Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management

This document was revised on 14 September 2012. The document you are viewing is the corrected version. For more information, see the Corrections page on gartner.com.

The Web content management (WCM) market consists of commercial, open-source and hosted applications, based on a core repository, that control content to be consumed over one or more online channels. Product functions go beyond simply publishing Web pages to include:

• Content creation/authoring functions, such as templating, workflow and change management
• WCM repositories that contain content and/or metadata about content
• Library services, such as check-in/check-out, version control and security
• Content deployment functions that deliver prepackaged or on-demand content to Web servers
• A high degree of interoperability with adjacent technologies such as CRM (in particular with marketing resource management and multichannel campaign management), digital asset management (DAM) and Web analytics
• Real-time adaptation to visitor interactions through technologies such as delivery engines or enhanced frameworks for content delivery applications
• The ability to integrate well with delivery tiers such as e-commerce, social media and portal software (not a requirement but a factor that weighs favorably)

We exclude products such as portals and e-commerce engines, even though these technologies have overlapping functions in areas such as personalization, content management and content delivery (see "Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals" and "Magic Quadrant for E-Commerce").

A list of some vendors not featured in the Magic Quadrant that may suit some clients can be found in Note 1.

Source: Gartner (September 2012)

Vendor Strengths and Cautions

Acquia

Acquia is a venture-funded company that was founded in 2008. In its relatively short history, Acquia, the youngest vendor featured in this Magic Quadrant, has emerged as a prominent Drupal business, selling enterprise support and cloud-hosting offerings. Acquia also operates Drupal Gardens, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) version of the open-source content management system Drupal.

Strengths

• Acquia provides well-received services for Drupal, one of the most popular open-source software (OSS) WCM platforms. Feedback from multiple sources, including customers, partners and developers that have been working with Acquia, has been very positive overall.
• Acquia's management team consists of OSS visionaries as well as people with a long history in the WCM market. Therefore, Acquia understands enterprise requirements and at the same time ensures excellent relations with the broader Drupal community. Whereas other OSS vendors have sometimes created conflicts of interest with their respective communities, the success of Acquia so far has helped broaden the appeal of Drupal among some target groups that would not otherwise have considered open-source WCM.
• The combination of Acquia Commons, its social software offering, with a WCM offering provides Acquia with a unique opportunity to help enterprises with their broader online channel strategy. At a time when many enterprises are struggling to conceive and implement a social media strategy, Acquia can claim successes based on a social culture indigenous to both its community and its social offering, and provide unique guidance in this regard.

Cautions

• Acquia lags behind in terms of deep marketing-oriented capabilities. Although it has a good foundation, it has only relatively recently directed its road map more determinedly toward the needs and ambitions of online channel optimization (OCO).
• Acquia's strength in providing a leading OSS WCM services environment brings with it a responsibility to develop a substantially advanced vision for this area, but it has yet to rise fully to the challenge. To maintain and increase its differentiation, Acquia will need to meet this challenge and inspire the Drupal community to build on its vision. Currently, the Drupal community compares itself favorably with other OSS communities, rather than "raising the bar" for both itself and the aspirations of its target audiences.
• Acquia needs to invest more strategically and determinedly in the partner ecosystem around Drupal. It should take a stronger leadership role in the ecosystem, rather than participate simply as a member. In particular, it needs to boost its formal partner program by means of certification and training programs. Currently, Acquia is excluded from some shortlists because of its lack of presence in the geographical areas of some potential clients. This hurts both Acquia and Drupal. Also, in some cases existing clients have decided to replace Drupal with a commercial off-the-shelf alternative due to this lack of presence. Similarly, arguments have been made against using Acquia due to its partners' lack of ability to provide expertise in relation to interoperability with adjacent technologies such as CRM and marketing-oriented software, whether open source or not. Acquia should help the community predict demand for such expertise and orchestrate its provision.

Adobe

Adobe, which is based in San Jose, California, acquired Day Software, a Swiss company, in October 2010 and has since achieved a high degree of traction and a strong position of leadership. This is particularly the case among organizations wishing to develop or extend a digital marketing strategy. Adobe's core WCM offering, CQ 5.5, sits on top of an open, standards-based composite content application platform. A core component of this platform is an integrated Java Content Repository. Adobe's primary offerings in this market are Web Experience Management (WEM) Basic and WEM Standard, which both integrate with the company's digital marketing services, such as SiteCatalyst, Test&Target, Scene7, Search&Promote and Insight.

Strengths

• The ease with which CQ can be used by non-IT users, and the speed with which it can be deployed (relative to typical deployments of some other vendors' solutions), make it one of the best Java-based products in the WCM market.
• Adobe's creative culture and capabilities give its user interface a competitive edge in terms of intuitiveness, while its analytical capabilities enable persona-based assessments of the potential of different types of experience.
• Adobe's Digital Marketing Suite, built from solutions derived from earlier acquisitions and partnerships, has undergone a deep architectural integration. This gives Adobe an advantage in its efforts to create a "customer experience platform." Adobe's mobile strategy and offerings have an excellent reputation, especially for clients intending to build an online channel to optimize context-aware and cross-channel interactions.

Cautions

• Gartner clients often point to a lack of cohesion in Adobe's sales, execution and implementation support, which gives them the impression that Adobe needs to "catch up" with its operations following the acquisition of Day Software. Adobe urgently needs to adapt to meet the needs of such recently acquired or prospective customers.
• Adobe has chosen to take an approach to its messaging that focuses almost solely on digital marketing scenarios. Although these scenarios are important, this approach is more appropriate to much smaller vendors — given Adobe's size, it should be more of a thought leader and broader in its reach. Organizations considering Adobe CQ for non-digital marketing use cases should seek firm assurances about future product development, in addition to customer references to confirm this product's suitability for their initiatives.
• Even though Adobe's Digital Marketing Suite features SiteCatalyst (Web analytics), Insight (customer analytics), Scene7 (rich-media delivery) and integration with hybris (e-commerce), many customers are still unaware of, or confused about, how they can build broader, more effective strategies that incorporate more of Adobe's capabilities. Adobe needs to expand its focus from the horizontal marketing and creative arena, and be more aggressive in competing against the interoperability capabilities of best-of-breed WCM vendors.

Atex

Atex, which has its headquarters in Reading, U.K., has a long history in the newspaper, magazine, broadcast media and publishing sectors, particularly concerning editorial content management, advertising, subscriptions and support for digital strategies. Its acquisition of the Swedish company Polopoly in 2008 enabled it to enter the WCM market. Atex Polopoly is a Java-based offering, the most recent version of which, 10.4, was released in January 2012.

Strengths

• Atex has an excellent understanding of the media industry and a very long history in this area. It is therefore in a prime position to be shortlisted by media companies that are developing or expanding a digital strategy.
• Founded in 1973, Atex is one of the oldest companies in this Magic Quadrant. This status brings with it a reputation for stability and longevity — two highly coveted attributes in a market that has become somewhat more risk-averse due to the macroeconomic troubles of the past few years. The appointment of a new CEO in July 2012 will help balance this reputation with the promise of the ongoing progress needed to meet the urgent needs of Atex's targeted industries.
• Atex has a very loyal customer base, as in many cases the company has established itself as a trusted advisor to its clients. These clients look to Atex for guidance and direction with respect to the challenges they face, along with the advertising-related, audience-related and "digital first" solutions that will help overcome them. Almost all the customers of Atex with whom we held discussions praised it highly for its transparency, openness and understanding of clients' issues.

