Byrne Tony Byrne

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Questioning Sitecore's support model

1-Jun-2007

Tags: Web Content and Experience Management, Implementation, Marketplace at Large, Sitecore

Web CMS vendor Sitecore sells its software exclusively through 3rd-party consulting partners. That has helped the formerly small Danish company expand rapidly in North America, among other locales, at a time when many other vendors pay only lip service to their consulting channels. These partners become especially important, because, as Web CMS Report readers know, Sitecore is also unusual among its peers as more of a development platform than out-of-the-box product.

However, this approach sometimes leads to confusion, first in the sales process, but then later, after the contract is signed. The implementation partner will typically charge annual support (after a warranty period) for its customizations, and Sitecore encourages those partners to serve as first-line support more generally as the team closest to the customer, and as the team who also undertook the necessary system modifications. But then Sitecore also charges the usual 20ish percent maintenance-and-support fee as well. To be fair, maintenance includes product patches and updates that only a vendor can supply. And of course, other vendors use implementation partners too, and sometimes other vendors' tech support engineers won't support customizations undertaken by their own firm's professional services organization.

Nevertheless, in this case combined partner+vendor support fees feels like double-dipping. In the mid-market where Sitecore lives, customers certainly prefer having one belly-button to push when things go wrong. In the event, shouldn't customers have only one company to pay for support?

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