employing open source systems.

Nearly 60 percent of the 160 companies surveyed said they had at least considered open source for their WCM programs. The report also found that executives who make these kind of decisions are also the ones who are least likely to be very satisfied with their choice. 

Open Source Successes

Acquia certainly has a stake in the findings in this report. As a cloud services provider specifically for the open source Drupal ecosystem, Acquia would love to see more large companies adopt the open source ethos. Forrester found several large vendors who have successfully adopted open source CMSs, and there were a few reasons why those companies enjoyed that success.

Company infighting seems to be what is holding enterprises back when it comes to successful WCM implementation.

Company culture and classic marketing versus IT fighting may be the biggest reasons businesses failed to implement a new Web CMS, but let's look more closely at the number two reason: lack of a company wide strategy. This obviously goes hand in hand with number one, but at least Forrester has some recommendations for how to build that strategy. They are, in order:

• Required a solution that allowed for more customization and flexibility.
• Prioritized integration between WCM and other solutions to support digital customer experiences.
• Focused on more than just cost reduction.
• Made specific plans for supporting the open source WCM deployment.
• Understood the myths and reality surrounding open source security concerns.

First, most companies agreed that open source allowed for more flexibility and customization. One survey respondant, a UK educational institution, told Forrester that when using a proprietary system, it took nine to 10 months to add a new feature. With open source, they were able to add functionality within days.

As for combining systems, the all-in-one solutions often offered by vendors does not seem to fit with those companies who had adopted open source. These companies preferred a best of breed approach, and often realized the power of the developer community to assemble system components.

How to Choose an Open Source Web CMS

If you've been skeptical of open source in the past, you have nothing to fear from what Forrester says:

Open source has by and large achieved a higher level of technology maturity over the past several years and have demonstrated some success in large-scale web deployments."

It's not just entertainment, media and traditional education that are finding success with open source, the report reads. Governments, pharma and retail are having success with it as well, a sure sign it should not be excluded when evaluating Web CMSs.

Because open source allows for downloading entire systems for test driving, this is a decided advantage when doing an evaluation. Be sure to try out those prospective systems and contact the developer community for extra insight and validation.

Open source is not perfect, of course, so areas like support and implementation should be explored carefully. There are developers and system experts out there who have built networks on top of open source software. That way, many IT aspects can be outsourced including core platform support, module support, module creation and enhancement, system upgrades, integrations and 24 x 7 x 365 infrastructure and uptime.

Acquia, of course, offers just these kinds of services for the Drupal-based platform. The company has even begun diving into digital marketing with its latest release, called OpenWEM. Tell us in the comments if you've had reservations about open source in the past or if there are some concrete reasons it simply won't work for your purposes.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Acquia Introduces Open Web Experience Management For Drupal

Acquia, a provider of paid cloud services specifically designed to support the Drupal open source web content management platform, is introducing a new concept it calls “Open Web Experience Management” or OpenWEM. It looks like digital marketing has officially come to Drupal.

First, let’s examine exactly what Acquia is trying to accomplish with OpenWEM. The vendor says OpenWEM is a combination of Acquia cloud services, the Drupal platform and the Acquia app marketplace that allows users to “create immersive, digital content and campaigns [and] socialize them across multiple communities and channels,” based on an open standards web architecture.

OpenWEM also allows Drupal modules to integrate with most major marketing automation and social analytics solutions. Acquia says other WEM tools are based on proprietary third-party architectures that make them “slow to adapt to changing business needs and keep pace with the speed of the social web.”

Filling the OpenWEM Toolbox

In addition to offering the OpenWEM architecture, Acquia is also launching beta versions of two new tools supporting it: Drupal Commons 3.0 for Drupal 7 and Media Cloud. Drupal Commons 3.0 is designed to allow the creation of online communities for collaboration and content sharing. Acquia says the latest upgrade features enhanced mobile support, analytical capabilities and user experience improvements.

Meanwhile, Media Cloud is a new media management service designed to support native management and sharing of rich media content within the Drupal environment. Acquia is also partnering with gamification software provider Badgeville to include Badgeville for Drupal as a key supporting component of OpenWEM.

To further ease access to OpenWEM, Acquia is partnering with more than 400 digital agencies and developers and integrating APIs for the top Drupal development tools used most frequently by Acquia customers.

Acquia Opens Up to Developers

Through a combination of open source and free services, Acquia is angling to become the standard means of managing activities on the Drupal platform — the company refers to itself as the “enterprise guide to Drupal."

In addition to its new OpenWEM concept and supporting solutions, back in August, at DrupalCon Munich 2012, Acquia said its Dev Cloud will be permanently free for developing sites. The developer accounts will include all the features of Acquia Cloud: automated developer workflow, separate development, staging and production environments as well as backups, SSH access, Drush integration, Cloud API and Cloud Hooks for continuous integration and more.

Getting In the Digital Marketing Game

Acquia's introduction of OpenWEM, is the real opening of the door for companies to leverage Drupal as a complete customer experience platform. There's the Web CMS, Drupal Commons for Communities, Media Cloud for rich asset management and the ability to integrate digital marketing and social analytics solutions.

This is the kind of end-to-end platform story that many companies are looking for. It's what Sitecore does, Ektron does and a dozen other web content management (aka web experience or customer experience) vendors are doing.

Does the fact that Drupal is open source give them a leg up? These days selling the open source story isn't really a big thing. Some open source solutions can work just as well in an enterprise as proprietary solutions. With a community as large as Drupal's, an enterprise support company like Acquia, and this list of new capabilities, Drupal is well equipped to support the digital marketing needs of an enterprise.  

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Acquia Cloud Wins Government Approval with FISMA Certification for Secure Websites

Cloud services provider and major Drupal partner Acquia has won U.S. government certification for providing secure Web services, the company's latest step in its march toward giving customers a measured level of protection and control.

Acquia won SSAE 16 (SOC1) certification in June, and the latest move not only provides the company access to the lucrative world of increased government contracts, but also signals it is serious about standards. 

What is FISMA?

Acquia is now approved under the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 to provide secure Web services in the cloud, a key process for highly sensitive customers like the government. 

Specifically, Acquia is a FISMA Authorization to Operate (ATO) approved vendor, and that means federal agencies can more easily redesign their Drupal Websites while maintaining stringent security standards and cost efficiencies.

The White House uses Drupal for its Website, as does NASA and the FCC. 

Acquia says it is the first provider to offer an enterprise class Drupal hosting service that is FISMA moderate certified. Acquia Cloud uses Amazon EC2, and that system had already won FISMA Moderate ATO certification. 

“This effort demonstrates Acquia’s commitment to exceeding our Federal customers high expectations for security and availability in the cloud," Mike Lemire, Acquia’s director of information security said.

The Importance of Standards

Cloud provider Huddle also recently won FISMA approval, but the company had already been popular among European governments. IBM's SmartCloud for Government is FISMA approved, as is Google's Apps for Government.

FISMA provides a framework for government IT purchasing and security protocols, but it also gives potential customers a chance to see how rigorous a company's products are. It might be painful for companies like Huddle and Acquia to go through the certification process, but once they are through it, potential new customers have a new window into those companies' internal processes. 

However, FISMA and SSAE 16 are narrow standards with somewhat limited applicability. IT buyers of all stripes really need more broad based standards to avoid combing through the virtually endless world of Web based apps now available. 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com