Byrne Tony Byrne

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Your CMS license won't be as cheap as you think

10-Feb-2006

Tags: Web Content and Experience Management, Implementation, Vendor Viability & Financials

So today I came across a CMS vendor proposal to a prospective buyer where, in the section discussing corporate viability, they waxed on about their plans to "cross- and up-sell their existing customer base," obviously copying language originally crafted for investors. This is actually a fairly common gaffe, and in any case, buyers about to sink a lot of money into a major platform would do well to sit in on quarterly earnings calls. At the same time, I am beginning to see more sandbagging out there, with vendors pitching very low entry-level pricing, and customers discovering only belatedly that they need to pay a lot more than they thought for a complete solution. This appears to be a parallel phenomenon to the trend we isolated in the most recent version of The CMS Report: vendors going back to mixed licensing models that include per-contributor fees. Scoping initial pilot projects with only a handful of contributors and a couple of servers can make even the most expensive products seem reasonable -- until you add on extra fees for rich text editors, SDKs and API access, staging or publishing services, deployment services, receiver modules -- I could go on and on here. Caveat emptor.

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