There is no "mythical, magical CXM suite," Stephen Powers, principal analyst and research director at Forrester Research, told an audience Nov. 30 at the Gilbane Conference in Boston. Despite vendor rhetoric, enterprises won't find CXM--the term Forrester uses to describe web content management, on site search, marketing automation, analytics, commerce platforms and customer service interaction--as a suite anytime soon, rather "it's going to be an integration play," said Powers.

"The fact of the matter is no one vendor has all of the pieces yet," said Powers. "Beware of the vendors who try to be all things to all people...Instead, keep an eye on and give preference to those vendors who understand that this is an integration story."

In other words, integration should be an important part of RFPs. However, asking critical questions about interoperability and implementation is much more difficult than asking a vendor, "What features do you have?"

"Whether your CMS has 100 features or 1,000 features it still needs to be customized for your CMS needs," said Michael Assad, co-founder and chief executive at Agility, during a Dec. 1 Gilbane session.

According to Assad there are five questions enterprises should ask themselves and five questions they should ask vendors in order to find the right integrated solution for their business.

Assad suggests enterprises ask themselves:

1. What is the purpose of your digital presence? Are you selling products, selling ads or selling services?
2. Who are you targeting? What age groups, what gender, what occupation and what languages?
3. Where are your users coming from? What channels do you want to play in--mobile, social media? What channels do you need to focus on today, versus 3 years from now, versus 5 years from now?
4. Who's on your team? Who are your stakeholders?
5. What are your objectives? Are you trying to increase traffic, generate leads, build a community, extend your brand reach?

Assad recommends they ask a prospective vendor:

1. Do you build houses--simple solutions for small businesses? Or do you build sky scrapers--industrial strength enterprise sites? Do they have customers like you and can they show you case studies?
2. Are your tools do-it-yourself and open source or are they part of commercial-grade solution?
3. Is one contact able to address all my problems if I have trouble, or do you have a full team of specialists that focus on different areas?
4. Do you offer new solutions at a slow and steady pace or are you regularly updating the technology with the latest and greatest thing?
5. How much will we need to handle? Will be doing most of the work on our own or will you put us in touch with the various vendors and partners?

Assad agrees with Powers that there isn't a single-vendor solution out there. "A lot of CMSes try to be all things to all people, but the reality is you're not going to find a one-vendor solution," said Assad. "Other vendors will introduce you to partners for things like analytics, search ad serving, and other things."

Although finding an multi-part solution to meet CXM needs is more difficult, a silver bullet solution that seems too good to be true may be just that.

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