Is It Time To Consider Open Source WCM For Digital Experience?

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1 A Forrester Consulting Thought Leadership Paper Commissioned By Acquia Is It Time To Consider Open Source WCM For Digital Experience? Find Out If Open Source Is The Right Fit For You October 2012

2 Table Of Contents Executive Summary... 2 It s A Return To The Wild, Wild West... 2 Organizations Express Interest In Open Source WCM For Digital Experience... 6 Points To Consider When Evaluating Open Source WCM... 8 Which Organizations Have Found Open Source Success, And Why? Key Recommendations: Is Open Source The Solution To Your WCM Chaos? Appendix A: Methodology , Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester, Technographics, Forrester Wave, RoleView, TechRadar, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. For additional information, go to [1-KQPIBX] About Forrester Consulting Forrester Consulting provides independent and objective research-based consulting to help leaders succeed in their organizations. Ranging in scope from a short strategy session to custom projects, Forrester s Consulting services connect you directly with research analysts who apply expert insight to your specific business challenges. For more information, visit Page 1

3 Executive Summary Organizations continue to struggle with using web content management (WCM) solutions to support public-facing experiences. Many aren t satisfied with their implementations for a litany of reasons, including the products themselves. As this number continues to grow, open source WCM solutions are emerging as a viable solution in a variety of industries, as opposed to just the traditional open source strongholds like nonprofit, education, media, and entertainment. But those who have had the most success with open source WCM solutions have come up with plans to understand the total cost of ownership, security concerns, and support concerns. In June 2012, Acquia commissioned Forrester Consulting to evaluate the use of open source platforms. Forrester fielded a survey to 160 WCM decision-makers from a variety of organizations with more than 1,000 employees to explore some of these key themes, and interviewed a number of organizations about why they ve had success with open source WCM. Those who have had success cite a number of reasons, including open source WCM s flexibility when it comes to integrating with other digital experience solutions, increased availability of external resources to support open source WCM, and a focus on more than just cost reduction when considering open source WCM. We recommend that organizations considering new WCM products explore open source as a potentially viable option, take advantage of the lack of upfront license fee to pilot an open source project, engage with open source WCM communities for information and validation, and be sure to understand support options up front if they choose to proceed with an open source implementation. It s A Return To The Wild, Wild West Organizations continue to have problems with existing WCM solutions; only 20% of surveyed WCM decision-makers claim to be very satisfied. Surprising? Not really. More and more organizations look to WCM solutions to support increasingly complex and rapidly changing initiatives, moving from fully specified projects to more fly by the seat of your pants strategies. WCM supports interactive marketing on multiple channels or just the web channel only for 25% of the 160 surveyed WCM decision-makers; it supports customer self-service 16% of the time and general company informational sites 21% of the time. And additional complexity increases the risk of dissatisfaction. Organizations continue to demand an increasing level of functionality from their WCM solutions such as globalization/localization of content, personalized and contextual experiences (based on factors like behavior, demographic, and device), and support for rich media content to support more engaging customer experience initiatives. And implementing multiple technologies, such as commerce, site search, and digital asset management, to support multichannel delivery management just adds to the complexity. But as WCM vendors have scrambled to keep pace with customers ever-changing needs, customer satisfaction has waned. While some of the greatest barriers to success are due to a growing discontent with existing WCM products, the top three barriers to success all relate to the customer themselves (see Figure 1). The top barriers to success include: Corporate culture and/or politics. Forty-three percent of WCM decision-makers believe that corporate culture and/or politics was a major barrier to their success. This is often a result of conflicting priorities, classic Page 2

