The Gartner 2014 Magic Quadrant for WCM on CMS-Connected

On Thursday, January 22nd, CMS-Connected will once again take a look at the 'magical' 2014 Gartner MQ for WCM. Each year we tend to take some time during the show to address the report, but this year we are dedicating our entire episode to the 2014 WCM Magic Quadrant.

How much have the little dots wiggled around this year? Are there any new kids on the block? And who lost ground, or gained ground on their competitors this year.

 

Who Lost Ground

OpenText

We once referred to OpenText as the place where innovation goes to die as a challenge to their tendency to buy up innovative companies only to have them disappear into obscurity when attempting to integrate them into their current solution stack. This has caught up to them as Gartner elects to demote OpenText from Leader to Challenger, citing unsatisfactory marketing effectiveness and lack of interest from decision makers.

GX Software

GX Software finds itself in the ‘relegation zone’ this year having moved down from Visionaries into Niche Players. It appears partly based on their inability to market effectively to the ‘lucrative’ North American crowd. As well, enhanced marketing of its BlueConic product somewhat alienated its tried and true, traditional WCM, XperienCentral. Challenges with developing a congruent partner strategy have also seen clients communicate concerns with implementation and scaling based on training weaknesses with partner firms.

Who Gained Ground

Acquia

Open Source finds the holy land. Enterprise Drupal house, Acquia made the jump from Visionaries directly to Leaders since the last quadrant. This extraordinary jump is attributed to fostering their extremely close and prioritized connection to the Drupal software community. This allows them to leverage the community for cutting edge innovation and first to market development. Their service offerings (SaaS, Hosting available module solutions) have proven very popular across a broad range of clients.

This is a remarkable example of Enterprise CMS delivery with zero license fees.

Automattic

As with Drupal, Automattic is showing that Enterprise Wordpress deliver does exist and can generate enough revenue to ‘buy their way’ into the MQ. Automattic have worked to build on their ‘Vision’ and business model in order to move from Niche Players into the Visionaries quadrant. Gartner mentions the WP VIP offering as delivering simple, elegant interfaces for end users. This equates to short training cycles and quick content turnaround. “Customers using WordPress.com VIP report low initial costs, low cost at scale and high value relative to the cost of other providers.”

Some would argue whether it’s even appropriate to include Wordpress in this list of Enterprise WCM platforms. What do you think?

Honorable Mention

Ektron

While they haven’t dropped from Visionaries, they have slid considerably ‘inside’ the quadrant. While this is just a little blue dot wiggling around the square, it seems to indicate that they’ll find themselves inside the Niche Players tier, or worse, next year if they don’t turn things around. Perhaps Ektron AND Sitefinity will disappear next year to be replaced by the beast that is now Accel-KKR.

No Surprises?

What are your thoughts on the WCM MQ for 2014? Were there any surprises here? Surprise drop by OpenText after their continued assimilation strategy?

Please feel free to lurk in our live twitter feed during the show by tweeting along with the hashtag #cmsconnected

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