A recent article that I read alluded to the fact that regulatory bodies are struggling to keep their websites updated, which could lead to misinformation or a lack of information for consumers and companies interested in a country’s regulations and policies. The story specifically pointed to the English and Korean versions of South Korea’s Ministry of Food and Drug Safety’s (MFDS) website. While the website in Korean was up-to-date, the English version was not nearly as well maintained. 

A few visits to other regulatory agency websites in other countries led me to find that most countries, especially less wealthy ones, offer information only in their official languages. Some wealthier nations, like South Korea, did provide their website in multiple languages; typically those that are more frequently spoken among their constituents. For example, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) offers their website in English and Spanish. Health Canada offers theirs in English and French, and Israel’s Ministry of Health offers theirs in Hebrew, Russian, Arabic, French, and Spanish. Less wealthy countries, like Columbia, offer information in a single language, like Spanish.

Maintaining a website can be a big undertaking, let alone multiple versions in different languages. However, if you’re a government agency or a life sciences company looking to operate in a global environment, and you decide to take the leap and operate a multilingual website, it’s critical to make sure it’s maintained with accurate information – otherwise, it becomes a disservice. Bad information is often worse than no information.

From a technology standpoint, there are plenty of solutions (e.g., Sitecore, Liferay, Adobe Experience Manager, etc.) available to help create and manage large, multilingual websites. There are also a handful of APIs, like Google’s Translate API, that you can plug into your website, largely eliminating the need to maintain multiple versions (although, Google’s API isn’t always accurate).

To learn more about streamlining the digital experience for your customers, drop us a line.

Gartner Magic Quadrant Horizontal Portals 2014

The leaders for 2014 are still the same leaders as in 2013 and 2012. For the past few years IBM, Microsoft and Oracle have been clustered near each other in the Leader’s quadrant, with Liferay and SAP barely making it into that coveted quadrant.  You can see my post about the 2013 version here: Gartner MQ Horizontal Portals 2013.

It’s clear that Gartner is seeing both IBM and Liferay as leading competitors. Here is Gartner’s take on IBM: “IBM’s long heritage of leadership in the enterprise portal market has brought it the broadest feature set in the industry. IBM has a long list of marquee customers across vertical industries, and it has demonstrated support for nearly every type of B2E, business-to-consumer (B2C) and B2B portal initiative.”

Gartner definitely likes what Liferay as accomplished in the past few years. “Even in the face of increasingly large, complex deployments, Liferay continues to build up a pool of satisfied customers. Liferay Portal has often succeeded where portal initiatives using other products were bogged down in cost and complexity.”

We also see several other notable shifts. First Microsoft has moved backward in the vision axis and SAP is moving higher on the vision axis. According to Gartner, Microsoft is being hurt by uncertainty around the future of SharePoint and Office365. Microsoft is definitely making a push to Office365 and many companies want to stay on-premise. Gartner says, “The future of on-premises SharePoint Server is in question.”

SAP has traditionally been viewed as a portal for SAP only.  However SAP has made a lot of investments in enabling better user experiences and can now be seen as a more broadly-based portal by companies.

Another shift in this year’s Magic Quadrant is the inclusion of Sitecore for the first time.  Sitecore is listed as a challenger along with OpenText. Gartner says, “Sitecore appeals most directly to organizations seeking WCM capability for customer-facing Web initiatives, but its offerings are increasingly considered for portals of supporting various business processes and audiences.”

Another traditional Web Content Management product, Ektron, has also made the list for the first time in the Niche Players quadrant.  Ektron is another .net-based application, like Sitecore.  It has traditionally been positioned for customer-facing and marketing sites, but Gartner is starting to see some companies use it for intranets as well.

A final shift I noticed is that Covisint has moved down the execute scale. Covisint went public in 2013 and has suffered some pains as a result of being a publicly traded company.  You can read the Gartner report for more details about Covisint.

Overall, this is interesting information from Gartner and definitely a changing landscape in the Horizontal Portal market.

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.

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