New vendors and investment-fueled incumbents are disrupting the Web Content & Experience Management marketplace with more modern architectures and cloud services, according to independent analyst firm Real Story Group.

Real Story Group (RSG) has just released the latest major version of its WCM vendor evaluations, which covers 34 commercial and open source players from around the world. It is available at https://www.realstorygroup.com/Reports/CMS/.

New Entrants

The updated report evaluates new entrants including Brightspot and Contentful, which are applying modern Java architectures to some of the thornier problems of web content and experience management.  

Where these newer solutions still fall short is around strategic considerations, including the depth and breadth of ecosystems and implementation channels.

Revived Players

Over the past two years, multiple longstanding Web CMS vendors have obtained new or follow-on investments to expand their operations, including:

• Crownpeak
• Episerver
• Evoq/DNN
• Sitecore
• Sitefinity
• TerminalFour
• WordPress

In addition to the usual expansion in sales and marketing teams, vendors are using new funding to modernize architectures and expand cloud offerings.

Newer Architectures

Across the WCM landscape, Real Story Group is seeing renewed interest in “head-optional” capabilities, where a platform supports integration with eCommerce, portal, and other transactional systems delivering the actual customer experience, rather than delivering via the WCM tool itself.

Analyst Summary Quote

New players, new funding, and new architectures all add up to one thing,” says RSG research director, Apoorv Durga. “The WCM marketplace is as fragmented as we’ve ever seen it, which means unparalleled customer choice.”