4 disagreements between technical and nontechnical staff (like marketers), and a lack of understanding of why companies need to address digital experience issues. Lack of companywide online strategy. For 33% of surveyed WCM decision-makers, one of the greatest barriers to success is the lack of a consistent enterprisewide online strategy. This is because digital customer experience strategies are siloed across channel, brand/line of business, and/or technology application. While these siloed strategies have little to do with the actual WCM software itself, they can easily derail WCM initiatives. Poor budget/resource allocation. Twenty-seven percent of WCM decision-makers believe that poor budget and/or resource allocation was a barrier to a successful WCM implementation. IT organizations face increased pressure to lower costs by consolidating and outsourcing, all while delivering exceptional functionality to support digital customer experiences. According to a director of IT at a major educational institution, supporting her proprietary WCM initiative was difficult because it was almost impossible for us to find anyone who had experience with our specific WCM platform, and when they did find candidates, they either didn t have the budget or the developers would leave for a higher salary after just a few months. Integration with other applications. More than one in four WCM decision-makers cited the difficulty of integrating WCM with other enterprise applications as a main barrier to success. This may include the WCM solution s ability to utilize content from repositories other than the native repository to display online or use for website contextualization and its ability to make its content available to other systems such as ecommerce, customer relationship management (CRM), site search, digital asset management, or a second WCM solution. As organizations add more and more solutions to support web experiences, these integrations will become increasingly important. Limited product flexibility. Twenty-four percent of respondents blamed the WCM product itself for their lack of WCM success. For organizations with outdated solutions, this discontent likely reflects solutions that lack robust feature functionality to support more complex websites, such as those that support contextual web experiences and global/local sites. Lack of IT and business alignment. Many organizations still struggle to master the balancing act of aligning IT and business groups: 21% of WCM respondents cited the lack of business/it alignment as one of the greatest barriers to success. Why is there a disconnect between IT and the business? Organizations tend to have marketing or business units formulate strategy without IT involvement, and then later expect IT to execute this strategy. For many organizations web experience strategy, this often leads to disconnect between what is expected to be completed and what can feasibly be completed with the given resources. Page 3

5 Figure 1 Barriers To Success In WCM Implementations Base: 160 WCM decision-makers (multiple responses accepted) Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Acquia, October 2012 As a result of these barriers to success, only 20% of WCM decision-makers are very satisfied with their WCM solutions, with the majority feeling somewhat dissatisfied (9%), neutral (21%), or somewhat satisfied (48%) (see Figure 2). The data around satisfaction also revealed the following trends: Open source, proprietary, and homegrown solutions differ in satisfaction rates. Open source, homegrown, and proprietary WCM solutions all have similar levels of dissatisfaction likely owing to reasons related to the customer itself or limited flexibility and satisfaction. But even though WCM decision-makers with proprietary solutions are more likely to be somewhat satisfied (60%), only 8% said they were very satisfied. WCM decisionmakers with open source solutions had the highest level of respondents who reported being very satisfied (37%), with an additional 37% indicating that they are somewhat satisfied. Forty percent of WCM decision-makers with homegrown WCM solutions expressed that they are somewhat satisfied, with additional 22% as very satisfied. Business decision-makers are more likely to be unsatisfied. WCM decision-makers who are business leaders (as opposed to IT leaders) are significantly more likely to be dissatisfied by their WCM solution: 27% of business decision-makers said they are very dissatisfied or somewhat dissatisfied with their WCM product, versus only about 8% of WCM decision-makers from IT. Business leaders are more likely than IT leaders to view technology Page 4

6 as a barrier to innovation and a drag on time-to-market. As marketing and business leaders begin to take an increasingly active role in technology decisions, organizations must be prepared to both set realistic expectations and find solutions that can deliver on business expectations. Key verticals have high levels of dissatisfaction. Certain key verticals also experience high level of dissatisfaction. Twenty-four percent of respondents from education are either very or somewhat dissatisfied; there are similar levels of dissatisfaction for other key verticals, such as financial services (15%). Other key verticals have low levels of dissatisfaction, but are decidedly neutral about their current WCM solutions. Twentyeight percent of government respondents responded they were neither satisfied nor dissatisfied with their WCM product, while 18% of financial services respondents and 15% of high-tech respondents said they felt neutral toward their current WCM solution. With organizations expressing uncertainty about current WCM solutions, they have begun to consider moving to new WCM solutions: 31% of surveyed WCM decision-makers said they were considering moving to a new WCM platform in the near future. Marketing and line-of-business WCM decision-makers in particular are more likely than IT WCM decision-makers to consider moving to new solutions. Figure 2 Most WCM Decision-Makers Express Satisfaction With Their Current WCM Solution Base: WCM decision-makers (percentages may not total 100 because of rounding) Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Acquia, October 2012 Page 5

