First and foremost, you will notice the name change: from WCM to WCXM.  To be clear, we're not after adding more ingredients to the acronym soup. However, the marketplace is undeniably changing. Customers and vendors are moving towards more sophisticated ways of managing their web content and the resulting customer experience. It is no longer just about managing content or just on the web.

With this in mind, we have also updated our scenarios and vendor ratings criteria to reflect the latest use cases, and features and functions we evaluate in the WCXM products.  For example, we pay much greater attention to mobile capabilities, which are surprisingly weak in this class of tools.

Version 21.0 also includes updated reviews of the following vendors:

• EPiServer – focusing on mobile and commerce with Mediachase acquisition, but highlighted by slow penetration in North America despite many hires
• Joomla! – slow progression with some concerns from the community about the impact of the long-awaited major 2.5 release
• Drupal – increasing commercialization under the watchful eye of Acquia, coupled with major talent shortage

Another key theme comes courtesy of today's press release: the increasing trend toward commercialization of open source Web Content & Experience Management (WCXM) solutions.

What does that mean for you, the buyer? You need to keep an eye on the narrowing gulf between open source and proprietary business models and how they might affect your CMS purchasing decision.

We’ve discontinued coverage of the following Web CMS vendors (though you can still access archived versions of our reviews):

• EMC | Documentum (now sunset)
• VYRE
• PaperThin
• Oracle (UCM) -- maintaining coverage of former FatWire tool
• Alterian (acquired by SDL)

We’ll be adding new vendors, including ModX and SalesForce, in forthcoming updates to the WCXM stream.

As always, our WCXM stream subscribers can download Version 21 in its entirety, or just individual chapters, and comparison charts immediately. For those of you not familiar with our evaluations, go ahead and download a free sample here.

In early 2011, Accel-KKR Capital Partners bought a minority stake in the Toronto-based North Plains, and it would be fair to say that NP is putting that investment to good use by buying the Berkeley, California, based Xinet, which has an established European office in Munich, Germany. And here are some of the reasons why North Plains is making a good move in this acquisition.

In the Digital and Media Asset Management universe, workflow capabilities have long been the Achilles heel of the majority of DAM vendors. North Plains is one of the vendors that suffers from the lack of a good workflow tool in its TeleScope DAM product. The best you can get for workflow is a messaging system on steroids. Our traditional recommendation for clients considering buying North Plains is to augment TeleScope with a third-party product if they require true workflow capabilities.

Now, Xinet's WebNative Suite is known not so much as a stand-alone DAM tool, but more so as a workflow tool for prepress activities. “Xinet is all about the workflow and automation,” stated one longtime DAM engineer whom we interviewed some time ago for our DAM research. Xinet does indeed have some bells and whistles: metadata-driven automations, approvals, version tracking, asset mark-up and annotations, among other workflow features.

On the product side, what North Plains is also adding with this acquisition is a more (in theory, for now) holistic approach to the entire lifecycle of managing assets. This lifecycle stretches from its very beginning (Xinet has a strong integration with Adobe Creative Suite) to work-in-progress, and up to distribution, archival, and compliance (where TeleScope’s database-centric approach and strength as a repository come in).

What else has been hurting North Plains? Its primarily North American presence (with some attempts to penetrate the UK market) and inability to truly go global. Conveniently, Xinet has access to the print publishing/prepress and advertising industries, where they have a strong historical foothold. As well as, an established partner and integrator channel in Europe and a bit of Asia (mainly, Japan). And this is very convenient for NP that has been struggling to build up those channels organically.

But North Plains is also gaining internal human resources in this deal – a consistent pain spot for the vendor. Many prospects and customers of North Plains often express concerns about thin resources on the ground, despite NP’s attempts to grow its Professional Services team. Many buyers want to work directly with NP, instead of going through a third-party integrator or reseller. As a result, NP is also staffing up with this acquisition and rounding up the employee count to approximately 110.

As far as the immediate integration plans go, it seems there are not many yet. As James Christopher, President and Chief Executive Officer of North Plains, told me, they plan to continue selling both products separately for now due to the “fundamentally different approaches” they serve in the marketplace. Both products will have separate roadmaps.  So don't look for workflow goodness in North Plains right away.

In the six month to a year period, North Plains claims it will invest in lightweight integration dealing with workflows, as well as establishing better paths for moving work-in-progress assets into repositories.

Ideally, both North Plains and Xinet customers would benefit from this acquisition if it brought better integrations and continued investment in improving feature sets of both products. But as the M&A history in the information management sector shows, this is not always done or done right. I would advise to exercise caution and carefully examine both products’ roadmaps before making your decision to invest in either.

