The Web Content Management landscape has changed significantly over the last five years, as large vendors have acquired smaller vendors and incorporated point functionality into broader WCM suites. Despite this, the Content Management space continues to be confusing, as hundreds of vendors compete, complement, and overlap each other with functionality suited to Digital Asset Management (DAM), Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Marketing Asset Management (MAM), Marketing Automation, Email Marketing, Media Asset Management, eCommerce, and of course, Web Content Management (WCM). WCM solutions are differentiated by their ability to convert and optimize digital content for delivery across multiple online channels. Moreover, they provide integrations to most other tools listed above as well as a broad range of marketing and sales tools. WCM supports the execution of communications across the digital presentation layer and manages the production, publication, and distribution of digital assets over owned media. It’s not for managing work in progress, heavy workflows for content development, and large assets. For these reasons, WCM has become the key enabler to an optimized end user experience.
While marketing traditionally drives WCM initiatives based on business need, today, the pendulum is swinging back toward a joint marketing-IT collaboration to integrated WCM with other sales and marketing tools, such as analytics, A/B testing, email marketing, etc. Vendors have responded to the need for integrated functionality mostly by providing stable APIs to make integrations with other systems easy and streamlined. However, there are two major exceptions to this rule. Both Adobe, SDL, and Sitecore are attempting to incorporate both core WCM functionality and the functionality of sales and marketing tools into their proprietary platforms. It appears to be working for both companies, as they enjoy leading vendor status in the eyes of many industry watchers and among enterprise buyers of WCM solutions. However, most organization have expressed their desire to keep legacy systems and best-of-breed solutions in place, leading most vendors to focus heavily on integration capabilities.
In 2014, integrations and enabling the digital end user experience are of paramount importance. However, ease of use counts heavily in purchase decisions. WCM technologies are delivered across a variety of platforms and licensing models: SaaS, On-Premise, Licensed, Open Source, and Hybrid. While budget is important, ease of use is critical to engaging actual end-users in the demo process. The WCM solutions that enable non-technical users to easily optimize the digital consumer experience will win out over the next several years.
Top Challenges with WCM According to Top Performers
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