I received a copy of the Gartner report on the status of the web content management system market. I am always skeptical of such reports because they are geared towards those that work in a corporate environment. The reports are also made in a manner that allows the reporting company to remove itself from any responsibility if their information on the market climate is incorrect. Gartner did not disappoint me. But they do much to disappoint those that are putting a lot of energy and effort in to the OSS Web content management market.

"The web content management market is now mature and expanding."

This is the only part of the article that I agree with and can find no fault. Though it would be strange if the WCM market was shrinking. Which in turn would mean the internets popularity is shrinking. Not much news here but true nonetheless. Almost all of the Gartner report concerns commercial web content management systems and there is a small section on the open source alternatives. It is as though OSS is not responsible for any of the growth in the market.

The size of the market

"Gartner views WCM as a subset of the ECM market. The WCM market commands revenue of approximately $750 million. With an estimated compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15% between 2007 and 2012, it is growing faster than the overall ECM market."

The internets growth and expansion of web applications based inside of web content management systems is probably part of the growth. But to allow WCM in as a subset and not give any indications of its worth in comparison to the overall ECM market is unfair.

True open source vs. open source businesses

"Interest in OSS is increasing, and with good reason. Whether commercial (for example, Alfresco) or true open source (for example, Drupal), a combination of shifting organizational cultures, functional richness and maturity of the offerings is raising the profile and attractiveness of this option."

This is just outrageous. Two lines of text on two very popular OSS content management systems means that whoever wrote the report never investigated the projects or the software. This only confirms my personal reasons for disliking reports of this sort that come from companies too involved in the commercial aspects of the branch to remain unbiased. At least OSS deserves some mention of the comparative size of the commercial WCM markets user base as versus that of some of the larger OSS WCM projects.

Gartner chickens out

When it came to describing just what the report was attempting to cover Gartner takes a bow and runs off stage. They make it clear and obvious that they do not want anything thing to do with the OSS Web content management systems world.

"The WCM market includes software that helps manage content for extranets, intranets and Internet domains. In this MarketScope, we exclude portals and OSS offerings. While there are overlapping requirements with portal technology in the areas of personalization, content management and content delivery, portals fundamentally comprise complementary technologies, standards and strategies and are considered along with their respective vendors to occupy a separate market (see "Web Content Management and Portals: Collusion Not Collision"). The decision to exclude OSS was primarily based on the difference in basic business models and the inappropriateness of comparing such offerings to more established vendors with more traditional or software-as-a-service (SaaS) business models. The effect of OSS should not be underestimated, and Gartner sees it having an increasing influence on the WCM market in terms of culture and technology. All featured vendors also support the use of a single repository for all three primary domains. The growing application of such repositories as platforms is being tracked in this market but is currently not weighted strongly in the individual analyses."

Well you can't blame them. Gartner gets paid for its reports and much of their income may come from reviews and support of commercial vendors. They gain nothing by discluding the OSS market share nor do they loose anything by giving it an honorable mention but not actually comparing any of the OSS projects to a commercial product. Even Alfresco gets snubbed on this one. But they do give us some insight to just why this market share is ignored.

"Of the three available platforms, vendors featured in this document are based primarily on either Java EE or .NET. Although OSS is an important consideration for the WCM market, its penetration in terms of generated revenue — less than 3% of total WCM software revenue — remains significantly low in comparison with that of the featured vendors."

Well duh! Giving away software and support for free does not bring in a lot of direct income. There should have been an investigation of just how much indirect revenue the OSS content management systems bring in. How much venture capital are OSS WCM projects responsible for bringing in correlation to giving free alternatives to businesses?

I can't help but to think that Gartner either does not understand how OSS economics work or that they have a skewed view of the market due to the fact that open source software is so new to them. It is very hard to give an economic report when you don't open up yourself to the fact that there is an economy that is not necessarily based on the american dollar.

MarketScope for Web Content Management

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