We will be talking to our current customers about Media Asset Management tools and trends, as well as meeting with vendors and industry compatriots.

If you're a current RSG subscriber attending the show, it'd be great to meet up. Or if you'd like to find out more about Real Story Group and our research, please let us know as well. You can also find us participating in many other events throughout the year.

Pixelboxx and their product PrimePack is disciplined and organized, as you might 
expect from a German-engineered 
product. 
Pixelboxx Prime Pack grew from its
 roots of a Fast-Moving Consumer 
Goods (FMCG)-oriented media 
asset management product to a more 
broad offering.

One of the interesting features about this DAM product is their Intermedia Fotoficient module, which (like FlipFactory) acts as a transcoding and rendering engine. The approach of foregoing FlipFactory (which is being used by the majority of DAM vendors we cover) and building its own engine is rather unique.

Unlike Razuna and Picturepark, which also started out in the region adorned with the Alps, Pixelboxx is barely stretching out beyond the DACH region, or beyond primarily serving the German-speaking market. The entire product is very German-centric; despite the utilitarian and minimalistic interface, using it may make you wish you had taken that German class in college.

To be fair, Pixelboxx is trying to establish itself in the UK market via a partner channel, which right now counts one system integrator that is selling and customizing the DAM product. However, it is decidedly too early to speak of Pixelboxx as a global company, but time will tell. You can get the full and real story on this vendor in my detailed evaluation.

Think of these acquisitions as Photoshop layers and filters that go into the composition of a very complex picture of the product known as the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite, which incorporates approximately 17 SaaS-based distinct products under its roof. Sounds complex, right? It could prove be a goldmine for Adobe and its partner channel, but a very dark tunnel for its customers.

Adding to the complexity is Adobe’s data-driven digital marketing approach. It’s not surprising that Adobe has 27 data centers around the world and processes six trillion transactions (e.g., a mouse click) a year. More Big Data doesn't mean better data, or better marketing decisions. Software is as important as the processes and people. Despite much automation that machines can do, any Omniture customers will confirm that you still need analytics geeks in addition to marketers, IT, and other members of your organization.

Complexities aside, there was a lot of insightful talk at the Summit – particularly, the ideas about Digital Self (your profile and how it can be utilized by marketers), predictive insights, adaptive content, social analytics, and getting technology out of the way of marketers. A myriad of announcements were also made. Let me highlight a few:

• Launch of "Adobe Social," based on the Context Optional/Efficient Frontier acquisition, with the idea of social publishing, monitoring, engagement, ad buying, and analytics
• Predictive Marketing: Leverage historical data to predict future results and uncover behavior patterns for better targeting
• Launch of CQ 5.5: Updated version of the Web Experience Management (WEM) system with more meaningful integrations into Scene7, Search&Promote, and SiteCatalyst
• New eCommerce features via a partnership with hybris
• Adobe Discover addition of cross-visit analytics across multiple online properties.

One of the areas that Adobe is still not caught up on yet is Digital Asset Management in the context of digital marketing. “Expect us to step up,” said Kevin Lynch, the company’s CTO, as Adobe plans to further its CQ DAM and Scene7 products.

Adobe spans across multiple categories in our forthcoming Digital Marketing evaluation research, with very few rivals that can boast a comparable set of capabilities. I can think of Salesforce, Google, IBM, and maybe Oracle in terms of breadth. While Adobe doesn't exactly hold a monopoly in this space, their mantra is, “to be the standard for the way digital marketing and advertising is created, managed, executed, measured and optimized.”

The issue is whether you're really best served by doing digital marketing the Adobe Way. Adobe's Digital Marketing Suite is a complex panorama of technologies, with some layers still unrealized. A dizzying array of tools is typically not the ideal first step for solving real business problems.

Razuna is interesting as one of the few established open source DAM products in the marketplace. Yes, there are many open source DAM players in the market, but not many are mature.

With roots in the DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) region, Razuna is expanding its reach, and now sees deployments in Scandinavia, the United Kingdom and the United States (albeit with only one partner in the latter case). What you may find interesting about this product is its three-way licensing model: true open source under AGPL, commercial open source (like Nuxeo), or SaaS (like Widen).

Razuna is a web-based DAM focused on simple brand management. Focus is good. The not so good part is the UI: You may find yourself getting a little dizzy the more advanced work you do, overwhelmed by an array of one too many tabs and actionable items.