Cautions

• Atex needs to be significantly more aggressive in its horizontal expansion. Currently, we see Atex shortlisted primarily by media companies, but its competitors are shortlisted in the same context more and more often — and in many cases they are winning. If Atex is to increase its visibility and prowess in the WCM market and in the broader context of OCO, it must nurture and embrace opportunities outside its current comfort zone.
• Atex has invested modestly in product development in accordance with its conservative product road map. It now needs to increase this investment and accelerate its progress, particularly with regard to interoperability with adjacent technologies outside its own portfolio. Even some of Atex's smaller competitors have "bigger" strategies, together with a partner ecosystem to help clients capitalize on those strategies.
• Atex Polopoly's usability still lags behind the high standard set by the offerings of some of the Leaders in this Magic Quadrant. Although the product is relatively easy to use, the degree of business agility afforded to non-IT users of the system is still modest in comparison with that provided by the competition. Atex needs to put higher-level capabilities in the hands of a variety of business (non-IT) users. Its focus on the role of "editor" needs to broaden to include a variety of business users, particularly those involved in developing digital marketing strategies.

CoreMedia

CoreMedia was founded in 1996 and is based in Hamburg, Germany. Its flagship content management system (CMS) is in its sixth major release. CoreMedia, which was a Niche Player in 2009, has become a provider of scalable, robust solutions in multiple regions with an impressive customer base and a high retention rate. Version 7 of its product is scheduled to ship at the end of October 2012.

Strengths

• CoreMedia 6 has high usability and its Studio editorial interface appeals to both business and IT professionals. The delivery module, the Content Application Engine, is well architected and allows for a high degree of interoperability with adjacent technologies and the delivery of dynamic experiences that can be contextually optimized in real time for different audiences.
• CoreMedia has done well to expand its partner ecosystem and to incorporate high-level cooperation agreements with companies such as SAP, IBM and T-Systems into its overall marketing message. It has also done very well to address the need for the different types of partner required to help clients address the broader context of OCO solution development, from strategic development to user design, to implementation and deployment.
• CoreMedia has placed high strategic value on the importance of social media in the context of content management. Earlier in 2012 it introduced its Elastic Social product as the next evolution of its social software capabilities. Based on the same NoSQL technology on which Facebook and Twitter are based, Elastic Social is intended to be a highly flexible and extensible platform integrated into CoreMedia's CMS. It comes with standard use cases (for rating, commenting, discussions and moderation) to enable more social interactions to be incorporated into the delivered experience.

Cautions

• CoreMedia still faces challenges in terms of its geographical expansion, and its presence and brand recognition outside Europe is lacking. Gartner often sees situations where the capabilities provided by CoreMedia would suit the listed requirements well, but where it is not considered for selection. If CoreMedia is to be included in more longlists and shortlists, it needs to invest much more heavily in its overall marketing strategy and expand its ecosystem more effectively, particularly in North America and Australia.
• CoreMedia's value proposition needs to expand more significantly beyond its current emphasis on being a provider of a best-of-breed Java CMS. It needs to paint a broader solution picture for prospective customers and existing clients, and show how they fit into this enhanced solution landscape. Currently, key buying influences that are building digital marketing strategies do not see CoreMedia as an obvious choice, and attention is very often given to other Java-based offerings that feature in this Magic Quadrant. CoreMedia needs to be more effective in emphasizing the different use cases to which it can bring value and orchestrate even more strategic partnerships with key vendors in the areas of Web analytics, marketing automation, CRM and multichannel campaign management.
• Compared with other Java-based vendors featured in this Magic Quadrant, CoreMedia is excluded more often where potential interoperability with .NET is a primary requirement. This is particularly the case where Microsoft SharePoint is used for an intranet. Although CoreMedia has proven capabilities in integrating with a variety of external systems, it needs to place a greater marketing emphasis on such scenarios and present more case studies showing where it brings value to architectural landscapes that are highly heterogeneous. It must also extend this story and logic to landscapes where there is a mixture of on- and off-premises components with which it needs to interoperate.

Dynamicweb

Dynamicweb markets products that focus on WCM and e-commerce. Although it has traditionally focused on small or midsize businesses (SMBs, see Note 2), it has steadily increased the interoperability of its offering in order to be considered by larger organizations that require more complex solutions. Its flagship product, now in its eighth major release, includes an Online Marketing Center.

Strengths

• Overall, Dynamicweb has a good combination of capabilities: WCM, e-commerce and marketing functionalities based on .NET in an environment whose popularity is driven by Microsoft SharePoint. This will enable it to "surf the SharePoint wave" and tap into the demand from which most of the other providers of .NET best-of-breed WCM offerings featured in this Magic Quadrant also benefit. Although this will appeal primarily to the mid-market, Dynamicweb's ability to interoperate with other Microsoft products in areas such as CRM and ERP will also enable it to be considered for some larger deployments.
• During the past year Dynamicweb has done well to readjust its focus by placing more emphasis on the North American market and to have restructured accordingly.
• Dynamicweb is well positioned for customers in certain vertical markets, such as wholesalers and manufacturers, that need to manage product information and integrate heavily with ERP applications. Dynamicweb also has the potential to benefit from the trend in e-commerce for businesses to extend their solution landscapes to include best-of-breed WCM modules. In this context, the competitive pricing that Dynamicweb maintains presents an additional competitive advantage and will help it with sales execution.

Cautions

• Dynamicweb has only recently introduced capabilities in the crucial area of digital marketing. This is an important step in the company's development, but the current breadth of its capabilities may not be sufficient for organizations with high ambitions for their digital marketing strategy. Available capabilities still represent only a modest subset of what other vendors featured in this Magic Quadrant offer. Prospective customers need to assess whether the lower price compensates for the present lack of capabilities.
• Although it has a presence in North America, Dynamicweb is still the in the very early stages of establishing the ecosystem required to raise its brand recognition and achieve better traction in this region. Prospective customers should assess the partners and consulting resources available locally as part of their selection process.
• Dynamicweb needs to invest more aggressively in its overall marketing strategy. Currently, the company rarely appears on shortlists discussed with Gartner. If its growth is to keep pace with that of the WCM market, this needs to be one of its top priorities.

e-Spirit

e-Spirit is wholly owned by adesso and based in Dortmund, Germany. Its flagship product, FirstSpirit CMS, is a Java-based WCM offering currently in its fourth major release (4.2 R4), with version 5 scheduled for release later in 2012.

