Jim Howard as been CEO at CrownPeak since its founding in 2001. We asked him about content management in the cloud (since he's been doing it before it was called that) and how he addresses customer hosting concerns.

FCM: You were delivering software as a service long before the "cloud" name caught on. How has the cloud revolution affected your business?

JH: The biggest change to our business has been adoption by large global customers. The past few years have brought about a change in perception about cloud computing approaches so that CIOs, CTOs and enterprise architecture groups now often prefer the way we have architected our solution over legacy approaches. Cloud computing has enabled us to expand globally, with better scalability, speed-to-market, and economics than our competitors. It's made all the difference for us. Because we moved first in this direction and have developed a mature, proven solution with all of these advantages, we've really established ourselves as a key player in the market to replace expensive, slow-moving legacy products in the enterprise.

FCM: How do you answer critics who suggest it's dangerous to store your company's content on another company's servers?

JH: We are here for public-facing websites, not Intranets, core document management or business process projects. So the content in our system is intended for use in the public domain. That being said, CrownPeak treats security and compliance as a core priority. For us to be successful we needed to make IT departments and business managers very comfortable with our security approach, which goes beyond safeguarding data and preventing interruption.

FCM: It seems the biggest fears facing companies using a cloud content management vendor are governance and eDiscovery. If you get a subpoena for your customer's content, what is your company's policy and how do you deal with it?

JH: CrownPeak takes the same approach as pretty-much every IT outsourcing partner: If we are served a subpoena we notify our customer immediately, but will have to comply with the law of the land. To be honest, it's not a big issue for us due to the nature of the content in our systems. It's content that is either freely available to the public, or requires a password to view, but is typically available to a large audience outside of the client themselves. So disclosing such things in a legal proceeding is typically not a large concern.

FCM: What do you see as the main differences between your approach and an on-premises approach? Assess the strengths and weaknesses of a cloud solution.

JH: Services and architecture are the two big advantages we have over last-generation approaches. Combining super-responsive services with a unique cloud architecture gives the speed and innovation needed by marketing and the scalability, security, reliability and interoperability required by IT. Our unique cloud architecture removes the complexity of managing a web content management and web hosting solution, enabling our customers to be agile marketers. Customers, their agencies or our services team can make changes to templates and other critical elements in hours, without the typical multi-week release process required for an on-premises approach. 

Our customers are global on day one, both with the content management system and the web host. Over the past three years we have completed and rolled-out a full rewrite of the system without any disruption to our clients. With that rollout comes innovation like testing, truly advanced targeting, customer data management, mobile site and app management, and social media integration, as well as market-leading interoperability including out-of-the-box integration with the major CRM and ECM products. Customers who have a requirement for a central web content repository, so their content is available in a structured form to be used by any application in any format, get great value from our cloud architecture. Likewise, customers who need to call WCM functions from other applications like SAP or SharePoint get tremendous value from our unique architectural approach. 

As CrownPeak has grown and our solutions have matured, all of the perceived weaknesses of a cloud solution have been eliminated. Security, interoperability, scalability, control and access to advanced features have all been cited as concerns, but with nine years of operating history and a third-generation solution live to the market, CrownPeak is running many of the most important websites for the largest companies in the world.

FCM: Looking into your crystal ball, do you think more content management vendors will move to the cloud in the coming years, or will we continue to see a mix of on-premises and cloud solutions as we have today?

JH: I think we won't see many entrants in SaaS or cloud WCM due to the architectural and institutional barriers for a traditional software vendor to move to a cloud computing approach. The architecture of the products is entirely different, so it requires a complete ground-up rewrite as well as a big commitment to human and capital infrastructure. We have the most experienced cloud-development group out there and it took us a full three years to get our rewrite completed. It took us years to build our global support team and infrastructure. So those are big barriers.

The second big issue is revenue. A traditional software company is addicted to the big upfront license fee and the huge professional services fees they charge. Changing to a recurring revenue model means that their software license fees will drop to one-third of what they are today and their professional services fees could drop even further if they successfully build a rapid-deployment cloud product. Imagine a CEO going to her board and suggesting that the company will shrink to one-third of its size immediately and then after a few years they hope to start growing again. 

What we will see instead is more on-premises vendors installing their software in cloud hosting environments and changing their license arrangements somewhat. The drawbacks of that approach were seen 10 years ago with the ASPs (Application Services Providers). They all failed because they didn't really have any advantages to IT organizations managing the big, bulky, expensive products themselves but instead had some disadvantages--they have to make a profit doing it, for example.

Without re-architecting the product, agility, innovation, scalability, cost and upgradability are all still highly problematic. A 10-server solution, no matter where it is managed, will always be expensive and time-consuming to change, scale, upgrade and integrate. And building the global support organization and Network Operations Center to be really great at cloud solutions is very expensive and challenging. A cloud solution can only be effectively delivered with a true cloud architecture and global management and support infrastructure.

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