Over lunch with an industry colleague the other day, I asked: "Have you heard anything of Percussion lately?" The answer was negative, which didn’t surprise me and only confirmed my assessment of the WCXM vendor stalling in mid-air, while the majority of its competition (such as Adobe, CoreMedia, Oracle/FatWire, and SDL Tridion) continues to soar ahead.

Looking back, Percussion did hit some serious turbulence, albeit of its own creation. The company made a puzzling strategic decision to go down-market, adapting their flasgship CM System Web CMS to create a “lighter” version of the product dubbed CM1. From what I can see, the market hasn’t responded enthusiastically to the slimmed down CM1.

If you’re not familiar with CM1, it uses the same code base as CM System with a simplified user interface. Percussion says it's suited for organizations using products like WordPress, or who may be transitioning from blogs to simpler sites. CM1 provides an AJAXy, widget-based front-end, with drag-and-drop capabilities to develop small sites quickly. It is a less expensive alternative, but it has limited extensibility options. (You can read more about CM and CM1 in our detailed Percussion evaluation.)

While Percussion has undertaken some hiring and internal promotions recently, it seems to have been less to grow the company, but more so to fill the voids left after some key personnel jumped ship. All in all, at about 60 employees, Percussion is considerably smaller than other competitors in this tier. The company underwent a realignment of top management in 2008–2010, and again in early 2012. Bill Beardslee, who used to be the Percussion’s SVP for Marketing, comes to mind. Beardslee left for dotCMS, then Magnolia. More recently Joe Wykes -- who stood behind the product in various capacities for years -- departed to run global channels for Drupal at Acquia.

The long-standing veteran CTO Vern Imrich, though, remains at Percussion, like a faithful captain who refuses to abandon ship, along with the founder and Chairman of the Board, Barry Reynolds.

On the technology side, Percussion’s CM System is a rather capable, but very tech-heavy WCXM platform, which means most implementations require expensive and time-consuming custom Java development. At the same time, Percussion has proved rather dormant in its R&D cycles, as it focused on calving off CM1. 

Complexity is not always a problem, as long as customers can find experienced help. Unfortunately, Percussion has never really embraced a partner channel. As such, it is hard to find third-party specialists and integrators with Percussion experience, outside the company’s own professional services group.

Right now, Percussion's trajectory doesn’t look inexorably downward, but it has certainly gone flat. I’d counsel extra diligence if evaluating Percussion in your current CMS selection project.