There’s a lot more I could tell you.  But, you'll just have to read more about Razuna in the detailed evaluation in our DAM report.

Have you worked with Razuna? What are your impressions?

There are clear advantages to the SaaS WCXM model: get rid of the extra IT support overhead and the burden of installation, maintenance, hardware support. In the same breath, SaaS WCXM vendors are failing to pervade the WCXM marketplace.

We’ve seen some M&A activity in this segment in the past year, but little meaningful product development.  For more details, consult our recently updated 2012 WCXM "Cross Check" marketplace analysis.

Now, if you're evaluating a cloud WCXM supplier (either SaaS, managed hosting, or true cloud), you might be thinking about things like data security risks. Security is important, but other requirements may emerge as equally salient. For example, your WCXM system will likely need to “talk” to other pieces of software in your enterprise ecosystem. At least from our experience, as integration requirements get more sophisticated, SaaS vendors increasingly fall short, particularly when it comes to the layer of experience management functionality in addition to good ol’ web content management.

But I'm also curious about your experience. Have you been evaluating or experimenting with cloud-based deployments of on-premise WCXM solutions? Or worked with a true SaaS WCXM system? I’d love to hear about your victories and challenges.

To give you a bit of a historical perspective, SDL’s initial offer of 80p-a-share was rejected by Alterian in October, citing “undervaluing the company’s position and its future prospects.” While SDL was busy upping the offer, the struggling Alterian, in the meantime, announced workforce cuts from over 400 people to around 260, attempting to pretty up for the acquisition and reduce annual expenses by about £10.6 million.

Now, SDL has a Web CMS product called SDL Tridion (via an earlier acquisition). Alterian has a Web CMS product as well: Alterian Content Manager, having downsized from three CMS products, killing the Morello and Immediacy brands. The WCM collision, however, is not the most beguiling part of this romance.

In early 2011, SDL has stepped onto the path of what it calls "Pervasive Engagement Management" (a flavor of Web Engagement Management) with the release of SDL Tridion 2011. The release included integration with Netbiscuits (for mobile websites and apps production and delivery) and a new product developed internally called SmartTarget (based on the acquisition of Fredhopper technology). In addition to that, SDL Tridion piled on another new product – the Online Marketing Explorer – and yet another interface to master. All in all, SDL Tridion boasts a hodge-podge of tools that -- even once mastered -- still may not provide a rounded offering of value to customers.

What is most interesting to SDL, then, is Alterian’s marketing suite -- social media monitoring, marketing analytics, and campaign management.  More services to add to the stew.  So the first reason for concern for any current and future customers is that SDL Tridion as a web content management system runs a big risk of turning today's small whale into full-blown bloatware.

The second risk falls to Alterian's WCM customers. The two vendors' web content management businesses are not complementary, if only from a perspective of slightly different customer segments that they can serve.

Let’s just hope that both parties will handle product overlaps more gracefully and transparently than Alterian’s earlier approach: quietly taking their two more junior offspring behind the barn and strangling them. Customers looking for a less gruesome outcome should explore carefully whether SDL follows a clear strategy in words as well as deeds, evolving product maps in a manner that doesn’t send licensees of either CMS product into swirls of panic attacks amid lingering rumors.

On the other hand, there’s also the fact that SDL and SDL Web Content Management division have been trying to expand its partner channel for quite some time now, and licensees still struggle to find qualified implementers of SDL Tridion 2011, let alone prior versions of the product. Alterian boasts a network of approximately 150 marketing services partners, systems integrators, and agencies, which SDL may use to provider greater coverage of services -- assuming they can ramp them up in any reasonable timeframe.

The acquisition is not expected to close until early 2012.

In recent years, the drumbeat has been for SaaS-based WCM vendors. By renaming themselves "cloud" vendors, the thought went, surely now they would sweep aside all those incumbent, fuddy-duddy, on-premise solutions. Recently Gartner declared a "big shift" towards cloud WCM for a vendor webinar.

Here's what I think: Not gonna happen.

Are SaaS-based solutions more popular than ten years ago? Yes. Have they reached liftoff in the marketplace? No. Let's look at three of the bigger players we evaluate in our Web CMS Report:

• Clickability: sold to a CDN vendor with venture investors taking a bath; future a bit uncertain
• CrownPeak: working on its first major UI overhaul in nearly ten years, and suffering from a meandering roadmap
• OmniUpdate: doing relatively well in the market, ironically by focusing intently on a very specific niche -- higher education in North America; other WCM vendors are also succeeding in higher ed

Meanwhile, many if not most traditional WCM vendors are doing quite well. Among mid-market and select open source projects, doubling or tripling their customer bases in recent years.