7 Organizations Express Interest In Open Source WCM For Digital Experience 58% of those surveyed considered open source when they last evaluated WCM software, and 27% of those surveyed are currently using an open source WCM platform in some capacity within their organization (interest in open source isn t restricted to WCM, either we frequently speak with organizations using open source search engines, portals, and databases). An open source solution was among the top five solutions used by organizations that participated in our survey. A variety of organizations use open source: for this survey, we spoke with a major national supermarket chain and an international pharmaceutical company using open source as their primary WCM system. And of course there is the well-known example of the federal government website, whitehouse.gov, which utilizes an open source WCM. Interestingly, website redesigns are more likely to be a driver for open source WCMs (30%) than proprietary (14%) ones, perhaps reflecting the expanded set of use cases behind customer-facing experiences as opposed to intranets and the dissatisfaction with solutions that support those use cases. But despite the interest, there is a lot of confusion regarding open source. In particular, stakeholders cite concerns around how to evaluate open source versus proprietary closed source solutions. For example, many larger organizations are used to working with larger vendors and don t understand how to compare a proprietary vendor s annual revenues with an open source project s number of downloads when evaluating stability. They also have questions around security, particularly those in highly regulated industries or who want to use sensitive data like that stored in a CRM to help contextualize the web experience. Support is an issue as well; those who are used to having the support and implementation departments of a commercial vendor may struggle with the idea of supporting an open source project. In many ways, the open source debate is like Coke versus Pepsi. Proponents of either choice often are hard-wired to believe what they believe to like what they like and usually for valid and defensible reasons. Some organizations gravitate toward open source WCM based on factors such as corporate culture, budgetary limitations, and a comfort with open source due to previous experience with other open source applications and familiarity with the community principles that underpin these solutions. For other organizations, the opposite is true: They often lean toward proprietary solutions because they believe they better mitigate risk, have been tested more thoroughly, are more secure, need less customization, and have better support options. Some of these beliefs are justified; some aren t. As with any other technology solution, surveyed WCM decision-makers cite a litany of reasons, but the three most often mentioned are: A perception that open source WCM costs less and is easier to customize. The lack of an upfront license fee and the idea that the source code is available leads many to believe that total cost of ownership will be lower. However, total cost of ownership for both proprietary and open source WCM solutions can vary greatly, depending on a variety of factors beyond license cost. These factors include third-party partners, support costs, functionality upgrades/ongoing system maintenance, and adding staff. Flexibility. Many organizations view their online experiences as an opportunity for competitive differentiation. They believe that open source WCM will give them greater flexibility to customize their website technologies to help achieve that differentiation. The appeal of the open source community. Many respondents expressed an appreciation for the communitybased nature of open source projects, in which individuals contribute time and effort to improve the platform, Page 6

8 create new functional modules, and even provide ad hoc assistance or advice to peers globally. Given the difficulty in finding resources trained in proprietary solutions, this appreciation isn t surprising. More than half (58%) of those surveyed indicated that their organization has considered or is considering open source WCM. Marketing professionals appear more likely than their IT counterparts to consider open source WCM: 67% of marketers said they had considered or are considering it, versus 56% among IT pros. The fact that more marketers are considering open source WCM than their IT counterparts could indicate dissatisfaction with their present platform. Conversely, 33% of marketers and 44% of IT pros say they had never considered open source WCM. Despite the high interest level in open source WCM, a number of factors pose challenges to its wider adoption. More than half (55%) of respondents cited security as a concern by far the largest reason cited among organizations that did not consider open source WCM. This was followed by lack of enterprise service and support (31%), legal issues involving intellectual property (25%), and inexperience with open source in general (18%) (see Figure 3): Figure 3 Decision-Makers Have Concerns About Open Source WCM Base: 49 WCM decision-makers who did not buy or consider an open source WCM solution (multiple responses accepted) Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Acquia, October 2012 Page 7

9 Points To Consider When Evaluating Open Source WCM Despite the widespread interest, interviewees told us that there are significant differences between implementing proprietary and open source WCM solutions. An organization evaluating open source WCM should consider the following: Security. Perception of security risks in open source solutions may not be unfounded. Among respondents who have deployed open source WCM, only 12% strongly agree that open source improved their security; 47% were neutral on the subject. Forty-one percent disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement that open source improved our security so 88% were either neutral or negative on the topic of open source security. It s important to understand the details of security concerns whether they relate specifically to system security, user security, and permissions, for example and compare them with their proprietary counterparts. Just saying security as a reason for selecting or rejecting a technology isn t enough. Level of functionality. Proprietary WCM vendors seem to offer a wide variety of features and capabilities. But, like eating too much ice cream, too many features for the sake of features can be a bad thing, and organizations may only implement a fraction of the features they buy. However, in a market where the vendor checking the most boxes often wins, having lots of features can still hold sway. WCM buyers currently focus on functionality like mobile delivery, integrated analytics, and content targeting. Open source platforms depend largely on an extended network of peer developers who contribute features and modules to the core systems. This can result in variable experiences with specific modules and features or force companies that adopt open source to innovate quickly to gain the capabilities they want. It s important to understand which features are most important to your organization and examine whether those features are available in the core product, community-authored modules, or both (see Figure 4). Page 8

