According to a new report by Forrester Research, The Forrester Wave: Web Content Management For Online Customer Experience, Q3 2011, traditional web content management activities have become commoditized and the new differentiator is in the growing area of customer experience management.

According to the report, the two companies best positioned to take advantage of this new trend are SDL and Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE). The fact that Adobe is included is telling, given that it really just got in the game over the last few years. Key acquisitions of Day Software and web analytics vendor Omniture have given Adobe a powerful one-two punch in customer experience management.

As Stephen Powers wrote in the Forrester report, Adobe has a lot of potential here. "Adobe's challenge is uniting its various CXM components--such as the Omniture suite of marketing, targeting, and analytics products and the Adobe desktop tools--with WCM. The vendor is early in its integration plans. But it has great potential, and implementation firms report a good deal of success behind Adobe's offering," wrote Powers.

When asked which customer experience functionality enterprises plan to implement in the next 12 months, the top answers included mobile delivery, video streaming, rich internet applications and targeted content. The latter especially is geared toward helping deliver relevant content to the customer based on behavior.

I was surprised that the report only glossed over open source offerings--giving them only a paragraph in the report overview. Also, IBM received a relatively poor rating because, in Forrester's view, it lagged in basic WCM functionality, even though it showed strength in the customer experience management part of the ranking (due in large part, I'm sure, to its many analytics purchases over the last several years).

These reports are useful as far as they go, but they represent one company's view based on a set of company-defined criteria. Regardless, it's certainly a good starting point for discussion and the basic premise that customer experience management is the general direction in which WCM is headed is certainly an interesting one.

For more information:
- download the Forrester report (.pdf) at the SiteCore website

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