Much to every one’s surprise, the Wave came out with nobody listed as a Leader.  Adobe, hybris (SAP), IBM and Sitecore came out as the Strong Performers followed by many others in the Contender category. Nobody was listed as a Risky Bet.

So what gives?  Really no Leaders?  Dom Nicastro wrote a story last week about this development: Forrester Wave: No Leaders in Digital Experience Delivery.

Forrester considers a Digital Experience Platform a full end-to-end delivery platform and most vendors fell short in the completeness of their offerings.  Each vendor seemed to shine in one or more areas, but nobody stood out as having all the components needed to be a Digital Experience Leader.

For me, part of the issue stems from how Forrester defined the market.  hybris from SAP is strong in Commerce, while Adobe and Sitecore are more known for their Web Content and Marketing capabilities.  So the companies included in the wave are really all over the map, in my opinion.

Is it fair to compare commerce systems with WCM systems?  Yes and no.  If you need commerce in your digital experience, then you want to know who has commerce capabilities.  If commerce isn’t important, then no and the analysis gets skewed.

There is a lot of interesting information in the Forrester report, so I encourage you to read it yourself.

In the leader quadrant, Liferay has jumped ahead of SAP on the ability to execute scale, but the big three – IBM, Microsoft and Oracle – seem to be the same.

In the visionary quadrant, salesforce.com and Adobe are poised to bust into the leader quadrant, but haven’t been able to make the jump.

Like the other quadrants, there isn’t much movement amongst the other vendors.  Either they are all getting better at the same time or nobody is making significant improvements in Gartner’s eyes.

Customer experience, digital experience, customer engagement, and marketing integration have all been a focus of many of these vendors in the last couple of years.

IBM has been investing heavily in making WebSphere Portal a key component of its customer and digital experience strategy.

Likewise, Adobe and Oracle have been positioning their portal products as the foundation for customer experience suites.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has been focusing SharePoint more and more on the intranet experience.  While they do tout some of SharePoint’s external digital experience capabilities, Microsoft seems intent on excelling in the employee experience.

Salesforce’s push into the portal space seems pretty solid with a combination of Force.com and Chatter.  Many people still can’t make the leap from Salesforce being a CRM system to Salesforce being a horizontal portal, but it has lots of capabilities just waiting to be exploited.

I think I’d like to see added to the list more Web Content Management vendors who are offering portal and portal-like capabilities.  Sitecore comes to mind as a strong WCM vendor who could compete with many of these portal solutions.

What is interesting is that the report includes only those companies that have native applications on multiple mobile operating systems and have some sort of cloud-based solution.  Naturally this criteria is going to leave some companies out, like Apple, Microsoft, and RIM who target apps for one mobile OS.

The applications included in this Wave are somewhat of a melting pot.  Adobe’s Connect application is a leader and delivers web-based conferencing.  Comparing that application to Yammer, also a leader but more of a corporate-friendly Facebook, is kind of hard.  Box.com is a file sharing and synchronizing application which is completely different than Connect or Yammer.

Still, the collaboration space is a very broad market consisting of a variety of application types.  It is good to see an evaluation of these different companies not based just on the product they deliver, but on many other factors, such as strategy and market presence.

Forrester rates the leaders in these categories as follows:

• Current Offerings: Box, IBM, and Yammer
• Strategy: Skype, Box, Cisco, and Yammer
• Market Presence: Skype, Cisco, and Google

If you don’t have access to Forrester.com, you can read a quick review of this Wave on CMS Wire here.

Welcome to CXM

One of the key things they note is that WCM has evolved.  I’ve blogged before about WCM evolving towards portal.  Forrester takes a larger view and show how WCM includes much more than just some portal and WCM functionality.  It also includes search, analytics, campaign management, and even some commerce functions.

Forrester's expanded view of web content called customer experience management (CXM)

So Customer Experience Management (CXM) definitely takes a large view and it’s one I’m seeing with a lot of customers.  They demand a lot more from a customer facing web site.  They want things like:

So who is important in the Wave?

The two key winners in the wave are SDL Tridion and Adobe CQ5.  I don’t have much information on either but here’s a quick view into what Forrester says,

SDL and Adobe lead due to breadth of functionality, market momentum, and track record. Both Adobe and SDL provides a solid set of tools aimed at enabling business users to manage experiences. SDL’s globalization and localization functionality remains a differentiator and has the potential to be an asset for mobile website management. Adobe has an excellent offering in terms of technology and features, and its integration with other Adobe-owned CXM
components shows potential.

Personally, I’m seeing a lot of interest in Adobe Cq5. It represents about 5% of the search hits on our blog site for example.

It’s interesting that IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft were all ranked lower as strong contenders but they were not as strong as CXM vendors.  I find this funny because both IBM and Microsoft actually had some major updates to their WCM tools in 2010.  IBM specifically upgraded WCM a lot just to make it a viable vendor in the marketplace.  It’s just that once it was released, the marketplace started asking for a lot more than just web content management.  Now the big three vendors are strong and have substantial R&D dollars ready to plow into this space.  IBM bought core metrics and Unica as well.  Microsoft will doubtless evolve Sharepoint in it’s next major release in 2012 or 2013.  I suspect both of them will be able to show CXM functionality quite nicely soon.

