A second wave of interest revived the Web content management (WCM) market in 2005 as the demands of operating Web sites forced companies to improve their content handling. Companies initially deployed WCM in the late 1990s. After the market peaked in 2002, it went into a downturn in 2003. However, recovery began in 2004 and caught on more strongly in 2005.

During this time, enterprise content management (ECM) vendors acquired WCM capabilities, which became one of the core technologies of ECM suites (see "What Constitutes Enterprise Content Management?"). According to Gartner estimates, WCM accounted for approximately 24 percent of the overall ECM market in 2002, as measured by new worldwide license revenue. By 2003, this percentage had dropped to approximately 21 percent. Gartner estimates that in 2005, however, WCM rebounded to approximately 24 percent to 25 percent of the overall ECM market.

Still, managing Web site content often requires stronger functions than many ECM vendors offer, so companies still often turn to stand-alone WCM vendors to consolidate and improve their deployments. This Knowledge Support Spotlight includes research to help companies understand WCM, evaluate WCM vendors, and understand when to use stand-alone WCM and when an ECM suite may work.

Why WCM Has Regained Its Importance

The basic need for WCM never disappeared, even when the market flattened (see "Answering Questions About Web Content Management"). Companies continue to publish more on internal and external Web sites, and in most cases, the large volume of content and constant updating overwhelm manual processes. Without WCM, companies send content to a central webmaster (which can become a severe bottleneck) or permit different constituencies to edit their Web content (which invites anarchy). In the long term, either of these situations will cost more than buying WCM upfront to automate Web site operations.

WCM's resurgence in popularity partly stems from the growing quantity of content that people need to access, the number of sites that enterprises maintain and the number of business processes that enterprise content supports. Thus, WCM doesn't simply handle publishing anymore (see "IT and Business Unit Managers Should Know the Top-10 Trends in Web Content Management"). Companies want to take full advantage of the Web's potential to support, for example, blogs, wikis, portals, transactions, analytic personalization and other dynamic functions. Therefore, WCM is borrowing several different functions from other types of software to handle all of these new requirements. Buyers should differentiate between vendors that can support Web-enabled business processes and those that only offer publishing functions. A product may be perfectly suitable for creating and deploying static HTML pages, but unsuitable for an interactive site.

One new class of functions in WCM deserves special attention: digital asset management (DAM) for handling rich media objects such as graphics, audio and video (see "Digital Asset Management Enhances Web Content Management"). Most of the objects on an average Web page are graphics, but buyers don't always look for DAM functions when evaluating a WCM solution. That omission could be costly. Therefore, buyers should evaluate WCM candidates for their DAM capability. The same applies to companies that use ECM suites to manage their Web content. They should check to see whether the ECM suite has enough DAM and WCM capabilities to meet their needs, and that these capabilities operate well together.

Evaluating WCM Offerings

Evaluating WCM vendors should start with an understanding of which functions WCM includes (see "Web Content Management's Core Functions"). These functions go beyond tagging content with HTML to create Web pages. WCM may also catalog or index content, select or assemble content at runtime, or deliver content to specific visitors in a personalized way or in different languages. Some of these functions are critical for using dynamic Web content to support business processes. The complete list of core functions should form the basis of the evaluation framework that companies use to rank prospective vendors.

One of Gartner's MarketScopes evaluates 16 WCM vendors — pure plays and ECM suites (see "MarketScope for Web Content Management, 2005"). We based our evaluation on six criteria:

• Vendor viability
• Sales execution and pricing
• Product features and functions
• Customer experience
• Geographic strategy
• Innovation

Most ECM vendors originated as document management players, and later acquired WCM vendors or built WCM extensions to use their repository or workflow tools. The leaders in WCM functionality, however, started as WCM experts and became ECM vendors by acquiring document management functions instead. Moreover, many pure-play vendors still only offer WCM, and some provide stronger functionality than some of the larger ECM vendors. Buyers with demanding WCM requirements may be better off pursuing a best-of-breed strategy, even if they already have a document management system.

© 2006 Gartner, Inc