10 Figure 4 Organizations Look To WCM For A Wide Variety Of Functionality Base: 160 WCM decision-makers (percentages may not total 100 because of rounding) Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Acquia, October 2012 Customization. Few WCM solutions support complex digital experiences out of the box, and organizations can expect to do some level of customization. Open source WCM solutions generally provide a flexible platform that developers can customize to fit specific use cases and business requirements to a point. Before adopting an open source WCM or any WCM, for that matter organizations should spend the time to determine the level of customization that will be required to meet their needs and whether other developers or third-party providers have done work that you can leverage to help achieve goals more quickly and cost-effectively. Integrations. Respondents cited a long list of desired integrations in our survey data. The most commonly cited integrations that organizations currently integrate or plan to integrate in the next 12 months include site search (87%), web or social analytics (75%), testing and optimization (68%), and CRM (66%) (see Figure 5). Mobile application development is near the top of responses at 65%, a strong indication of the inherent link between website and content management and mobile initiatives. We also asked which solution respondents would like to see included in the same stack as WCM. The largest response (35%) was none; we prefer best-of-breed. Why? Likely because monolithic suites often don t live up to their promise and open source proponents appreciate and lean toward integrating with apps with proven capabilities. That said, approximately one out of four respondents said that they would like to see things like CRM and site search included in the same stack as WCM. Page 9

11 Keep in mind that no one solution open source or proprietary will integrate with everything. So come up with a prioritized list of potential integrations and evaluated products accordingly. Resource availability. For those who didn t consider or choose an open source solution, 31% said that their organizations lack of ability to deliver enterprise level service and support for open source WCM was the reason they didn t want to consider an open source solution. This was the second most cited reason for not considering open source, after security concerns. However, the emergence of third-party, for-profit businesses dedicated to providing open source implementation, support, hosting, and troubleshooting has mitigated many of these concerns. Several interviewees at enterprise-class organizations stated that commercially-supported open source enables them to bridge some of the gap and feel assured that there are outside resources for operational support and implementation. Figure 5 Organizations Have Integration Plans For WCM Base: 160 WCM decision-makers (percentages may not total 100 because of rounding) Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Acquia, October 2012 Page 10

12 Which Organizations Have Found Open Source Success, And Why? Five years ago, it was difficult to find many larger organizations that had deployed open source WCM solutions as their primary WCM solution. Those that did have open source WCM solutions were supporting smaller microsites or other small-scale initiatives. But this is beginning to change. For this research, we spoke with several large organizations that were using open source WCM as the primary solution in enterprise deployments supporting customer-facing experiences. What are these organizations with successful large-scale WCM deployments doing differently now? After speaking with multiple organizations with open source WCM deployments, we ve boiled down the keys to their success to five main factors. These organizations: Required a solution that allowed for more customization and flexibility. Seventy-two percent of surveyed WCM decision-makers who have implemented open source WCM solutions agreed or strongly agreed that their open source WCM provided them with more flexibility. Sixty-eight percent also agreed or strongly agreed that their open source WCM solution was easy to customize. Indeed, this is one of the major benefits of an open source solution, where an organization can add additional modules or customize the base,or utilize external resources to do so. One interviewee from a UK educational institution told us that when using a proprietary solution, it took nine to 10 months to add new feature functionality, but with open source, they were able to add functionality enhancements within days. As another interviewee put it: The ability to customize, along with the availability of the developer network, helped us keep up our pace of innovation. On the flip side, organizations that require little customization and just want more prebuilt functionality may find that open source WCM doesn t fit their needs. Prioritized integration between WCM and other solutions to support digital customer experiences. Integrating different technology solutions is becoming increasingly important. No single vendor offers all of the technologies needed to manage, engage, and measure digital customer experiences. While some vendors are currently assembling multiple components of this ecosystem, most organizations can t afford to rip and replace all of the technologies in which they ve already invested in favor of a single vendor suite. In fact, when asked what solutions they wished to be offered on the same stack as WCM, the top response was a preference for a best-ofbreed approach (see Figure 6). With proprietary solutions, organizations are reliant on prepackaged integration and (more often) on APIs. But with open source solutions, the exposed code base and the developer network may make integration with other technology solutions easier. One interviewee from a major media and entertainment organization told us: It s been much easier for us to integrate once our developers found the correct community resources. Page 11