Strengths

• e-Spirit has a good track record of working in conjunction with other Web foundations, such as IBM WebSphere Portal, IBM WebSphere Commerce and SAP NetWeaver Portal. It has therefore proven attractive for customers looking for WCM to complement an established portal or e-commerce foundation, or dealing with the necessity of multiple established portals or e-commerce platforms. This position as a "neutral" WCM provider that works across multiple established platforms (IBM, Microsoft, Liferay, SAP) has worked very well for e-Spirit in terms of its sales execution and fundamental marketing message. It also presents the company with further opportunities in solution landscapes where such platforms are increasingly being augmented to include best-of-breed WCM technologies as online strategies are overhauled.
• e-Spirit has done well in recent years as an emerging player in a market where demand for best-of-breed enterprise-class Java WCM offerings has been growing but supply has been shrinking.
• With the introduction of AppCenter, e-Spirit has increased the usability of its product, particularly for business users and non-IT professionals. This module enables smooth interoperability with other technologies and content sources without the traditional need for long software development life cycles. This will particularly attract customers wanting to enrich the experiences they deliver via online channels with a broader variety of content and functions in order to increase the impact of their online strategy.

Cautions

• e-Spirit has improved its overall marketing message in recent years, but it still focuses too much on technology in a market where the decision makers are increasingly outside IT organizations. It needs to correct this in order to increase the resonance between its value proposition and the business contexts in which it wants to be considered. It also needs to be more aggressive and incisive about differentiating itself in a market where its competitors have far larger marketing budgets and much broader reach.
• e-Spirit has yet to establish a significant footprint in North America, a region that is crucial for the company if it is to grow at least at as fast as the overall WCM market. Although e-Spirit has made a slight improvement in this area year on year, it needs to give it greater focus — otherwise, if it waits too long, it will run the risk of requiring disproportionately greater investment to achieve the same traction.
• e-Spirit urgently needs to broaden the value proposition for its social capabilities. Although it does offer functionality to allow interaction with Facebook, Twitter and the like, and also offers functionality to enable some aspects of social collaboration, it is significantly behind other vendors featured in this Magic Quadrant. Demand in the WCM market for thought leadership in this area is developing greatly. If e-Spirit is to help customers embrace a truly cross-channel strategy, it must make more effort in this area.

Ektron

Ektron has its headquarters in Nashua, New Hampshire. The latest version of its WCM platform, Ektron 8.6, released in July 2012, focuses on enhanced usability, enterprise scalability and interoperability through the company's Digital Experience Hub. Ektron's platform is based on .NET. The company also provides products for marketing optimization, analytics, e-commerce and social media.

Strengths

• Ektron is an experienced vendor in the WCM market. In the past it has focused on small and midsize companies, but it is now also attracting business from large enterprises, particularly in North America. Its installed base is increasing and its brand strengthening, based on organic growth. It also has a strong partner ecosystem, including Omniture, Webtrends and Google for site analytics; Baynote for adaptive targeting and recommendations; Marketo for marketing automation; and salesforce.com for CRM.
• Ektron's management team is maturing, thanks to the company's attraction of senior managers away from large and successful firms in adjacent areas of the software market. This is likely to help improve Ektron's business relationships, product vision and evolution, and overall growth.
• Ektron's product family, and particularly its Digital Experience Hub, resonates with the developing demands of the WCM market. Ektron is investing in new areas, including HTML5 support for multiplatform interaction. It also has a good relationship with Microsoft, for the extension of SharePoint capabilities and use of Fast Search technology.

Cautions

• At the same time as Ektron has made progress in attracting large enterprises, Gartner has received reports from smaller Ektron customers of deteriorating support and deployment assistance. Ektron built its success on smaller organizations and it must not leave them wanting as it grows. It needs to invest more in its support team and deployment services.
• We have also heard reports from larger Ektron customers that implementation of key capabilities has been difficult from both a technological and an operational perspective. Although clients report that the core capabilities work well "out of the box," some of the more advanced functions, such as those used when deploying multilingual sites, are not mature and require a lot of additional work.
• As Ektron grows, its larger clients tend to be multinational. This brings functional demands for globalization, localization and multilingual needs, and service and support requirements. Ektron needs to invest to achieve scale worldwide, but particularly in EMEA where we are not seeing it have enough success.

EPiServer

EPiServer, which is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, has recently increased its U.S. staff to 30 people via an acquisition. Its flagship CMS offering is based on .NET, has been on the market for 13 years, and the latest available version is CMS 6 R2. EPiServer continues to add marketing and sales functions to its WCM product that is used by its related social software and e-commerce products. EPiServer also offers a degree of contextual content delivery across its core products.

Strengths

• EPiServer offers a modular and well-architected set of capabilities, the ease of use and rich functions of which are among the best available. Business users in particular will like its graphical user interface and the ease with which they can tailor experiences to different touchpoints, such as media tablets, smartphones and traditional websites.
• EPiServer is popular in the midmarket but has long established itself as an enterprise-class vendor with clear and highly competitive prices. EPiServer's modular architecture has enabled it to build on its offering by, for example, introducing three add-ons earlier in 2012: Social Reach, which interfaces with multiple social media networks; SiteAttention, which provides content editors with real-time advice on the optimization of content; and a Google Analytics add-on that provides analytic insight during the content creation process.
• EPiServer has expanded regionally since 2008. To its original operations in the Nordic countries, it has since added presence in the U.K., other parts of Western Europe and North America. It aims to increase the proportion of its revenue derived from these areas and from its partner ecosystem. As part of its expansion effort, earlier in 2012 EPiServer acquired a Swedish company called 200OK. Its Truffler cloud-based application, now branded EPiServer Find, will help EPiServer handle "big data," including large volumes of social and mobile content.

Cautions

• EPiServer's technological alliances have been more insular than the market requires. It has expanded its offering via acquisitions to include modules for e-commerce, social software and marketing, but still needs to close the gap with some of the other vendors in this Magic Quadrant, especially in terms of marketing-related capabilities. In conversations with Gartner, EPiServer clients have also expressed confusion about the completeness of these modules in its "suite" approach, as compared with the integration of offerings from vendors that specialize in these areas, especially applications such as those for CRM and ERP, which are sometimes at the center of their organizations.
• EPiServer does not exploit its potential in the SharePoint ecosystem as well as some of its direct competitors do with theirs. Organizations with ambitious goals for their online channel frequently look to best-of-breed .NET offerings to augment the fundamental capabilities of SharePoint. It is rare, however, for Gartner to see EPiServer considered in shortlists for this scenario. EPiServer needs to adjust its high-level messaging so that it is considered more often in this context and seizes this opportunity more effectively.
• Despite the improvements EPiServer has made, some North American customers whom Gartner has spoken to still view EPiServer as "remote." Its reliance on indirect sales has led to early exclusion from selection processes, as its more technology-oriented partners are not as adept at helping companies build an overall OCO strategy and explaining how EPiServer supports that strategy. Although EPiServer has recently modified its sales strategy to be more direct in North America, this new approach has not yet gained as much traction as its competitors.

eZ Systems

eZ Systems, a Norwegian company, offers a WCM platform both on a commercial open-source basis and as SaaS. Its flagship product, eZ Publish, now in version 4.7, is based on the Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) stack. Version 5 is scheduled for release in November 2012. In August 2011, eZ Systems added recommendation and personalization capabilities to its portfolio with the acquisition of German firm Yoochoose and, in October 2011, Web analytics with the acquisition of odoscope. Both acquisitions are now fully integrated as part of eZ Systems' strategy of building a platform in which WCM is the kernel.