Anyway, You can get the full Forrester report at Forrester.com

• Organizations are demanding better user experiences in their portals.
• They see consumerization driving other products and want it for their portals.
• Mobile devices and the need for context-awareness are being demanded by users

What about cloud-based portals – is that in our future?  It certainly is!   Many vendors are starting to offer cloud-based portal systems. But beware!  The very nature of the portal is that it typically connects to a whole bunch of other systems in your organization behind your firewall.  So for a cloud-based portal to be effective, you will need to open up your internal systems to the cloud vendor and have some serious networking pipes. On the other hand, a cloud-based portal would be ideal to integrate your other cloud-based applications.

2015 is still a long way away, so what is happening between now and that future?  Here are the seven things that Gartner sees trending in the portal market over the next few years.

• Analytics need to be implemented to help gauge the effectiveness of the portal.  There has been a recent flurry of acquisitions in the Web Analytics market by traditional and newer portal vendors
• Portal-less Portals – there are several vendors beginning to offer portal type systems without claiming to be true portals.  Backbase is considered one of those vendors.  Adobe’s CQ5 could also qualify.
• Portal ubiquity – portals will become more ubiquitous as unbind their services
• Exploit context across more user attributes (aka enhanced personalization)
• Widgets are becoming more important and portlets less-so
• Mobile is becoming a key first consideration
• The User Experience Platform begins to emerge as a set of cohesive, pre-integrated, highly user interactive services rather than a bunch of products loosely coupled together.

Finally, in terms of vendors, we have basically three major portal vendors today:  IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft.  Close behind are our open source friends Liferay and JBoss. As the market begins to move toward this UXP concept, we are going to see lots of other vendors emerge with UXP offerings.  Firms from the content management space are beginning to move toward UXP, as are firms in the Social Software, Mashups, Portal-less Portals and other Markets.

Here are some vendors to keep your eye on over the next few years:

IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Liferay, Redhat JBoss, Backbase, Adobe, Cisco, Google, Apple, United Planet, JackBe, NetVibes, Pageflakes, Fatwire, Extron, Automony, Drupal, DotNetNuke, Plone, Jive, Atlassian, Telligent, SocialText.

What is driving the cloud?  It’s all coming out of web 2.0.  Web 2.o continues to improve and mature.  Technology like REST and Ajax help it.  The user or community based paradigms get better.

Portal and the Cloud

• The portal is aggregation friendly. Good for the cloud.
• It includes cloud capabilities.  Consuming web services is easy for them for example.
• It embraces WOA/REST.  You see this in RESTful services, widget support, mashups, etc.
• It supports MyPortal
• Social Software functions are critical and integrating these things.

Vendor Cloud Offerings

There are a number of major offerings by key vendors in the marketplace.

Microsoft

• Office Live
• Windows Live
• XBOX Live
• Exchange Online
• Sharepoint Online
• Office Communications Online
• Office Live Meeting
• Windows Azure – just launched 5 weeks ago.
• BPOS

There are a lot of moving parts and a lot of pieces. It’s hard to put it all together.  With MSFT, you have low level services like Azure up to middle and top tiers like Sharepoint Online.  This is a very broad strategy.   You can deploy most of this on premises, have MSFT deploy them for you in a hosted model, and then have the actual shared model like BPOS.

IBM

IBM has a number of offerings.

• Web Conferencing in Lotus Live
• Collaboration with Engage and connections
• Amazon EC2 to spin up portal, content, etc.
• He went through this really fast.  IBM offers a little more than he mentioned.

Google

Google calls it GAPE or Google Apps Premier Edition.  They want to make money with this offering. It comes from the consumer side. They want to make people use the web more and thus use MSFT less and less. Google makes more money when people are online.

• Gmail and Google Calendar
• Google Docs and Google Sites
• Google Video
• 25 GB account for mail. 10 gb + 500 mb for storage
• 99.9% uptime guarantee

Is it ready for prime time?  Gartner asks if the enterprise is ready for Google with it’s quick and nimble approach.  However, Google continues to enhance it’s product offerings:

• Postini acquisition for mail security and archive capability
• Migration support
• however, they had multiple outages last year.
• Not a huge amount are taking the plunge.
• iGoogle and Sites are out there. (Sites is the old Jotspot)
• Google Wave is interesting.   It’s not integrated with existing products though.  Gartner considers it a good proof of concept

Covisint

They are really one of the only ones who are pure play cloud.  They focus on a couple key industries.  They have horizontal offerings as well.

Adobe

Their key asset is their client site internet technologies like Flash, Flex, and PDF.  They are starting to offer cloud based services like acrobat and photoshop.com.  Jim Murphy sees them fleshing out collaboration and leveraging the analytics firm Omniture  to help the whole user experience.  (Note: Omniture isin my hometown of Orem Utah)

Models in the cloud

1. Cloud Friendly: I consume cloud services
2. Cloud based portal as a service: Portal in the cloud either hosted or like BPOS from MSFT or LotusLive from IBM
3. Public Cloud Deployable: this is spin up portal on Amazon EC2
4. Private Cloud for internal use: Create your own private cloud and spin it up.
5. Private Cloud for external use: Same thing but different constituents.

Life Beyond the Titans

It’s not just IBM and Microsoft

• Cisco is entering
• Jive has been here a while
• Oracle has some offerings
• Force.com
• Amazon
• AT&T
• Yahoo!
• Facebook
• and a bunch more