The more interesting development, I think, is the broader trend on public websites for outsourcing both development and hosting, as internal IT and development resources struggle to keep up with fast-moving technologies and marketing needs. Note that managed hosting for, say, Drupal or Sitecore is not the same thing as a native SaaS-based solution. But for many customers, it's a happy medium.

The majority of buyers often don't even consider the SaaS option for WCM. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of myths and red herrings surrounding the concept. On the other hand, I also understand when customers, particularly larger enterprises, look out over the WCM supplier landscape and conclude that SaaS vendors are not the strongest reeds in the pond right now...

Elvis is a resident of the “Dutch software belt,” as I like to call it (more on this concept in a separate blog post). The estate of Mr. Presley, however, is not involved. Elvis DAM is not being coded from Graceland Mansion. The product name stems from its early versions and internal code name while it was been developed in Krommenie, the Netherlands, circa 2001, in a spin-off from Graphit BV (an SI in the Benelux media sector).

On the UI side, Elvis DAM is quite a good-looking contender in the DAM space. Users often compliment the elegance of Elvis’ interface. Also among strengths, is Elvis' comparatively strong Lucene-based search and filtering capabilities.

If you want to SOAP it up, or REST it down – there’s an API for that. But don’t hope for much depth, especially if you’re trying to pair up Elvis DAM with a Web CMS. Elvis will tell you they have a TinyMCE rich text editor plugin that gives you a button in the RTE to browse Elvis folders and insert assets into a page. But this is as far as you can go in Elvis’ current state of integration capabilities -- leaving much, much more room for gezelligheid.

For those of you European buyers doing DAM product selections, also consider Elvis’ close neighbors: ADAM and celum. If your needs depend heavily on strong video management capabilities, you may want to check out celum’s MOVIS server. If your budget is a bit tight for ADAM, or if prefer not to deal with a slew of add-ons to the core product, Elvis may have a more attractive price point and a more modern architecture. But these facts are simple illustrations, mere drops in the ocean of how we compare and evaluate these vendors in our DAM evaluation research stream.

Scene7 is a SaaS-based product best suited for web cataloging and print production scenarios. If you have been following Day Software (now, Adobe CQ) for as long as I have, you are probably wondering about how S7 compares to CQ DAM, and suspect there may be some similarities. And you would be correct. There is some functional overlap, as well as distinguishing features in both products, but most likely you’ll see convergence of the two going forward. The existing customer base will probably remain on either product, but in the future choices may need to be made.

Scene7 – being part of the Adobe abode – works well with Flash, InDesign, and other members of the Creative Suite 5 family. S7, however, lacks *any* wokflow functionality. The majority of DAM/MAM vendors we cover are infamous for omitting this feature from their product roadmaps, so Adobe is not alone here. But this is also when Scene7’s adopted sibling CQ DAM might come to the rescue. There have been talks of CQ DAM as an alternative and/or complimentary addition to S7 to fix this gap -- though such an integration wouldn't be simple.

As a pure-play DAM, Scene7 is far from ready for prime time. It may never even rise to the stars. All things DAM are a bit commotional and out of sync at Adobe, as I was just saying not long ago. Plenty more details on these two DAM/MAM products are available to our DAM subscribers.

One thing Adobe does well is embracing design and creativity. At MAX, the vendor put on an impressive show, unveiled its acquisitions of TypeKit and Nitobi, plans for Creative Cloud, touch apps, plus a slew of other announcements, and gave sneak peeks into fascinating things under development by Adobe engineers. Curiously, Adobe didn't mention Flash once in the opening keynote. In the day-two keynote, Flash was finally uttered, but seemingly only when accompanied by AIR or HTML5 in the same sentence.

WEM/CEM and DAM received even fewer mentions.

One thing Adobe doesn't yet do well is enterprise software. Despite being alluring to the creative crowds, Adobe (at this point in time) doesn't seem to have figured out what to do in the WEM space, and allows both Omniture and Day to swim in separate swim lanes, albeit in the same pool. On one hand, it was expected that neither Day nor Omniture would have much presence at MAX – due to the recently announced merger of these two business units, and departure of Rob Tarkoff, former SVP and GM, Digital Enterprise Solutions.

One the other hand, MAX was one of the opportunities for Adobe to show off its WEM and DAM propers, but that didn't quite happen – neither in presentations, nor on the show floor.