Strengths

• eZ Systems is a well-led, carefully managed and strongly driven company. It is knowledgeable about the WCM market for enterprises, having both a top-down and a bottom-up understanding, rather than only the latter as is typically the case with OSS providers. This has enabled it to be more forward-thinking in terms of its overall strategy, rather than adopt the "wait and see" approach like many other OSS providers. Its commercially supported open-source model enables customers to save on license fees while still getting the benefits of an organization that manages code quality, updates and patches well.
• eZ Systems has a more complete portfolio for "full life cycle management of digital presences" (including creation, delivery and optimization capabilities) than many vendors, and it successfully promotes its capabilities for "continuous optimization." In recent years, it has expanded its portfolio to augment eZ Publish with modules such as eZ Recommendation Service, eZ ecommerce, eZ CRM Connectivity, eZ odoscope (analytics, testing and optimization) and eZ Find. Such capabilities, together with a high degree of interoperability through representational state transfer (REST) interfaces with third-party technologies that support, for example, CRM, are much in demand as organizations acquire solutions for OCO.
• eZ Systems has been very successful in embracing the open-source culture but not relying too much on it. By being practical and focusing on the desired organizational outcomes of customers, it has gained more traction in the market than it would have done under the "OSS banner" alone. Customers can also use eZ Systems' platform as a fully managed cloud-based solution. The eZ Market, a commercial hub for vendor-certified extensions, has gained momentum and provides an attractive additional business model with which to monetize project solutions for eZ Systems' partners. This model is likely to encourage innovation and cross-project reusability, which in some cases could prove differentiating.

Cautions

• eZ Systems' strong publishing orientation — evident, for example, in the product name eZ publish — won't instantly appeal to every organization. Although this orientation can be advantageous in that the Web has made every company a publishing company, the relevance of ez System's focus may not be obvious to firms in industries other than publishing, such as manufacturing and retail. eZ Systems has done well to emphasize concepts such as "customer experience management" and can produce some good case studies in various industries. However, it needs to expand its marketing activities in order to emphasize its message both horizontally and vertically.
• eZ Systems is a relatively small organization, with 110 employees in 10 locations. Although its regional and vertical-market expansion has progressed (for example, it opened Asia/Pacific and U.K. offices in 1Q12), it is still relatively unknown outside the publishing and telecom industries, and it rarely appears on longlists and shortlists seen by Gartner. It needs to increase its investment in marketing in order to improve its brand recognition and sales execution, especially in North America.
• The overall set of capabilities provided by eZ Systems remains modest in comparison with other vendors in this Magic Quadrant. It therefore needs to invest more heavily in product development and devise a more ambitious product road map, particularly for marketing-friendly capabilities and contextualized delivery of tailored experiences.

GX Software

Based in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, GX Software offers two Java-based products relevant to OCO: WebManager, a WCM offering, and BlueConic, a product designed to help increase engagement across multiple online channels. The current version of WebManager is 9.18.

Strengths

• The combination of WCM and BlueConic is a compelling value proposition in solution environments where the type of functions they provide are combined routinely as part of an overall cross-channel strategy with real-time dynamic profiling and delivery.
• GX's recent partnership with Pitney Bowes could prove transformational. GX needs to do all it can to ensure this partnership is regarded as strategic in order to achieve its promise of offering a "communications continuum" to its customers. A solution based on such a concept would help ensure greater communications continuity and optimization across channels, both online and offline. It would also create new opportunities for GX on the fringes of customer communication management, an area traditionally regarded as separate from WCM.
• GX continues to show an accurate understanding of the WCM market, the drivers of purchasing decisions for WCM and the vertical contexts in which those decisions are made. As a result, GX continues to grow at a promising rate.

Cautions

• GX remains absent from almost all the shortlists presented to Gartner by North American customers. GX needs to increase its marketing investment there and urgently develop a broader supporting ecosystem if it is to have a reasonable chance of competing effectively in this region.
• GX needs to improve its overall value proposition and capabilities with respect to interoperability with adjacent technologies.
• GX has improved the usability of its offerings, but still compares poorly in this respect with offerings from some of the vendors in this Magic Quadrant. It must make usability an even higher priority and invest in creating the kind of interface and user experience that will appeal strongly to non-IT professionals.

HP

On 3 October 2011, HP announced that it had completed its acquisition of Autonomy, a company that entered the WCM market in March 2009 with the acquisition of Interwoven. Since then, Autonomy has enhanced its technology and provided additional capabilities via integration with its search and analytics platform. A strong early focus on specific business scenarios (such as interactive marketing) and the provision of enterprise-class technologies to improve usability have earned Autonomy a strong position in this market.

Strengths

• Product capabilities remain on the cutting edge with a foundation in the Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL), which effectively brings content management and content intelligence together. Assets like DAM and multivariate testing make its capabilities at least as complete as those of any other major WCM vendor.
• Autonomy has, and continues to develop, a high-end client base that includes well-known brands. Autonomy is well represented across industries.
• Autonomy claims to command a high degree of customer loyalty. Its skill at cross-selling and up-selling helps it retain high-end customers. It could further benefit from the size and global reach of HP.

Cautions

• HP needs to improve greatly the extent and clarity of its overall vision and strategy with respect to how it will help customers execute OCO strategies. Almost one year after its acquisition by HP, Autonomy is still generally perceived as an entity separate from the broader HP vision. Cross-delineation synergies — for example, between their WCM capabilities and Vertica (an analytics platform), their implementation services and their cloud capabilities — are not pronounced or effectively articulated to the market. If HP is to retain its leading status in the context of WCM, it will need to describe clearly the direction in which it wishes to take its broader offering and explain more effectively the associated value proposition.
• Autonomy's reputation for offering high-end products for large WCM customers brings with it a perception of high cost and complexity, compared to most of its competitors. In the past year, Gartner has seen a fall in the number of times Autonomy is included on shortlists for new WCM projects and initiatives.
• Autonomy runs the risk of relying too much on cross-selling, whereby it appeals only to customers that treat HP as their strategic vendor. Although HP represents a considerable base for new Autonomy sales, the parent company's strength tends to reside more in hardware and services than in software. Autonomy could therefore miss out on opportunities where competitors like IBM, Microsoft and Oracle have established strategic positions as providers of the components of an OCO strategy.

IBM

With Web Content Manager 8.0 IBM seeks to increase its influence with, and appeal to, marketing executives and other influential business roles. Though IBM continues to offer Web Content Manager as a stand-alone product, its Customer Experience Suite combines WCM with portal, e-commerce, analytics, application integration and other capabilities, including FileNet Content Manager.

