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CMS in the Cloud, an opportunity. How will it play out?

February 5th, 2010 by Matthew Johnson

Today, Razorfish is conducting its annual technology summit.  Topic this year is Transforming your business through the cloud.  The cloud is a very broad term covering many angles from services to infrastructure.  This topic is very relevant within CMS space. Frankly the time to market for many CMS solutions can be large and significant, especially within the Enterprise market-space.  CMS setup, development, customization and cluster maintenance can be very cumbersome to say the least. Members of the CMS community are all familiar with the time and effort to bring a high performance CMS cluster online and support it.    As content consumption patterns shift from traditional web pages to a more multi-channel content  ecosystem (mobile, website, tablets, widgets, game consoles, kiosks, etc), the demand for highly scalable and near real-time CMS will be needed.  The movement to a real-time web will exponential increase resource requirements of CMS solutions as they try to manage more content in a shorter time frame. Innovative CMS solutions will need an agile and flexible home that expands and contracts with shifts in demand due to marketing campaigns, events, and overall increases in consumption . Cloud services from Rackspace and Amazon provide an excellent foundation to establish a CMS foundation.  They allow the ability to quickly allocate space, bandwidth, and instances in direct response to demand.  I am especially interested to see how the traditional vendors like Oracle, Autonomy, Tridion, Sitecore and others address this trend and enable their solutions to quickly be installed and setup within these dynamic Cloud infrastructures.  I see movement from open source community like solutions that combine Drupal, Joomla, Alfresco, Liferay, and others, however big players have yet to show a significant presence. How will it play out? wait and see.. but I see blue ocean possibilities.

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Feb 05, 2010 | Categories: Featured | Tags: , , , , , | 2 Comments »

CMS Trend Predictions for 2010

December 16th, 2009 by Matthew Johnson

Well 2009 has been interesting, especially in CMS space.  Its all about cost control and compliance right now.  Companies are under direct and extreme pressure to stay above water as consumer and business spending is down.   Companies have slashed budgets, minimized inventories, and cut back head count in an attempt to look good to shareholders and the market.  In these times where the importance of efficiency is high on list, it would seem that demand for CMS, ECM, and WCM solutions will increase.  CMS solutions do present a viable option to improve efficiency within web development, document management, records management, etc.  But large CMS projects and software solutions are expensive, not in licensing, but mostly in people and time.  Company leaders are under pressure to add value now, not in 2 years, therefore CMS projects need to think of this as well.   From 2000-2005, we saw the famous ECM arms race, as companies looked for the one-stop-shop to handle all information management. However, most ECM products cannot achieve best-in-breed status across all elements of content management (document management, records management, web content management,  etc); therefore the holy grail of a total ECM solution is yet to be found.

Putting these factors into consideration,  I have put together some thoughts on how CMS will trend in 2010.

  1. Federation over Centralization: I always love the line “the best repositories are the ones you have.”  This is where I see CMS going.  CMS solutions will need to continue to grow in integration capabilities and function as the connective tissue between federated repositories.  The opportunity cost  of moving large legacy  repositories of one format into another centralized CMS is high.  Centralization is an attractive term from a operations management perspective, but most often not technically viable.  Some CMS evangelists always promote centralization and consolidation when it comes to content management practices, but this not really realistic. For example, many companies will continue to leverage different solutions and packages across their CMS stack, these product will continue to need new ways of talking to each other.
  2. Cloud Options: With the economic downturn in play, cloud solutions will grow in adoption, especially in Web Content Management + Marketing scenarios.  The cost saving and time to market considerations will provide significant pressure to try out these options.  Many products are looking for examples on how o install and configure their products within Mosso, Amazon EC2, HP, IBM, or other cloud hosting providers.
  3. CMS + API + SOA (Rest, JSON, XMPP): Content will need to continually pushed and pulled to and from more sites, channels, and mobile device.  Content will need quick and easy means of integrating into widgets, apps, iphones, android apps, etc.  As a result, APIs and SOA for content services are critical for strategic positioning.
  4. WCM + Analytics + Targeting + Testing: WCM will continue to expand into the complete experience around content. Especially how content is performing, targeted, and delivered within experiences across multiple sites and channels.  WCM vendors will continue to acquire and establish partnerships to expand their offerings.
  5. Faceted Search: As federation expands, faceted search with grow in importance to search and locate content via filtering and metadata.
  6. Open Source will expand: Open source solutions will grow in adoption, especially in social networking and content distribution scenarios.  The adoption of Drupal by the http//www.whitehouse.gov is dispelling the myth that open source cannot scale and provide an enterprise level solutions.
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Dec 16, 2009 | Categories: Editorial, Enterprise, Featured, Strategic Planning, Trends 2010 | Tags: , , , , | 7 Comments »

CMS and Faceted Search

September 29th, 2009 by Martin Jacobs

Faceted search and navigation has been mainstream for a while now in the larger eCommerce sites. This was partly driven by both the faceted nature of product data (i.e., most products have a type, brand, price, etc.) and the availability of the data in retailers’ existing information systems.

Interestingly enough, even though the technology is there, the use of faceted search and navigation in mostly content sites has been lagging. However, in the last year, we have finally seen an uptick in the use of this pattern beyond commerce sites. With the redesigned Bing search engine really leveraging this concept, and driving some of the innovation around search, I believe we will see the concept become a standard practice on sites that have large amounts of content.

One additional contributing factor is that there is also some traction around the lower end and open source market. Although vendors like Endeca and Coveo have been providing this capability for the enterprise for a while now, open source and low cost alternatives are emerging as well.
For example, Apache Solr is getting a lot of traction recently, and Acquia launched a hosted faceted search capability for Drupal earlier this year.

This is an exciting development, and I believe we will see significant improvements in site search in the future.

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Sep 29, 2009 | Categories: Drupal, Editorial, Enterprise, Featured, Opensource | Tags: , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »