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1 I D C V E N D O R S P O T L I G H T B r i n g i n g D i gital Experience Management to S h a r e P oint October 2012 Adapted from Worldwide Content Management Software Forecast by Melissa Webster, IDC # Sponsored by Ektron From its roots as a portal, SharePoint grew quickly in team sites and collaboration and then branched out into enterprise content management. Today, nearly half of organizations (and almost three-quarters of organizations with 1,000 or more employees) are committed to SharePoint for one or more of these three use cases. Given SharePoint's widespread adoption, it's not surprising that many Microsoft customers have also tried to use SharePoint as a Web publishing platform; much of the valuable content that Web publishers need to create compelling digital customer experiences is stored in SharePoint. However, SharePoint isn't a digital experience management platform, and it lacks many of the Web publishing capabilities that marketers need. This paper discusses the user needs and trends driving spend on Web content management and related solutions and highlights the benefits of combining SharePoint with a robust digital experience management platform. The paper then considers how Ektron's Digital Experience Management solution addresses user needs in this strategically important market area. Evolution of the Digital Experience Platform Customer experience management (CXM) is a hot topic for marketers today. Briefly, CXM refers to the ability to manage the overall experience customers have with a company, from their discovery and awareness of its brand(s) to their purchase and use of its products and services and their advocacy of its brand(s) across all channels or customer touch points, whether physical ("bricks") or digital ("clicks"). Fueling the excitement around CXM are profound changes in the relationship of a company to its customers, notably the power that online consumers have today to define the brand, especially in light of the growth of social media. Marketers are seeking to more effectively leverage digital channels Web sites, landing pages, campaigns, mobile applications, interactions through social media and social networks, and so forth and marketing spend is increasingly shifting to the subset of CXM called digital experience management. This shift in focus and spend is driven in part by the growth of the online audience. Today, 2.3 billion people a third of the world's population are connected to the Internet, and the number continues to grow as emerging markets catch up to industrialized countries. The shift is also driven by the unprecedented opportunity marketers have to connect directly with their customers over the Web, via mobile devices, and through social communities and understand and service them better. Marketers can leverage insights gleaned from the customer's behavior, interactions, and affiliations what some have called the digital persona to personalize the customer experience and make it more relevant and engaging, driving increased revenue and customer loyalty. Online marketing is becoming increasingly data driven; we can already see the beginnings of predictive marketing. The economics are in favor too: Digital campaigns are easier to measure, analyze, and optimize and are more cost effective. IDC 1397

2 This shift to digital experience management in turn is spurring innovation in the software stack that is used to deliver the online customer experience. Digital marketers today need an integrated technology stack that combines Web content management, ecommerce, marketing automation, analytics, and a variety of online marketing tools all working together to improve the customer experience across every online and offline customer touch point. Web content management vendors are responding by evolving their solutions whether organically or through partnerships to provide a broader customer experience solution for digital channels such as the Web, mobile devices, and social networks. This shift to digital experience management is reflected in IDC's annual surveys on Web site investment plans. Web site budgets have grown every year since 2007; they continued to grow during the global recession, and growth has accelerated as the economy has started to recover. In IDC's Web Site Investment QuickPoll (September 2011), 43% of respondents said their organization's budget for public-facing Web site(s) had increased over the prior year. The shift is also reflected in planned spend on Web site technology: 12.9% of survey respondents said their organization planned to purchase a Web content management solution within the next 12 months, and an even greater percentage planned to purchase online marketing tools such as Web analytics, testing tools, personalization/targeting tools, recommendation engines, ecommerce solutions, and campaign management tools to complement their Web content management investments. At the same time, ease of use and quick time to deploy remain paramount needs. Marketers must be able to quickly make changes to the site and publish without involving IT to speed "time to Web." When respondents were asked to rate buying criteria for Web content management software, ease of use for nontechnical users topped the list, with 71.2% of our survey respondents rating it important/very important. 68.4% of survey respondents rated quick time to deploy important/very important. Low total cost of ownership, ease of management for IT, robust content management capabilities, and enterprise scalability were also rated highly. Attributes of a Successful SharePoint-Based Web Publishing Solution SharePoint is widely used today for portals and intranets, and some organizations also use SharePoint for extranets, although as IDC research shows extranet projects can prove challenging to deliver. However, from a Web publishing perspective, the most obvious gaps lie in developing public-facing Web sites. SharePoint is not a digital experience management system; it lacks the robust personalization, optimization, and multichannel delivery capabilities that today's marketers need to deliver engaging digital customer experiences, improve conversions, and grow revenue. There is an important supporting role for SharePoint to play, however. Organizations that have large SharePoint deployments with many users trained on SharePoint have little desire to introduce a separate content management system (CMS) or a new collaboration platform. Instead, they want to enable their SharePoint users to continue to collaborate on content within SharePoint whether text, images, videos, PDFs, or other types of content. CIOs who drive top-down adoption of SharePoint often need to purchase separate technology to address gaps in SharePoint for specific business purposes, and this is especially true in marketing. What's required is seamless integration between the Web content management system and SharePoint enabling users to continue to work entirely within SharePoint while offering up a set of new capabilities for marketers who are focused on improving the digital experience. Without this integration, marketing departments will struggle to adopt SharePoint as they seek to address the challenges of digital experience management IDC

3 Benefits of integration include: Enhanced productivity for site editors. Content editors can work within the familiar SharePoint environment without having to learn a new content management system. Relevant experience. Marketers can leverage content in SharePoint to target different audiences, improving conversion rates and increasing revenue. Content can be targeted to Web site visitors based on their geographical location, site behavior, search engine keywords, information about them in customer relationship management (CRM) systems such as Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce.com, and so forth. Multichannel delivery. Marketers can repurpose content for delivery to all digital channels including the Web, mobile devices, and social networks. Fully managed content. Storing all content assets in SharePoint ensures that the organization maintains a complete and trustworthy repository of record. Assets can be shared across all applications and users, not just the company's Web sites. SharePoint provides the access controls, version management, and governance required to ensure that the right versions of assets are used. Managed content ensures the organization has a complete view of where assets are used and improves the return on investment in those assets. Cloud deployment. The integration of Web content management with SharePoint enables organizations to manage content in SharePoint while delivering Web sites on popular cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure and Rackspace. Ability to connect to a broader digital marketing technology ecosystem. Integration with the Web content management system brings with it the opportunity to leverage the broader set of digital marketing tools such as customer relationship management, marketing automation, Web analytics, and more. The benefits are clear for those creating public-facing Web sites. IDC believes organizations will see similar value in their extranet projects. Considering Ektron's Digital Experience Management Solution Ektron has more than 3,700 customers around the world and claims that 12,000 public-facing Web sites run its Web content management solution today (many use Ektron for their intranets and extranets as well). Customers include Citigroup, Darden Restaurants, Dell, Fairmont Raffles Hotels International, Microsoft, NASDAQ, Sony PlayStation Canada, Rice University, Tesco, Travelex, the United States Golf Association, and Wal-Mart. Privately held, Ektron was founded in 1998 and is headquartered in Nashua, New Hampshire, with offices in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Ektron has an extensive network of implementation partners that help customers design, develop, and deploy its products and provide support around the globe, in conjunction with Ektron's professional services group. Ektron's solutions and products span the broader customer experience needs of digital marketers: Ektron Digital Experience Management for SharePoint enables marketers to extend the value of SharePoint beyond content collaboration by adding a new set of capabilities for improving the customer experience, including content targeting, A/B and multivariate testing, marketing analytics, and more. Key features include the following: Ektron Social Marketing enables site owners to build communities to improve service and foster customer loyalty, provides commenting and rating of content, and publishes content to social networks for improved brand consistency and engagement IDC 3

4 Ektron ecommerce provides shopping cart, payment gateway, and order fulfillment services. Ektron Marketing Optimization enables marketers to personalize content, optimize search results, and improve conversion rates. Ektron Cloud Manager enables marketers to quickly and easily launch Web sites or campaign microsites on Microsoft Windows Azure or Amazon EC2. Ektron Digital Experience Hub (DXH) integrates CRM, marketing automation, Web analytics, and other applications with Ektron Web Content Management to provide a cross-channel view of the customer and enable targeted, personalized experiences. The Ektron DXH has connectors for SharePoint, Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce.com, and Marketo. Ektron esync automates provisioning of Web content, code, content assets, and templates from development to production. In addition to providing its own solutions for personalizing and optimizing the digital experience, Ektron partners with best-of-breed providers such as Brightcove (online video publishing), HubSpot (end-to-end online marketing platform), Marketo and Eloqua (marketing automation), PR Newswire (social monitoring), and Webtrends (analytics). Integration with SharePoint and the Microsoft Stack Ektron is a Microsoft Gold ISV and Silver Digital Marketing Platform partner and builds its solutions on the Microsoft.NET Framework. This makes Ektron a very attractive choice for organizations committed to the Microsoft stack. Ektron's Digital Experience Management solution offers out-of-the-box integration with SharePoint, enabling content editors to transparently leverage content assets from one or more SharePoint repositories. Ektron's SharePoint connector maps SharePoint lists and items to Ektron folders and pieces of content, enabling a bidirectional flow of documents and information between Ektron and SharePoint. Automatic syncing ensures content editors always have the latest version. This combines the strengths of SharePoint for team collaboration and authoring with Ektron's dynamic content delivery. Content authors can stay in their familiar SharePoint environment to author content and manage lists. (They do not need to use Ektron for traditional CMS functions such as authoring, workflow, versioning, and permissions; there is no need for organizations to "switch" from SharePoint to another CMS.) Ektron's Digital Experience Hub liberates content from SharePoint, making it available for multichannel delivery across Web sites, mobile devices, and social networks. Marketers can personalize content delivery, effectively targeting SharePoint content to different customer segments, and they can leverage A/B and multivariate testing to optimize offers and increase conversion rates. SharePoint users can leverage Ektron's Cloud Manager to launch Web sites and marketing campaigns that showcase SharePoint content in the cloud. Ektron's Digital Experience Hub connects SharePoint to other applications; for example, CRM systems such as Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce.com, Web analytics, and online marketing tools from Marketo and HubSpot all of which capture valuable customer data and provide marketers with the real-time insights they need to make better data-driven decisions and optimize the customer experience through more relevant, personalized SharePoint content. In addition to SharePoint and Dynamics, Ektron is preintegrated with Microsoft's enterprise search solution (formerly FAST), enabling Ektron to search for content across multiple SharePoint repositories and also giving Ektron a strong site search solution. As IDC research shows, improving site search is the number one Web site enhancement priority for organizations today IDC

5 Ektron is integrated with Active Directory and uses SQL Server. Further, Ektron esync is built atop Microsoft technology that enables Ektron to update a site on the fly without taking down the site to deploy a new package whether on-premise or in the cloud. This eliminates weekend downtime and reduces risk because the site can always be rolled back in case of a problem. Challenges So far, Web content management hasn't been an important focus for Microsoft, although this could change in the future. SharePoint 2013 makes some improvements in the area of Web content management; however, they are limited for the most part to core functions such as content authoring. Aside from this, Ektron faces the usual small company challenges. It can be difficult for smaller vendors to compete for mindshare with large publicly held corporations, but Ektron is already well known for its Web content management solution, and it has a large customer base and partner network. It can also be difficult for smaller vendors to compete with large vendors on the basis of solution breadth, but best-of-breed solutions do well in the digital experience management market because technology partnerships play such an important role in providing the broader solution users need. Ektron will need to continue to cultivate its technology and channel partnerships to remain competitive and make inroads in new markets outside North America. Conclusion IDC anticipates continued strong growth in the Web content management market as spend continues to shift away from analog to digital experience management. Nearly half of the available market is using SharePoint today, which makes the opportunity for.net-based vendors very attractive. Customers are actively evaluating Web content management system solutions and have demonstrated a preference for a best-of-breed strategy when it comes to the digital customer experience. If Ektron can address customers' broader needs for a digital marketing platform through a mix of its own organically developed solutions and technology partner integrations, it should assure itself a place on the short list in this rapidly evolving market space. Ektron's Digital Experience Management solution will be a key enabler of the company's success in addressing the SharePoint Web publishing opportunity. A B O U T T H I S P U B L I C A T I O N This publication was produced by IDC Go-to-Market Services. The opinion, analysis, and research results presented herein are drawn from more detailed research and analysis independently conducted and published by IDC, unless specific vendor sponsorship is noted. IDC Go-to-Market Services makes IDC content available in a wide range of formats for distribution by various companies. A license to distribute IDC content does not imply endorsement of or opinion about the licensee. C O P Y R I G H T A N D R E S T R I C T I O N S Any IDC information or reference to IDC that is to be used in advertising, press releases, or promotional materials requires prior written approval from IDC. For permission requests, contact the GMS information line at or gms@idc.com. Translation and/or localization of this document requires an additional license from IDC. For more information on IDC, visit For more information on IDC GMS, visit Global Headquarters: 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA USA P F IDC 5