Online Information 2010: Challenges for Commercial CMS Vendors

Last week's Online Information 2010 expo (formerly IMS) in London marked what looked like an interesting turning point in the CMS market. There were far fewer commercial CMS vendors there than previous years, and some of the biggest names were notably absent. In fact there were actually more 'open source' vendors there than commercial ones. The commercial vendors that were there had significantly smaller stands then previous years.

Why the quotes around 'open source'? Well although we at Netsight were there representing the Plone community, the were no other 'community' Open Source projects there, but a number of 'Commercial Open Source' vendors such as Squiz, Hippo, and ezPublish. These are companies that have Open Sourced some/all of their products, but the majority of the development and control is still only held by a single company rather than a diverse community. Nonetheless they offer products that you can freely download and use without paying and are licensed under an OSI approved license.

One of the first people to come up to the Plone stand to talk to us was from an educational institution that was part way through a CMS procurement process. They were all set on going with Day, whom fall into the 'Commercial Open Source' camp but at the last minute Day were bought out by Adobe and the organisation decided to abort the procurement as they were unsure of Day's future for their needs under the helm of Adobe.

This got me thinking about other acquisitions out there, and whilst we normally hear of the issues surrounding acquisitions of commercial CMS vendors, what about acquisitions of core pieces of technology their rely on? My mind was on Java and all the current discussion on its future under the new hands of Oracle. There are both commercial and Open Source CMS systems that are written in Java... how is this affecting them?

I managed to catch up with Alan Pelz-Sharpe from Real Story Group at the show to ask him if he had seen any ripples in the CMS pond with regards to the Java licensing issues, but he hadn't seen any. The biggest problem he did say he saw facing the commercial CMS market right now is the issue of how license fees are computed. Per-seat licensing for products gave away to a supposedly fairer per-CPU licensing, but now that virtualisation is coming in big time, commercial CMS vendors (and their customers) are having a hard time working out exactly how to count CPUs. Not to mention the whole issue of CPUs vs cores vs threads. Even just today there are news reports on Oracle trying to work out how to do this for their database products.

From what I can see the only way out of this quagmire is to move more towards the Open Source model... many commercial vendors say in defence of their license fees that the fees make up only a small proportion of the total cost of a CMS deployment. So why not drop them all together? Why not just Open Source your systems and move to an entirely services based business?

One company I couldn't quite fathom at Online Information was Jadu a UK based commercial CMS vendor. Their original premis was that they sold a completely hosted SaaS style CMS that you didn't need to install. But for some reason they had boxes of software on their stand. I'm not sure if they were actual software boxes or just props, but it seemed a confusing message. But then again not quite as confusing as their stance on Open Source is:

"Most open source Jadu products have no real guarantee and in many cases, require heavy investment in internal resources to manage, maintain and extend the system."

Umm... so what are you trying to say? You are or are not Open Source? Are you saying Open Source is a good thing or a bad thing? They certainly use Open Source technologies at the core of their product... I just don't think they have clearly worked out what their stance is on Open Source in the CMS market itself.

A number of visitors to the stand explicitly said to us 'We are under constrained budget, so we are looking at Open Source now". Which is great, however whilst I love Open Source, and I think it really is the best way to develop software, I wish people would compare systems on their own merits as well. Plone stands out on its own, and just because software comes with a license fee don't assume it is better. Not wanting to keep picking on Jadu, but look at the links to the news items on their home page. Numeric URLs? This is 2010, I thought every CMS was doing meaningful URLs nowadays.

Last year all of the commercial CMS vendors were touting all the additional wares they had related to CMS. It seemed you weren't anyone unless you were doing A/B or multivariate testing or had analytics coming out your ears. This year there was much less of that. My gut feeling is people just want a CMS that works. And CMS vendors would be best concentrating on their core offering, and just partnering with others doing the other stuff.

I tweeted this week about the rise of Web Experience/Engagement Management or WEM for short. This is widening the field to include not just content management but also tracking, metrics, personalisation, email newsletters etc. My iPhone helpfully corrected it to 'Web Enragement Management' which I think is how quite a few users feel when using their CMS. One outspoken critic of the term WEM, Jon Marks, pointed out that this is what creative/digital/online agencies have always been doing, just without a product name. It was just called 'marketing'. It kinda reminds me a of a great line in the nine minute beat poem 'Storm' by Tim Minchin: "You know what they call 'alternative medicine' that's been proved to work? Medicine." I guess the agencies didn't have licenses to shift so didn't need a name for it ;)

[edit: just as I hit publish I spotted a blog post from a few days ago by Ian Truscott whom explains the issues far better than I could: Web Engagement – The Emperor’s New Clothes?]

There was however quite a lot of talk about multi-platform publishing. One of the main focusses of Online Information is information companies and the likes of libraries, and with devices like the iPad and Kindle hitting the mainstream they are working out how this changes the publishing game.

This actually brought about another 'the grass is not always greener on the other side' revelation. One of the last show floor seminars was eZ Systems doing a talk on multiplatform publishing. The first half of the talk was basically just a show of how eZ Publish works, and what actually struck me was how similar it is to Plone's model of publishing (ie publishing in place, and content types etc). But the key point that struck me was how they were saying that only by having a system that deals with content as objects rather than just pages can you start to publish to multiple platforms. If your CMS just deals with 'pages' then it makes it impossible to re-purpose that content to a device which doesn't really have the notion of a 'page' (e.g. an iPhone app). This is something that Plone has been doing right from the start. We have content objects defined by a schema and then a template that is applied at publish time. I thought that was how all CMSs worked, but I guess maybe some of them don't.

For me this is one of the great values of going to shows like Online Information is to see all of the products competing in the same market as Plone and seeing how they are marketing and what features they believe to be important. Sometimes its only by seeing how other systems work do I fully appreciate how Plone works and all the lessons Plone has learned during its development over the past decade.