When I stopped by the WEM booth and asked a question, the person manning the booth couldn't quite explain what this product does and how it works. "It's something about updating web pages," was the paraphrased answer I got. To be fair, he was standing in for a guy who went to get lunch, but it gives you the sense of depth...

The Creative Suite, ColdFusion, and Digital Publishing Suit booths were swarming. I could get a nice badge on Foursquare if there were check-ins at individual product booths.

Note that I am not suggesting that Day and Omniture product lines and their respective customers are in immediate trouble under the Adobe roof.  Nevertheless, the show displayed a palpable lack of mental and cultural investment. Time will tell if and how this changes.

In both cases, be aware that (as my colleague Tony puts it) there are fewer lines of new code than lines of marketing text and messaging around these WCM vendors' Web Experience Management activities. Pardon me, a correction: SDL Tridion has its own moniker for WEM – Pervasive Engagement Management.

Most importantly, as they say in surfing, know your limits and your capabilities before jumping into the ocean and riding that WEM/WXM wave.

Look at Adobe CQ, for example. In the latest release, version 5.4, most of the effort went into integrating Day Software’s WCM product into the Adobe family, mainly through first steps in marrying CQ WCM with Omniture-based Test & Target and other analytics functionalities. The dame of CQ DAM didn’t get much love in this release, aside from some tweaks to video management. Also, we hear there’s a Scene7 affair going on with CQ.

VYRE, one of the vendors that also does both WCM and DAM, has shifted its focus to digital marketing and marketing automation. As a result, there have recently been rather substantial updates to Vyre's DAM functionality, including the launch of a new product dubbed OnBrand. OnBrand is a more modular, bundled-up version of VYRE Unify with some interesting features for marketeers.

Nuxeo’s first and foremost focus has always been on its ECM platform - Nuxeo EP. DAM is just one of many applications that can be built on top of it, and this is exactly how it's being treated – like a step child. Some of the most interesting developments, like the speech-to-text engine implementation, still haven't been productized or taken advantage of.

As you can see, the CMS + DAM marriage is a fascinating and multi-layered one. If you are exploring Nuxeo, Adobe CQ or VYRE as plausible candidates for your merged scenarios, or as standalone DAM systems, have a look at our latest research for some guidance on vendors’ real strengths and weaknesses.

The word adobe traces its roots to spoken Arabic (from Coptic), where it was al tub, or "the brick." Adobe's recently announced Digital Enterprise Platform (ADEP) can be described as a tub of bricks for building abodes of tablet, mobile, web, and desktop applications. The "tub" in this case is CRX -- the repository layer that Adobe took over via the Day Software acquisition.

In a recently released Advisory Paper, A First look at Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform, I examine how ADEP incorporates Adobe's longstanding LiveCycle offering, along with other related services. Although the first version of ADEP won't go live until August 2011, it represents an important attempt to rationalize and integrate a variety of Adobe tools and services under one framework, with multichannel "Customer Experience Management" as the unifying theme.

There's important long-term potential here, but the real customer value remains unproven at this time. This paper looks at the promise and the potential pitfalls of ADEP from that perspective, as well as upcoming licensing changes and implications of that.

The paper is available for our WCM, Portals, ECM and DAM subscription customers for download here.

The lower half of this tier -- what we call mid-market products -- is a bit like the crowded Grand Central station: arrivals are more or less according to schedule, the orchestration is in place, and innovation is sparse. The .NET CMS darlings who dominate this tier are not necessarily shaking up the universe, but merrily chugging along.

The demise of former mid-market stalwarts RedDot (OpenText Web Solutions) and Immediacy (Alterian CMC) is an indicator to the Darwinian evolution in the jam-packed space. There are many choices in the mid-market CMS product tier even as some offerings like Sitecore differentiate themselves by becoming more platform-like (read: complex). Only the fittest will survive.

SharePoint remains a plausible alternative, but as an expensive development platform, it's neither priced nor productized for broader adoption among mid-market customers.

Trying to break away from its Czech roots, Kentico has seen some adoption in North America and has expanded its feature-set to include e-commerce and social capabilities.  Yet Kentico still remains a rather niche vendor, largely fitting basic scenarios.

Ektron released a slew of new features (as they often do), along with the new API, which still remains far from prime time. Developers are yet to fall in love with the Ektron way.

DotNetNuke decided to modernize its innards and switch from VB.NET to C#. This development though is unlikely to have much impact on its usability or architectural shortcomings.

Getting squeezed on the lower end by the likes of WordPress and Joomla!, the .NET mid-market is under pressure to remain relevant and distinguish itself in a way that is appealing to organizations with limited budgets or limited IT resources.

