CEO

Those of you who have been in the content management industry a while will remember the CMS Watch report. I’m not sure when I first heard of it, but I think it was at an AIIM conference in 2005. I remember thinking that if we could just get Agility into that report, we would have it made. Looking back, it’s amazing to see how many of the systems that ranked well in 2005 are either gone or no longer relevant.

A few years later, I saw an article on CMS Wire that Ektron had made it into the Gartner Magic Quadrant. I realized that it was going to be hard to complete with this level of recognition, no matter how superior Agility is.

I've been pitching one of Canada’s largest and most interesting brands for about 5 years now. It’s one of those dream customers that every CEO has. They are the perfect fit for our unique mix of capabilities and I was fully convinced that with a little patience, we would be given the chance to prove it to them. My systematic, persistent relationship building and follow-ups finally paid off early this year when a they emailed me an RFP for a new CMS.

I became giddy as I read through it as it basically described the features of Agility in minute detail.

Editor's Note: Petr Palas, founder and CEO of Kentico software, lets his voice be heard to in this week's CEO Corner. In this article, he provides rebuttal to an earlier CEO Corner written by Agility's Michael Assad. Where Assad favors a "best of breed" approach and questions the validity of CXM, Palas believe the future is in fully integrated CXM solutions. Which CEO is right? We'll let you decide...

If I learned anything from my open source vs. proprietary CMS post, comparing CMS’s based on the method used to code them is no longer that relevant. Following the great discussion that was triggered convinced me that comparing along this dimension no longer contributes much to the CMS selection process.

The other thing I learned was that being cheeky, while good for attention, probably isn’t the most forthcoming way to educate the readers of this great publication. So this time around, I promise to be more thorough and objective!  Hopefully we’ll get some insights from the community again as well!

The first thing I did when I sat down to write this article was search the Google Keyword Tools for ‘Proprietary vs. Open Source CMS’. I wanted to see what kind of traffic this article might get. I got 0 searches per month globally.  A flip of the terms to the title I chose nets a whopping 22.  With < 10 in the United States.

My curiosity was piqued, so I checked ‘Open Source CMS’ and ‘Proprietary CMS’ and was not surprised with the 9,900 global searches for the former to 91 for the latter. This is out of 450,000 searches globally for ‘CMS’.

What I am surprised about is that more people aren’t looking for information comparing these two very different approaches to CMS.

All this talk about CXM being DOA has got me thinking about the age old question when it comes to CMS – or software in general for that matter.  Should you try to build the world into your software, or focus on specific capabilities and integrate for the rest?

It's no secret that I'm not a big fan of what the content management industry is calling 'Customer Experience Management', or CXM.  To be clear, I firmly believe that it's important to manage your customer experience.  What I don't believe is that your content management system vendor has the answer.

Yesterday, Robert Rose from Digital Clarity Group posted a great article on CXM. However, I came to very different conclusions based on the facts he described.

I went out for lunch with one of our customers last week. They are one of the largest magazine publishers in Canada and one of the first customers of our Magazine Suite.

I’ll leave real names out of it, but for the purposes of the article, I’ll call my lunch guest Ben. 

Ben is a media entrepreneur. He started a blog that became one of the most popular in Canada which was then bought by said publisher. He is now a VP.

Michael Assad, the CEO and a co-founder of Agility, must have been one busy man with a video camera during this year's SXSW. Michael was able to interview a number of leaders in the Web publishing industry including people working for such groups as Time Inc., Hearst, BBC, the New York Times, and Al Jazeera.

My two favorite interviews includes Michael's interview with Perry Solomon from Time Inc and his interview with Bill Adair from PolitiFact. One of my long standing criticisms of traditional media has been their lack of enthusiasm in embracing digital media. As a blogger, I tend to think that perhaps they "just don't get it" but such an argument would not be honest nor truthful. There are major players in the publishing industry that have known for decades that digital publishing needed to be a part of their business model. That iPad you're using wouldn't have been possible without the amount of brain storming provided years prior by these publishers.

Given one reason or another though, publishers until recently have been slow to deliver their content in the multiple formats and the mediums we prefer. As skilled as the publishing industry may be for delivering digital content their achilles heel has been unwillingness to take necessary risks. That's why this is great video footage from Michael as they show the print industry is now ready to fullly evolve and allow the digital publishing business take to be fully integrated with traditional print. At least that's what I take away from these videos.

"Why have IT report to accounting?  You show me a company where the CIO reports to the CFO, and I'll show you a company lagging in its industry in the use of technology."

- Benjamin Salzmann, Acuity CEO, Quoted in "CIO to CEO: If You Want to Move Up", ComputerWorld, December 18, 2006