CMS Trend Predictions for 2010

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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9 thoughts on “CMS Trend Predictions for 2010”

  1. This is a great list and definitely rings true with what we are seeing with our ad agency and media clients. A couple of things that I would add:

    User Generated Content: Configuring and moderating content from the user

    Measurement: Who is looking at the content where (website, mobile site, facebook, youtube) and how often?

    The on-demand thing is big with our agency clients as well. Rather than pay tens of thousands for an enterprise license, pay for the months that the campaign or contest is live.

    Regarding the cloud, using Amazon S3 for video and heavy file storage has proven invaluable in terms of redunancy and scalability for a very minimal cost.

    Looking forward to seeing how 2010 pans out!

  2. Matt,

    This is a great list, and I think your predictions are spot on. I believe that the the expansion of Open Source is partly driven by cloud computing. As companies are looking to leverage cloud solutions for agility, the licensing complications with commercial solutions will drive further open source usage.

    On the more complex side, the ability to handle multiple sites/brands in many different languages will be important as companies are looking to consolidate their web infrastructure.

    Martin

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