By the same token, there's no CMS where you can drag and drop everything around, WYSIWYG  your way through all sorts of templates without ever needing a technical person to do any heavy lifting.

Despite the long-ish history of web content management and the search for the Holy Grail of ease-of-use and zero-training interfaces, it is still very much about Web Complexity Management.

The simplicity (in all its complexity) -- no matter how much you yearn for it -- is just not there. Just like in haute cuisine, "simplicity is not simple," as one of my favorite restaurants in the world located in Brugge, Belgium, puts it. Depending on the particular Web CMS, some tasks will unfold more easily than others, but overall these are complex systems. It's the rare digital enterprise presence that lacks complexity in one way or the other.

Frequently touted "simpler" alternatives are not always so simple.  SaaS-based CMS is not necessarily less complex than on-premise technology. Open source CMS is almost never easier than proprietary competitors. If you, the buyer, hope for a magic tool that will do everything for you without you doing a lot of hard work, I am sorry to disappoint you. That won't happen.

To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, ask not what your CMS can do for you -- ask what you can do for your CMS. Be ready on many fronts -- including content inventory, migration strategy, planning, budget, change management, proper staffing, competent implementers, sound technical and functional design, education and adoption strategy....the list goes on. No single piece of technology can solve your organizational challenges around information management.  Invest in people. It’s the people who can make that happen.

Here’s a bit of a background to this acquisition. SDL Tridion Web CMS has long lacked some basic digital asset handling features. Yes, you can upload binaries -- images, videos, audios, etc. -- into the so-called “multimedia components,” but this is about it. (We’ve talked before about DAM-lite vs. true DAM functionalities.) Any other sophisticated features like image editing, video transcoding and metadata ingestion are out of the question.

While Tridion tried to make some strides to integrate with ADAM  – a Belgian DAM software vendor – they were few and far in between, not to mention hardly productized. So this is where Calamares – a very-few-people Delft shop comes in. Calamares has also done some ADAM integrations, as Calamares lacks many core DAM features, because they mostly focus on video storage and distribution. And this is very important: while Calamares positions itself as a Software-as-a-Service MAM (Media Asset Management) vendor, its true strength lies in Video Asset Management (VAM). VAM is only a subset of MAM as a whole.

Ektron, Sitecore, and Hippo are some of the CMSs being reported (by Calamares) as having connectors to the Calamares VAM system as well. Where Calamares fits in the SDL Tridion picture is MAM. The build vs. buy argument is one good reason (we've seen SDL Tridion pitch custom-built DAM-like feature components to prospective customers). However, Calamares is mainly video management, and people still like to be able to crop and resize their images while in the CMS. The question is which functions will be integrated better than others.

It certainly doesn’t make much sense to now consider SDL Tridion a DAM or VAM vendor. Video streaming, rights management, and video distribution features of Calamares will hardly make SDL Tridion a plausible candidate for media and publishing companies that tend to go for highly customized CMS approaches. On the other hand, Calamares shouldn’t be considered a standalone VAM or MAM vendor any longer either.

The question here is: how much are you willing to pay for DAM-like features if you need them? How well will the integration transpire? (I’ve seen too many examples with many Web CMS vendors that prove it doesn’t always go well.) You’d think you’ll be able to manage all assets from one central repository? There are some technical limitations to Calamares as it stands now. With the Brightcoves of this world as an alternative, it remains to be seen what value Calamares will bring to you, the current and future SDL Tridion Web CMS customers.

Although it's not entirely clear yet what Limelight will do with Clickability, some of the guesses may include: as a true CMS, as an interface for a hosted video delivery platform (transcoding/encoding, streaming, and HD video), or as a central content repository (infrastructure, syndication, and digital marketing) for various other cloud-based integrations (Limelight made other SaaS acquisitions in the last year, including EyeWonder and Delve Networks).

In any case these agendas might present a stretch for those organizations exploring Clickability as a potential WCM vendor.

As one of the long-standing and "true SaaS" Web CMS vendors (Crownpeak is another one), you can't say Clickability has been struggling lately (despite occasional pitiful attacks towards struggling CMS vendors). Nor can you say that it's been exactly prospering.

One fact to illustrate the latter point: Clickability took in $15.3m in venture funding over the years, but sold for $10m. Lesson #1: Investors face deadlines too, and will cut their losses when they can.

Secondly, despite much hype otherwise, interest still remains much greater in on-premise WCM technology, even if many organizations exhibit insufficient resources to deal with full-blown WCM installs. Given that Limelight expects Clickability to contribute only up to $5m in H2 2011 revenues, everyone seems to be very cautious. Hey, even TweetDeck sold for at least $40m on the same day.