Strengths

• IBM has begun focusing on solution suites for the online experience on both the Internet and intranets. An important product adjacent to its Web Content Manager is WebSphere Portal, which enables integration with applications and data sources via a wide range of mechanisms that support standards. WebSphere Portal integration also allows enterprises to use a personalization engine, shared authentication and an authorization repository for both content and applications. This helps to avoid the redundancy and conflicts that often arise when companies implement separate WCM and portal software.
• Web Content Manager has a large and active customer base. It has undeniable growth potential thanks to its bundling with WebSphere Portal and other industry framework assets, and IBM's large ecosystem of partners, global presence (operations in 170 countries), and expert sales and consulting relationships with large financial services, government, telecom, retail and healthcare organizations.
• During the past year IBM has acquired more than 10 companies in the fields of analytics, intelligence and search. These acquisitions, which include Vivisimo for its enterprise search technology and Tealeaf Technology for its customer experience analytics, will enable IBM to make progress toward providing multiple solution components crucial to helping organizations fulfill their OCO vision.

Cautions

• As IBM works on solution suites for the online experience — their foundation being Web Content Manager, WebSphere Portal, Forms and Web Experience Factory — and tackles areas such as commerce, social media, enterprise content management (ECM), enterprise marketing management, analytics, collaboration and business process management, it faces a struggle to create both a seamless experience for business users and a cohesive, easy-to-deploy platform for IT organizations. Although progress in this regard is clear in its latest release, IBM needs to be even more aggressive in its product development in order to close the gap with the Leaders, particularly with regard to overall usability.
• For some customers, Web Content Manager is tied too firmly to the WebSphere Portal platform. A unified portal, WCM and extended platform suite may be valuable to enterprises with complex needs, but those with investments in other portal platforms or auxiliary solutions might find the combination unnecessarily burdensome and expensive as they look to reduce their IT spending.
• Users of Gartner's client inquiry service identify Web Content Manager only very infrequently as a shortlisted option — much less frequently than some of the other vendors featured in this Magic Quadrant. Even in contexts where IBM's offering might be suitable, it tends to be excluded because of price, a lack of inherent functionality and the heavy involvement of a system integrator or professional services team. In addition, clients mention the difficulty of hiring knowledgeable resources, especially for a diverse set of technologies such as those present in IBM's foundation suite.

Limelight Networks

Limelight Networks, which is headquartered in Tempe, Arizona, entered the WCM market through its May 2011 acquisition of Clickability, a provider of a SaaS-based WCM offering. It markets this offering as the Limelight Dynamic Site Platform. Limelight's product portfolio also covers small-object delivery, video content management, website and application acceleration, mobile delivery and monetization, electronic software downloads, and live and on-demand media delivery.

Strengths

• Limelight offers a good combination of WCM with video and content delivery network (CDN) capabilities in a market that values highly the ability to "bring all the pieces together." In this regard, Limelight's "Orchestrate brilliance" tagline could resonate well with organizations developing an OCO strategy. Limelight is No. 2 in the CDN market and is the only vendor to offer both WCM and online video natively — a combination that is growing in popularity.
• Limelight is one of the few "pure SaaS" vendors of WCM in a market where cloud solutions are becoming increasingly popular. This means it can effectively present "a single throat to choke" — a proposition that many organizations may prefer in a risk-averse market. The role of pure SaaS provider is distinct from, and usually superior to, that in which a vendor simply enables its single-tenant software to be hosted on, for example, Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Microsoft's Windows Azure or Rackspace.
• Limelight has communicated to Gartner a road map that appears very well aligned with developments in the WCM market. In particular, it has launched and maintained — and plans to develop further — capabilities to be even more appealing to organizations developing a digital marketing strategy. These capabilities include Website Marketing Acceleration (WMA), social media publishing and Dynamic Site Platform for Mobile.

Cautions

• Gartner has received inquiries from clients regarding the financial context and overall viability of Limelight, primarily owing to the losses it has reported in four of the past five years. However, Limelight's 2Q12 earnings announcement reported total revenue of $44.4 million (up 7% from 2Q11); earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) of $2.5 million, approximately $125 million in cash and no debt. Limelight will need to sustain double-digit growth in its WCM business and improve its profitability if it is to allay clients' concerns. In the meantime, organizations seeking assurances about Limelight's ability to invest in its road map and innovate effectively should work with it to ensure their concerns are addressed.
• Gartner has noticed a reduction in the market interest that Clickability used to generate since its acquisition. Also, Dynamic Site Platform rarely appears on shortlists shown to Gartner, even where the emphasis is on a requirement for SaaS WCM or where the broader value proposition of Limelight's overall suite would have made it a good fit. If Limelight is to reverse this trend and enjoy demand similar to that of the Leaders in this Magic Quadrant, it must communicate its message of orchestration more effectively to the market — in a manner that both business and IT managers perceive as relevant.
• Limelight needs to revise its go-to-market strategy, particularly in terms of the associations and partnerships it should consider, the high-level value proposition it is articulating and the roles it should address within its target organizations. A repositioning is crucial if it is to capitalize on the growing acceptance of SaaS-based WCM offerings. Public statements by Limelight suggest that a strategic review is already well under way, but it remains to be seen how well it will be able to execute a revised strategy.

Microsoft

There is huge interest in the WCM capabilities of SharePoint 2010 and its predecessor, since although this widely adopted product is used most often to support internal content management and collaboration, some Microsoft customers and partners also use it for customer- and partner-facing websites. A beta version of SharePoint 2013 was released in July 2012.

Strengths

• SharePoint 2010's adoption by well over half of Gartner's client base shows that it has become an important part of the content management portfolio of many enterprises. Many companies are using its "publishing site" functions for basic and mid-level WCM use cases. But only a small percentage use SharePoint for their external Web presence.
• SharePoint offers content management, search, portal, collaboration, social computing, business intelligence and composite application features, all based on the common development environment known as ASP.NET. This combination appeals to companies looking for a general-purpose workplace tool.
• SharePoint's success has helped Microsoft build an expansive ecosystem of partners offering a wide range of services to help enterprises plan and execute a SharePoint deployment.

Cautions

• SharePoint's strength as a general-purpose technology is also a weakness, as in the WCM arena it lacks refinements geared to important business scenarios and influences, such as the marketers who often lead online initiatives. Personalization and content-targeting features are urgent requirements for external websites, but SharePoint's are still largely geared to internal scenarios. The continued success of some of the other .NET WCM systems of vendors featured in this Magic Quadrant indicates that Microsoft's product is less suited to the needs of organizations wanting to expand a digital marketing strategy.
• Although SharePoint Server 2010 for Internet Sites makes licensing more attractive in externally facing situations, enterprises looking to provide collaborative, social, advanced search, analytics and business process facilities to external audiences pay a relatively high price. The most advanced deployments require SharePoint for Internet Sites, SharePoint Enterprise and a separate license for Fast Search. These substantial license costs — to which must be added costs for implementation, customization and design services to equip SharePoint for an advanced and readily consumable WCM platform — make Microsoft a more expensive option for many customers than competitors with more specialized and out-of-the-box WCM capabilities.
• SharePoint's WCM capabilities are not well matched with some established third-party portals and e-commerce platforms that are crucial to many customer-facing sites. This is especially the case with Java Platform, Enterprise Edition offerings from providers such as IBM, Oracle and OpenText. Although Microsoft has improved SharePoint's interoperability with support for standards such as Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) and Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS), SharePoint is rarely used as a WCM system in those environments.

