Web Experience Management VSM
For my fourth Vendor Selection Matrix, I’ve researched how businesses manage the web experience of their prospects and customers. Web Experience Management (WEM) is a set of business processes to create, manage, deliver and optimize contextualized digital experiences on websites. WEM software must now cope with an ever-more complex, extensive and interconnected technology landscape. It is a mature software market but under disruption from new vendors because of this challenge, but also because of the transition from on-premise to cloud-based implementations.
There are well-over 100 software/SaaS vendors offering WEM solutions with a multitude of open-source providers and vendors active only in their local markets. Websites are run by businesses and individuals alike and so, over the 2 billion websites worldwide, the overall WEM market-leader is the open-source, and free, solutionWordPresswith around 25% share.
But the list of vendors used by businesses is under 30. In 2018, the total global annual software license, maintenance and SaaS revenues for WEM totaled over $ 5 billion. WEM is now strategic to companies. Originally a product supporting the appearance of just one or a handful of websites with essentially static content, WEM buyers now seek a broader platform to broadcast across many digital channels and render dynamic content on hundreds of websites at speed.
In my global survey, the five vendors who were rated highest by the 1500 business practitioners for the business process of web experience management were, in alphabetical order: Acquia, Bloomreach, Episever, SDL, and Sitecore. Similarly, positions six thru ten (actually eleven because two were equal in position 10) were taken by: Adobe, Amplience, Crownpeak, Contentful, e-Spiritand Progress.
The survey notes that switching vendors is a challenge for many businesses though, most users tend to want to stay with their vendor as migration costs are perceived to be high if they have been creating web content for several years. Vendors looking to capture new market share must offer migration services and/or focus on new business initiatives where brand-new WEM platforms could be deployed.
Across the WEM vendors, I saw a curious range of target audiences addressed in their marketing; some used language and provided features aimed at technical web developers while others focused only on marketing professionals. I think that marketing users will prevail over IT developers. As the web experience becomes the primary business presentation of a company, business users will insist on more ability to control and configure that experience. They know and understand the needs of their customers and prospects better than the IT department or teams of web developers. Even in large companies that have built up resources of web developers, there will be a drive to provide the WEM platform directly to staff in Marketing Operations. If I am right, this will require some vendors to change their go-to-market language and approach.
An abridged version of the report can be viewed here bit.ly/VSMWEM2019 and below are my headlines for each of the top 11 vendors.
Always keeping you informed! Peter