As for Clickability, some departures at the executive levels in recent years suggested something was stirring. The CEO (and CTO) Jeff Freund has been quiescent for at least the past couple of years (perhaps busy prepping for the sale), while still formally remaining on the official roster.  Lesson #3: pay close attention to vendor intangibles (we do, in our vendor evaluations).

If you're reviewing Clickability as your next CMS supplier, it might be wise to pause for a bit until things sort themselves out. In addition to the typical cloud concerns (c.f., Amazon data loss), you don't want to deal with post-acquisition usuals -- possible staff cuts, rebranding pains, awkward integrations. Product instability is one of the areas of concern here. Tread carefully if planning to invest in Clickability for traditional Web CMS scenarios.

Just a few observations from the recent past.

VYRE -- one of the very few vendors that does a combo of WCM + DAM -- recently changed its orientation from WCM to "marketing automation". In addition, they're putting more focus on marketing resource management. Does that mean they've stopped doing WCM? No. However, the majority of VYRE implementations tend to fall on the Digital Asset Management side, whereby brand asset managers look to provide better marketing capabilities and brand distribution channels for themselves and their clients. One of those channels is always, inevitably, the web - so VYRE won't be cutting out their WCM capabilities anytime soon. 

Sitecore recently announced they're now a "Customer Engagement Management" platform. The repositioning actually comes with some new engagement-y functionality (e.g., engagement automation, adaptive segmentation) -- though not to be fully revealed until perhaps early Q3 in the 6.5 release.

Upon the acquisition by Adobe, Day CQ5 is raving about Customer Experience Management - from physical kiosks to mobile delivery, where CQ5 is the proposed foundation for content management, CRX is application central, Omniture for analytics, and LiveCycle is the RIA and toolset layer.

Messaging, marketing, and positioning changes orchestrated by WCM vendors are not always indicative of the actual market trends. Buyers should be aware of that, should you want to escape any achy, breakin' WCM hearts.

The bottom line: it doesn't really matter what's happening in the vendor's marketing department or which kool-aid the CMO is drinking. If you're buying a CMS, you should be buying it for what's under covers, for the core of technology, for what it can do for you, and not necessarily for the marketing labels attached to it.

I talk to enough customers and vendors to know what organizations pay, and when vendors are willing to give out discounts, and what an average customer agrees to pay for any Web CMS in the market. Depending on which tier you look at, your budget can start at US$5K, $20K, $50K, $100K, or $250k – license cost only.

It is still a common misconception that open source is free. I've long been an advocate and educator for organizations, trying to get them to understand that licensing is only the initial investment. The bulk of the expenses will come during the implementation.

So, if you ask me who is cheaper when you're considering Adobe CQ5 vs. Drupal, or Ektron vs. OpenText, or some other nonsense combination, my answer to you: your priorities are wrong. First, look at how the WCMS fits what you're trying to accomplish. Second, look at how your business objectives are met with various options. (Our WCMS evaluations can help you here.) Third, look at how much your initial investment will be. I can go on.

It's simple, really. You're not just buying technology, or just a Web CMS product – you're buying a relationship. Whether you're loaded or not, it's not just about money.

The explanation is quite simple and has nothing to do with JCR dying, global warming, or rising cotton prices. If you remember, there was an excruciatingly long period of silence in Basel leading up to the release of CQ 5.1 in 2008. The jump from CQ4 to CQ5 brought a considerable improvement in the product, wrapped with an elitist bow - aiming to enchant not only techie geeks, but marketers as well. Since then, Day overhauled its upper management echelons, kept up an aggressive research and product development schedule, expanded sales and marketing activities globally and, particularly, in North America, prettied up enough to get acquired by Adobe. Result? The product is now officially popular.

But is that a good thing for you the customer?

History is repeating itself here, as waves of WCM vendors -- some fresh off the boat, others longstanding like Day/Adobe -- have experienced this popularity jag, balancing high demand with scarcity of resources to support growth. RedDot (now almost defunct), SDL Tridion, eZ Systems, and other WCM vendors we cover in our Web CMS research have all experienced mismatched levels of product demand versus product expertise.

Historically, Day relied mainly on its partner network to carry out many of its CQ5 WCM product implementations. We hear from customers, though, that not every partner is created equal, and some have had to replace partners mid-project. Given CQ's historical roots, the collective partner intelligence is higher in Europe; whereas in North America CQ-experienced SIs are harder to find. Some CQ5 partners are wisely reaching into Eastern Europe to ramp up skill bases, but that too takes time.

