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CMS Vendor EPiServer Not Going Public

12-Aug-2010

Tags: Web Content Management, Vendor Viability & Financials, EPiServer

This year's big plan for Swedish Web CMS vendor EPiServer was to go public on July 30th. In the end, though, that didn't quite work out: EPi withdrew at the last minute.

That's not a real shocker, considering the current economic climate. But it's not because of trouble at EPiServer: in fact, the vendor seems to be doing well, and apparently, all available shares were placed. The main reason to withdraw seems to have been a volatile stock market. In other words, if one of the reasons to go public with your company is prestige, it doesn't look so good if immediately afterwards the share prices tank. Even if it's because the stockbrokers in Stockholm are in a general panic about the market as a whole, and not your shares specifically.

So should this worry you if you're a current customer or looking for a CMS? Not at all. If anything, I would argue it's in technology buyer's interest for EPiServer to maintain its steady growth, rather than the company jumping into the shark-infested waters of mergers & acquisitions. You could sympathize with EPiServer's disappointment, but other than that, this means business as usual.

    Excerpt from the EPiServer Evaluation

    Web Content Management Report looks at... Dragging Pages in EPiServer

    "Like Alterian and some other tools, EPiServer allows editors to drag and drop articles within the left navigation tree, enabling them to move pages and site sections around quickly (Figure 203). This is, of course, a familiar experience to Windows Explorer, but once again, note the emphasis on pages rather than discrete content items..."
    (p. 452)

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