[Typo3-marketing] SYSTEMS

[Daniel Hinderink [TYPO3]]

Hi Folks,

It seems that none of you were there. Or at least I did not hear from any of
you.

Anyway, that is my general impression of this years SYSTEMS: many of the big
names of the CMS-trade were not present.

However, we did have a look at:
Infopark
ContentServ
Stellent
EZPublish
Webedition

And some others, I will not mention here.

The most interesting meeting was definitely with ezpublish, a well known
Open Source CMS from Norway.
Ezpublish is produced by the company of the same name (www.ez.no), 25 people
open source producer, who is also offering services, like implementations of
their software.
Ez is offering a dual licence model: companies that want to build
applications with ez and then want to be able to sell them, can buy a
commercial license. However, EZ is also GPL.
Interesting model for creating some income, but it is seemingly not where
they generate a lot of turnover.

Architecture-wise, ezpublish is reminding a lot of Zope in terms of how
things are adressed in the system. The backend seems pretty awkward compared
to TYPO3. A strong point is the performance, ez claims to server 700 hits
per second with ease.

Infopark was pretty hard to assess, they were not too pleased with informing
us, after they heard the name TYPO3. It seems they have just lost a major
pitch :-) Who is doing the Nuremberg hospital?
Anyway, then software is based on Objective C and does make a pretty grown
up impression. There are many modules (which all seem to cost 24700,- Euros,
no matter which one you want)

ContentServ is a small company and they were one of the sickly-built fish,
that they should really wake up to see, that they have no future in one pool
with a shark like TYPO3. They do have a nice low-tech implementation of a
php-based workflow-designer. The rest, as I said, is fish bait.
The same goes for webedition. It is very cheap, but it is also very weak.
They advertise their project with slogans someone must have left in the hall
from systems 1998 (website editing without html knowledge...) and the nicest
thing about their stand was the brand-spanking-new 17"-powerbook G4 :-)

That leaves Stellent in the ring. And this is the shark that eats things in
our LAMP-pool for breakfast. Stellent really is a document management
system, with a trillion of features, integration with every big name in pro
software on the planet and a top reputation for it's innovativeness and
overall drive.

Stellent has served the CMS market as an aside, but is not at all focussed
on it in my view, so go and draw your own conclusions...

>From a marketing perspective, the CMS-vendors are obviously trying to move
upmarket by offering more open concepts, modularity and multi-format input
and output are the big claims today. On the other hand, CMS-functionality
has now been built into so many other products, from DMSs, Web Application
Servers, Unified Messaging Systems (Domino, DAVID...) and finally the
desktop, that the pure CMS is not really a very attractive application
anymore. 

It is more en vogue to stress the glue-like function of integrating other
applications and reusing and transforming contents, managing aspects of
users stored elsewhere and processing external data for webbased display,
than to stress native functionality.

In short, it is about a rich toolbox, not a complete and monolithic
application. That's my impression.

Hey, and what about TYPO3?
Nowhere to be seen, but let's wait for CeBit 2004...

Cu there!

Cheers,

Daniel


> Hi folks,
> 
> I am off to systems trade fair tomorrow, which is the more professional
> "CeBit" in Germany.
> I will meet some press people there (iX and c't) and will do the usual
> stroll through the competitions area.
> 
> Like last year, I will send a short summary on my "market research" to you
> afterwards.
> 
> I will be happy to receive similar reports from your local trade fair
> visits.
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Daniel
> 

-- 
TYPO3 - get.content.right

Daniel Hinderink
Marketing, Press Relations, Strategy
http://www.typo3.com