OpenText

OpenText, which is headquartered in Waterloo, Canada, has two primary WCM offerings: Web Site Management (WSM) and Web Experience Management (WEM). These are based on its acquisitions of Hummingbird (which had earlier acquired RedDot Solutions) and Vignette, respectively.

Strengths

• OpenText has continued to grow in recent years, largely through acquisitions, and has added components to its portfolio that help enterprises build an online strategy. Enterprises pursuing a broad ECM strategy should consider OpenText, as its WCM offerings are well integrated into its ECM suite.
• OpenText's extensive partner ecosystem gives it strong global capabilities, whereas other vendors based in North America sometimes struggle with differences in culture and with messaging in other regions. OpenText is a Canadian company, but it can also regard EMEA as home ground, thanks to its numerous acquisitions. Strong relationships with SAP and Microsoft continue to help OpenText.
• OpenText understands its clients' need for WCM to be an enabler of customer experience management. OpenText is building a greater experience base in helping IT departments and marketers, so that its technology supports the needs of both.

Cautions

• Gartner clients remain confused by OpenText's dual-product strategy with WSM and WEM. Users of previous versions of WSM are unsure how appropriate the latest version is for their OCO initiatives. As OCO strategies become more ambitious, customers sometimes move from WSM to a competitor's offering, rather than to the more capable WEM. Also, OpenText shares R&D resources between these two very different offerings, which could slow its execution of an aggressive road map for either product. OpenText's market share is likely to suffer in the long term if it does not address these issues.
• OpenText has made progress since 2011 in addressing marketing roles, especially that of chief marketing officer, and it must continue to do so. It also needs to appeal to other roles that drive demand, such as business roles, which it could do by emphasizing interoperability with analytics, CRM, sales force automation and e-commerce, as well as support for multiple horizontal portals.
• OpenText's WEM is easy to use but not as intuitive as the products of some of its competitors. WEM also trails the offerings of OpenText's closest rivals in giving business users greater control over their online channel. OpenText needs to focus its resources better on future releases of WEM to maintain its overall strong position as demands for robust WCM capabilities continue to grow.

Oracle

In August 2011, Oracle acquired FatWire Software, which appeared as a Leader in 2010's Magic Quadrant. Since then, Oracle has rebranded its WCM offering as Oracle WebCenter Sites, which is its strategic solution for WCM and part of its broader Oracle WebCenter strategy. Oracle's previous WCM solution, Site Studio, is part of Oracle WebCenter Content, the company's ECM suite. Oracle recommends Site Studio for publishing from ECM to custom Web applications with modest requirements. For marketing and branding websites, Oracle sells Oracle WebCenter Sites.

Strengths

• Oracle has demonstrated a continued appetite to improve its WCM capabilities and in the broader context of OCO. In addition to the purchase of FatWire to acquire richer OCO capabilities, in June 2012 Oracle announced its "Customer Experience" vision, which includes bringing together Oracle WebCenter Sites and components such as Oracle Real-Time Decisions (RTD), Siebel, Endeca and ATG Web Commerce. In July 2012, Oracle finalized the acquisition of Vitrue, a cloud-based social marketing and engagement platform that enables marketers to centrally create, publish, moderate, manage, measure and report on their social marketing campaigns and activities on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google+. This set of capabilities will be a good complement to the capabilities Oracle gained with the acquisition of FatWire.
• The range of ECM capabilities in WebCenter can complement its WCM-focused assets. These capabilities include document management, Web publishing, DAM, search, records and retention management, archiving, and backup and recovery.
• Oracle RTD, which works with WebCenter's content repository and Personalization Server, can exploit a broad range of user attributes to provide personalization and context awareness. Profiles in RTD can employ a combination of user data from systems such as Siebel to optimize content and presentation. If Oracle continues to invest heavily in RTD, so that it can be applied more readily and deeply to OCO-related use cases, it will gain capabilities in the related area of analytics to rival those of its closest competitors.

Cautions

• Oracle's focus on acquiring software rather than coding software itself means it has overlapping products. For several years this has been a criticism of its portal offerings, and it now applies to its WCM capabilities and also raises concerns about the overall road map for its tools. Although Oracle has recently been clearer about how it will reconcile such overlaps in terms of its overall vision, it still needs to be clearer and more incisive in helping existing clients migrate from Site Studio to WebCenter Sites, where appropriate.
• Oracle still has to demonstrate compelling integrations with its business application portfolio. It is only just starting to use FatWire to enable synergistic couplings with its CRM, ERP, e-commerce and RTD products. Oracle claims to be progressing at a reasonable pace in these areas, but clients should watch for deliverables in this area in order to gauge the extent to which it is executing this strategy.
• Oracle's brand is not as strong in the workplace-related areas of collaboration and social media as those of some other large vendors. It needs to execute more effectively in this part of the information management spectrum.

SDL

SDL, which is headquartered in Maidenhead, U.K., views its WCM product, SDL Tridion, as part of its broader strategy for "Global Information Management" and increasingly focuses on marketing solutions and enhancing the customer experience. The introduction of modules that optimize the online experience has raised the market's expectations of SDL in terms of quality, innovation and value.

Strengths

• SDL Tridion's WCM capabilities — particularly their usability and interoperability — are regarded highly by a wide range of Gartner clients. SDL's acquisition of Alterian earlier in 2012 could give it a greater reach into social media capabilities and campaign management, which would increase it appeal to both marketing and IT organizations.
• SDL is gaining traction in the North American market as it has appeared more frequently on client shortlists in this region during the past year. The company should intensify its efforts to exploit this momentum with WCM-based applications for vertical markets.
• SDL has improved its marketing to paint a clearer picture of how each of its products fits into a cohesive OCO strategy. In addition, it maintains a strong lead by integrating its globalization capabilities into its core WCM products to help users achieve better customer engagement in multiple contexts.

Cautions

• SDL Tridion is not an easy product to implement as its capabilities are complex. Gartner clients have reported implementation difficulties and prolonged time to production. SDL must continue to improve its partner ecosystem and communicate directly with clients to ensure that both clients and partners succeed.
• SDL must be clearer about its strategic direction. Its mobile and social capabilities have suffered from weak positioning, but the Alterian acquisition will help it in this area. SDL is in a position to deliver good industry-specific solutions, but we have yet to see it execute in this respect. SDL continues to emphasize management as a core goal, as shown by its Global Information Management branding. Online and cross-channel optimization are decisive for enterprises today, and SDL needs to articulate its strengths and capabilities in these areas more effectively.
• SDL's .NET support can give it an advantage as an extension to Microsoft SharePoint for companies with deep OCO needs. However, other vendors featured in this Magic Quadrant that offer .NET capabilities are exploiting this opportunity more effectively. SDL must invest more aggressively in this area to avoid losing visibility.

Sitecore

Sitecore appeals to organizations seeking fairly modest WCM solutions and to those currently engaged in more ambitious OCO endeavors, such as digital marketers. The company's flagship Sitecore Web Content Management System v.6.5 and Sitecore Digital Marketing System v.2.0 are based on .NET. An Email Campaign Manager enhances its marketing and sales execution capabilities, while facilities for engagement analytics give marketers more autonomy in optimizing customer engagement across channels. Sitecore also provides e-commerce capabilities, particularly for business-to-business customers, through an OEM partnership with Insite Software.

