Intelligent Enterprise

Gartner's recent "MarketScope for Web Content Management" has predictably garnered a lot of attention from vendors happy with their position in the ratings chart. I have a mixed reaction.

Specifically, I'll take issue with Interwoven's "Strong Positive" rating. I've been following the company for ten years now, and this is what I think. Interwoven as a company and the extended TeamSite product management team in particular are still some of the best briefer/demo-givers in the industry. They perpetually tell what analysts call a "great story." What we've uncovered on the ground is a rather different story: a set of very expensive WCM tools running off a highly dated technology platform, often requiring excessive customization that can be detrimental to your longterm website health. For a complete scrub of Interwoven's TeamSite/LiveSite line, check out this free sample evaluation from the CMS Watch Web CMS Report 2008.

On the plus side, I think Gartner's MarketScope format is much more nuanced than the Magic Quadrant. Still, I think horserace-style analysis like this can become counterproductive, since it assumes that all Web CMS technology buyers are racing towards the same goal, with the same budget, in the same country, with the same website profile. That's simply not the case.

It is healthier for everyone, though, that Gartner has lowered the bar for vendor participation ($10m in sales) and therefore expanded the pool of covered vendors to seventeen. I think the marketplace is even flatter and more distributed than that (which is why CMS Watch covers 40, with more coming), and open source WCM has a much more significant footprint in the enterprise than Gartner allows. But it's good to see major analyst firms (Forrester, too) returning repeatedly to WCM after occasionally dismissing it while riding ECM and Social Software waves.

As long as enterprises publish Web sites and intranets, they will need ever more capable Web CMS tools. We'll keep watching closely.