As with other vendors, Adobe's own Professional Services can get parachuted in to put out fires, but there are always limits here. It should be noted that Day's PS organization in the U.S. was kick-started seriously only a couple of years ago.

What current and future Adobe CQ5 customers should keep in mind is that developing on CRX and CQ5 WCM presents a steep learning curve: be it for your own in-house developers or Adobe's new implementation partners.  Look for extensive developer training and previous experience to get to the needed expertise. Whether your developers or others', that takes time, so you should choose carefully into whose pocket you put those hefty CMS implementation fees.

Is FatWire heartbroken to become the third wheel? Why did EMC choose to befriend SDL as well? FatWire is one of the last few still-standing independents of decent size in the Web CMS market. Still, the EMC-FatWire fling was never consummated in an acquisition, despite engaging in several preludes to M&A activity. There are reasons for that.

According to EMC, the new dalliance with SDL Tridion “…will complement EMC's existing relationships in Web Content Management (WCM) and Web Engagement Management…”

But is it really that necessary for EMC’s customers and prospects to have multiple approaches to WCM? Even though right now, it appears that EMC is giving equal love to both FatWire and SDL, this polygamous approach doesn’t appear to be viable long-term.

FatWire, just like SDL Tridion, is in the business of singing Web Experience Management (WEM) hymns. The deal between SDL and EMC is about identical to the one signed with FatWire. It includes mutual reseller agreements, where EMC will resell SDL’s WCM system SDL Tridion 2011, and SDL customers and prospects will get access to EMC’s Digital Asset Management (DAM) product - EMC Documentum Media Workspace.

On the DAM side, SDL never exhibited many ambitions in expanding this side of the product beyond the primitive upload, storage, and re-use of digital assets – even image resizing is an additional implementation effort. Aside from a quick romance with ADAM, SDL has never committed to a DAM relationship until EMC came along with their brand asset management product.

Only a handful of WCM vendors kill two birds -- DAM and WCM – with one product stone. VYRE and Adobe CQ are some of them. In the majority of other cases, there’s a lot of work on the integration side to tie in your WCM/WEM with a DAM system. EMC and SDL are the two dots that do need to be connected.

Like my colleague Apoorv Durga in his take on EMC + FatWire, I am not sure SDL + EMC will make too much of a positive difference to customers. Neither EMC Documentum Media Workspace nor SDL Tridion 2011 is elegant or inexpensive. The two products are rather different from an architectural standpoint. If you are an existing EMC customer who were recently sold on FatWire’s WEM idea, be careful – you probably don’t want to face the challenge of switching to Tridion. 

To get a better handle on these technologies, you may want to check our Web CMS Research, which covers SDL Tridion, FatWire, and Documentum in depth. And if your needs include DAM, you'll want to check out the Digital Media and Asset Management Research as well.

I won't revisit a broader language debate here. The difference between VB.NET and C# boils down to syntactic sugar: while syntactically they are very different languages, Microsoft made sure that both are compatible with the .NET Framework development platform. As a result, just like in case with the majority of other .NET CMS vendors – Ektron, EPiServer, Umbraco, etc. – VB.NET can still be used as the implementation code, regardless of the core product language of choice. Therefore, VB.NET should still be supported going forward in the DotNetNuke API.

So far, things look pretty peachy, but let’s move on to the shaky bits. A software core re-write is a very significant change for any platform. The TCL-to-Java conversion caused years of pain for (then) Vignette that scarred the company indelibly.

If you're using DNN, the good news is that the weight of this huge task doesn't fall on your shoulders -- at least not immediately. Most of the work of converting the core to C# was done by a DNN enthusiast developer in China, Ben Zhong. Instead of forking (too much overhead), DNN Corporation decided to accept Zhong's codebase as the basis for a complete conversion. The new codebase currently remains in QA, with a planned release as DotNetNuke 6.0 in Q2 2011.

The not-so-good news here for DNN-based sites is that your VB developers -- and it's still not uncommon to see developers use VB -- will have to start putting their old tricks to rest and learn some new ones. More importantly, DotNetNuke is notorious for cutting corners around testing new releases. You should tread the muddy upgrade waters cautiously.

This move further manifests DotNetNuke's aspirations to be taken more seriously for enterprise-scale .NET WCM deployments (a déjà vu moment), but wholesale rewrites are tricky and can bring longlasting consequences.  So for customers there's still a long, winding road ahead.