Strengths

• Sitecore's evolution from a focus on WCM to a focus on customer engagement has made good progress during the past year. The company is increasingly shortlisted in WCM evaluations and displaying growth in the WCM market.
• Sitecore usability remains strong in relation to challenging issues such as multilingual and multichannel requirements and the demand for more richly functional WCM environments tied to Microsoft SharePoint.
• Sitecore demonstrates strong vision, with its Adaptive Print Studio enabling good continuation between online and offline experiences, and its work surrounding Engagement Analytics bringing good visibility to user interactions and campaign activity.

Cautions

• Sitecore's strong vision is well aligned with the overall direction of the OCO market, but the company needs to execute on its vision faster to meet the expectations of an increasingly advanced user group. Long periods between some of its more visionary ideas and the appearance of related functions could cost it market share. Its investment in research and development needs to increase if it is to continue to be shortlisted by organizations planning ambitious online strategies.
• Sitecore has made progress with its partner ecosystem, but Gartner still hears from customers dissatisfied because partnerships with some system integrators have not been monitored well. Sitecore is working to improve its training and certification of partners.
• Sitecore's .NET strength makes it less attractive to users looking for tools with a strong Java or LAMP stack focus.

Squiz

Squiz, an Australian company, markets a PHP offering called Squiz Suite, which consists of WCM, search (via the acquisition of Funnelback) and analytics (built on Google Analytics). Its core WCM product, Squiz Matrix, is now up to release 4.8.

Strengths

• Squiz's management team has transformed an open-source company that focused primarily on technology and consulting services into one that is more client-centric and focused on providing business solutions. Squiz bases its business model on high-value, maintenance-oriented services, rather than just a project-based approach to customer interaction.
• Squiz is a leader among open-source software communities in terms of marketing and vertical positioning. Rather than emphasizing the merits of open source, its alignment of offerings with the needs of key industries, mainly government and higher education, has been a success, and it has also made progress in other industries, such as financial services and gaming.
• Squiz's context-aware capabilities, driven largely by search technology, have enabled it to inch closer to providing higher value beyond the core capabilities of WCM, and this combination of search technology and WCM is gaining popularity with decision makers. Squiz has also shown thought leadership through its strong promotion of a "touchscreen-friendly format" for internal editors, even though the demand for this option is still relatively nascent.

Cautions

• Squiz has not penetrated far outside Australia and Western Europe during the past year. Its lack of presence in a major region like North America will pose significant problems in a market in which competition is growing and loyalties are switching from traditional Java-based offerings to .NET offerings. Missing out on the market's growth in 2010 and 2011 hurts Squiz's long-term prospects in terms of service and maintenance revenue.
• Squiz runs the risk of being seen as a partnerless vendor, caught between the worlds of open-source and proprietary software. Both proprietary and OSS vendors need a good partner ecosystem. Squiz must consider the scalability and sustainability of its business model, which is to provide OSS with strong professional services.
• Squiz must showcase interoperability with key adjacent technologies, such as those for CRM, ERP and sales force automation, to compete with vendors that cover more of the OCO market. It needs to develop technology partnerships, advance its channel initiatives and demonstrate community advances at least as good as those of other open-source projects.

Vendors Added or Dropped

We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes as markets change. As a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant or MarketScope may change over time. A vendor's appearance in a Magic Quadrant or MarketScope one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we have changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a reflection of a change in the market and, therefore, of changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor.

Added

• Acquia (its revenue now reaches the required threshold).
• HP (due to its acquisition of Autonomy).

Dropped

• Alterian (acquired by SDL).
• Autonomy (acquired by HP).
• Percussion (did not provide supporting evidence that it met the revenue threshold).

We determined which vendors to include on the basis of the following criteria:

• Revenue: The vendor's total WCM software revenue (including new licenses, updates, maintenance and subscriptions, SaaS, hosting and technical support) for the calendar year 2011 must exceed $11 million.
• Geographic presence: The vendor must have been in business for more than five years, with a multigeographic presence for at least one year and a strategy that supports further geographic expansion. It must actively market its WCM offering in at least two major regions, such as North America and EMEA.
• Vertical and horizontal capabilities: The vendor must actively market its products in more than two major vertical markets and in more than one horizontal application category (such as e-commerce and customer self-service).
• Market interest: The market must be interested, as evidenced by marketplaces, community forums, books, seminars, and the activities of partners and channel organizations (IT services firms, system integrators, distributors, Web interactive agencies and advisory firms).
• References: The vendor must have WCM software commercially available and reference customers that use the software in production scenarios. Some of these customers should be of enterprise scale, with the number of contributing authors exceeding 50 and the average monthly number of page views comfortably exceeding 500,000, though we prefer deployments to support even larger numbers of users.

The WCM offering must be available as a stand-alone product or suite of products, and have the following functions at minimum:

• A content repository with basic library services, such as check-in/check-out and versioning
• Authentication of users (authors, editors and reviewers) and assignment of permissions
• Content authoring, through browser-based templates or via conversion from a word-processing application
• Workflow sufficient for content review and approval
• Conversion to HTML or XML and support of templates for Web rendering
• Managed delivery of content to Web servers or site management systems
• Multisite and multilanguage management
• Web analytics and reporting capabilities
• "What you see is what you get" design capabilities with the ability to customize look, feel, and behavior independent of content
• Support for developer, administrator, editor, marketer and author roles in a distributed contribution environment
• Support for content aggregation and syndication (such as via APIs, REST interfaces and RSS)
• Ability to manage rich media in the context of Web efforts
• Ability to publish content for consumption on various devices (such as tablets, smartphones and TV sets)

Evaluation Criteria

Ability to Execute

Ability to Execute measures how well a vendor sells and supports its WCM products and services globally. The following list provides details of the specific evaluation criteria we used to assess Ability to Execute:

• Product/service evaluates product functions in areas such as:
  • Multisite and multilanguage management
  • Web analytics and reporting
  • Design
  • Content modeling
  • Metadata management
• Overall viability includes an assessment of the vendor's financial health and the overall success of the company, together with the likelihood that it will continue to invest in the product.
• Sales execution/pricing evaluates the vendor's success in the WCM market, including:
  • WCM revenue and the installed base
  • Pricing
  • Presale support
  • Effectiveness of the sales channel
  • Level of interest from Gartner clients
• Market responsiveness and track record evaluates how well the WCM offering matches buyers' requirements at acquisition. We assess the vendor's track record in delivering new functions when the market needs them. We also consider how the vendor differentiates its offerings from those of its major competitors.
• Marketing execution evaluates the clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of the vendor's efforts to market its WCM offerings. We examine aspects such as thought leadership, word of mouth and sales activities.
• Customer experience evaluates functions or services within production environments, including:
  • Ease of deployment
  • Operation
  • Administration
  • Stability
  • Scalability
  • Vendor support

• We assess this criterion via qualitative interviews with vendor-provided reference customers. We also use feedback from Gartner clients and other sources that use, or have completed competitive evaluations of, the WCM offering.

• Operations evaluates the vendor's service, support and sales.

