Clearly, 2020 has been a year unlike any other (at least in my working lifetime). Interestingly, while the “real world” has been turned upside down by the covid-19 pandemic, much of the marketing technology landscape remains either unchanged, or accelerated. Let’s start by looking back… 2020 predictions revisited In September Read more…
Warren Buffet famously spoke of “economic moats” when investing in companies. The idea being there are “defensible” competitive advantages to that company which make it difficult for newer players to compete. An example would be the massive network effects of Facebook, or the warehousing, delivery and logistical capabilities of Amazon. Read more…
Everyone should be familiar with this slide – it is used by almost every vendor to compare different offerings (either within their own offerings, or as a way to differentiate from competitors). I happen to be using a version from BMC software, but any search for “SaaS vs. IaaS vs. Read more…
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single user in possession of a good CMS must be in want of a better CMS. (Yours truly – with apologies to Charlotte Brontë) I wrote last week on the topic of user satisfaction in WCM and how complicated it is to Read more…
One of the challenges facing customers and analysts (and vendors!) is the ever-changing definition of what a Web Content Management system even is. Tony Byrne has discussed this fragmentation in some detail. In particular, I like his characterization of “products” (which often do one thing well) vs. “platforms” (which often Read more…
Earlier this year, McDonalds paid $300 million dollars for Dynamic Yield, a somewhat surprising fit for a fast-food giant and a tech company known for dynamic pricing and personalization. Just this week, MasterCard acquired SessionM, a Customer Data Platform (CDP)/loyalty program vendor (value disclosed, but based on $100 million in Read more…
Marc Benioff personally owns Time Magazine and via Salesforce Ventures, has a few million dollars invested in various WCM companies, including Bloomreach, Contentful and now $12 million in Automattic (Benioff owns 4% of Salesforce shares and they made a $300 million investment in Automattic). That may seem like a lot, Read more…
At the time this news broke, myself (and every other WCM vendor that wasn’t Adobe) were inhaling sharply, thanking our lucky stars it wasn’t our software or client. Now, to be fair, Adobe AEM is a well-regarded platform. Was it right for this client? Maybe. But far too often the Read more…
Two analyst firms have put out some predictions for the future of WCM earlier this year; Mark Grannan from Forrester wrote a report entitled “Coming Soon: Agile Content Curation And Orchestration Will Redefine CMS” with the catchy subtitle “It’s The End Of Web CMS As We Know It (And I Read more…
Following my post on CMP, Shafqat Islam, the CEO of NewsCred, one of the notable vendors in the space wrote the following comments: In a couple months there will only be one pure play CMP vendor left standing. Everyone else will be acquired, out of business, or a zombie company. Read more…