Source: Gartner (September 2012)

Completeness of Vision

Completeness of Vision focuses on the vendor's potential and points to its future chance of success. A vendor can succeed financially in the short term but won't become a Leader without vision and a strategic plan. A vendor with average vision will anticipate and respond to changes by perceiving market trends and exploiting technology. A vendor with superior vision can anticipate, direct and initiate market trends, particularly if it integrates its vision into a broad range of areas, and capitalizes on product and service development. The following list details the criteria we used to assess Completeness of Vision:

• Market understanding evaluates the vendor's ability to understand buyers' needs and translate those needs into vertical and horizontal WCM products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those wants and needs. WCM vendors that show the highest degree of market understanding adapt to customer requirements in areas such as SaaS, dynamic contextualized delivery and ease of use for nontechnical staff.
• Marketing strategy evaluates the extent to which the vendor articulates a differentiated message and communicates it consistently throughout the organization and through its website, advertising, customer programs and positioning statements, as well as statements of direction and product road maps.
• Sales strategy evaluates the vendor's use of direct and indirect sales, marketing, service and communications to extend the scope and depth of market reach.
• Offering (product) strategy is the vendor's approach to product development and delivery that emphasizes functions and features as they map to requirements for WCM. We also evaluate development plans for the next 12 to 18 months.
• Business model evaluates the soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business proposition and whether it offers synergies with other ECM components, such as DAM, records management and document management.
• Vertical/industry strategy evaluates how the WCM vendor uses its direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, such as the media industry.
• Innovation evaluates the vendor's development and delivery of differentiated WCM technology that addresses critical customer requirements. We evaluate product capabilities and customer use in areas such as:
  • Templating
  • Workflow and change management
  • WCM repositories
  • Library services

• We also look at other capabilities that are product-specific and that are needed and deployed by customers.

• Geographic strategy evaluates how the vendor meets the specific needs of geographic regions outside its home territory. We assess whether the vendor's partners, channels and subsidiaries are appropriate for those regions.

Source: Gartner (September 2012)

Quadrant Descriptions

Leaders

Leaders should drive market transformation. Leaders have the highest combined scores for Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. They are doing well and are prepared for the future with a clear vision and a thorough appreciation of the broader context of OCO. They have strong channel partners, a presence in multiple regions, consistent financial performance, broad platform support and good customer support. In addition, they dominate in one or more technologies or vertical markets. Leaders are aware of the ecosystem in which their offerings need to fit. Leaders can:

• Demonstrate enterprise deployments
• Offer integration with other business applications and content repositories
• Provide a vertical-process or horizontal-solution focus

Challengers

Challengers are solid vendors today and can perform well for many enterprises. The important question is whether they have the vision to succeed tomorrow. A Challenger may have a strong WCM product but a product strategy that does not fully reflect market trends, such as the increasing importance of the user's context, multichannel output and interoperability with adjacent technologies (for example, CRM, DAM and multichannel campaign management).

Visionaries

Visionaries are forward-thinking and technically focused. For example, their products may have unique multilingual capabilities or set the market's direction through their innovation and product development. To become Leaders, they need to work on some of the core aspects of their offerings and increase their Ability to Execute. They may need to build financial strength, functional breadth, service and support, geographical coverage, or sales and distribution channels. Their evolution may hinge on the acceptance of a new technology or on the development of partnerships that complement their strengths.

Niche Players

Niche Players focus on a particular segment of the market, as defined by characteristics such as size, industry and project complexity. This narrow focus can affect their ability to outperform or to be more innovative. Niche Players often support only those applications that apply to the particular segments on which they focus.

WCM plays an increasingly important role in business performance. It has become the central point of coordination for initiatives involving the enterprise's online presence, and these initiatives have become more sophisticated and more important to enterprises' business strategies. Thus, WCM is key for organizations wishing to execute a strategy of OCO (see "Project Overview: Optimizing Your Online Channel With Web Content Management") that embraces areas such as customer experience management, e-commerce, digital marketing, multichannel marketing and website consolidation.

The functions that make WCM effective today differ from those that mattered most when WCM primarily served the operational role of feeding content to websites. Today, WCM products need to work with a wide and growing range of content types — social media is the big trend now. WCM products must also support the enterprise's efforts to engage employees, customers and partners via mobile devices. And WCM products have to work with a wider range of systems — analytic applications, e-commerce platforms, database management systems and so on. As a result of these trends, many IT leaders have to upgrade or replace older WCM systems with new technology that can handle more complex and critical tasks.

In the context of OCO, mobile computing, social media and interoperability already play an important role in the evolving WCM market. Looking ahead, their importance will become even more pronounced.

Mobile computing offers opportunities for enterprises to differentiate themselves from competitors. Accordingly, they have ramped up their efforts in mobile marketing, mobile commerce and context-aware computing, and multichannel marketing. In addition, more workers connect to the enterprise via smartphones and mobile tablets for applications such as business intelligence. All of these initiatives require some level of coordination with enterprise websites, so WCM systems and processes will have to change to accommodate mobility. Using mobile devices to create or access content should, for example, take into account the following:

• Mobile form factors demand shorter, more modular content types, with different presentation from that used for "wired" websites.
• Authoring and approvals will need to become simpler and more automatic to keep the publishing process moving forward.

Different use cases for mobile devices will require different levels of integration with WCM. Simply feeding content to mobile devices requires device detection and rendering. More complex interactions with users requires deeper integration. WCM systems will have to work with mobile consumer and mobile enterprise application platforms (see "What Enterprise Architects Must Do About Mobility").

The social media explosion holds five consequences for WCM:

• Enterprises can no longer fully control the creation and publication of content on their websites — they must now share it with consumers and partners.
• Website content has to become more interactive — content no longer goes in just one direction.
• Website capabilities need to include additional services such as dynamic profiles, leaderboards, activity streams and shared metadata, around the content in order to encourage participation and contribution, but also to make it easier to navigate and notice relevant content when everything is constantly changing.
• WCM has to support still more new content types and formats.
• WCM has to support more use cases — for example, one cosmetics company uses social media to develop a fan base and then incorporates consumers' feedback into its website.

Not all WCM products have the capabilities to support these new demands. Thus, IT leaders must evaluate the services and add-ons available from the vendor and its partners, not just the WCM product itself. For example, some enterprises want to create a Facebook site, or to flow some of the content from their WCM system into Facebook (and vice versa), but few do so via their WCM product — most use a third-party tool. Over time, WCM vendors will add these capabilities, either through development or acquisition.

In many enterprises, WCM has become one piece in a larger solution (such as customer communication management, multichannel portal and user experience platform) and ceased to be a stand-alone application or part of an ECM suite. Therefore, IT leaders choose WCM products based on how well they enhance adjacent technologies or even substitute for them (for example, portal software, CRM and e-commerce platforms). Consequently:

• Buying requires a deep understanding of the business's needs — often business managers help make the decision.
• Buying occurs at a higher level within the organization or at least in coordination with a larger initiative.
• The integration capabilities of WCM products have become important factors in buying decisions.
• More buyers look to source WCM products from the same vendor from which they bought other solution components.