13 Figure 6 Stakeholders Prefer A Best-Of-Breed Approach Base: 160 WCM decision-makers (multiple responses accepted) Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Acquia, October 2012 Focused on more than just cost reduction. Seventy-four percent of WCM decision-makers who considered an open source WCM solution considered it because of lower costs. It s true that organizations may save upfront licensing costs with open source WCM solutions. However, those that experience the most success with open source WCM focus on much more than just cost savings. As one of our interviewees noted: Our brands that implemented open source solutions for the sole reason that it was cheap had challenges and many difficulties because they just didn t implement it properly. Correctly implementing an open source WCM solution will likely incur additional costs, particularly in the areas of configuration and customization. One national supermarket chain told us of the need to build customized content entry tools for its open source deployment, because the user interfaces included in the core product weren t up to the standards of the higher-end proprietary vendors. To succeed with open source, organizations must focus on key business drivers and business outcomes, not just cost. Made specific plans for supporting the open source WCM deployment. Thirty-one percent of surveyed WCM decision-makers who did not consider an open source WCM solution cited the lack of enterprise support and services as a reason for not considering open source. As one interviewee noted, You can t just call up a vendor support line any day or any time. Organizations that have had the most success with their open source WCM solutions have formulated plans for how they are going to support their deployments. For many organizations, Page 12

14 this involves a third-party provider that supports the core product, some community-authored modules, and some custom-coded modules. As one interviewee from a global pharmaceutical organization told us, We had some concerns about support with open source, but we felt like [a commercial company in the business of supporting open source] could make up for that and give us the support we need. Understood the myths and reality surrounding open source security concerns. One theme we heard over and over again as we spoke with interviewees is that the security concerns for open source solutions aren t that different from those faced when implementing proprietary solutions or even when implementing cloud solutions. One interviewee from a global pharmaceutical organization believed that his open source WCM solutions were more secure than proprietary ones because Unlike our proprietary solution, where we d have to wait a long time for security patches to be released, we now get security patches much faster thanks to the developer network. Many also feel that the open code base is a particular advantage, as it allows organizations to explore potential security vulnerabilities. Other organizations find good workarounds for their security concerns. As one interviewee from a major national supermarket chain said: Security was definitely a concern for us, but we overcame those when we shifted our plan and decided to have a third party host the solution. This eased our concerns, and our independent security audit also helped. Our interviewees tended to evaluate open source WCM security against a specific list of requirements and made plans on how to fill gaps. Page 13

15 KEY RECOMMENDATIONS: IS OPEN SOURCE THE SOLUTION TO YOUR WCM CHAOS? Open source web content management provides legitimate options for organizations selecting technology. We recommend that those considering open source WCM do the following: Actively evaluate open source WCM. Don t allow past biases against open source to control your technology decisions today; while some of the concerns you had five years ago may remain valid, others probably won t. Open source WCM solutions have bridged an important gap: they have by and large achieved a higher level of technology maturity over the past several years and have demonstrated some success in large-scale web deployments. We spoke with multiple enterprise-level organizations using open source WCM solutions, many of which were not just the traditional education and media and entertainment verticals (where open source has experienced success before) but from verticals like government, pharma, and retail. We interpret this as a sign that any organization wanting to use it as the primary WCM for public-facing experiences can include it when evaluating options. Leverage free open source for WCM pilots. Open source provides an excellent opportunity that many (if not most) commercial, proprietary WCM platforms fail to permit: full-scale software downloads that allow organizations to build pilot solutions on open source WCM without committing to a paid license. This also gives developers more of a chance to be hands-on with their pilots and gives them the time to put the technology through its paces, on their terms. Engage with the community for information and validation. Open source markets behave far differently than the proprietary, commercial, competitive, and fractured WCM vendor market. This is most clear in the communities of developers, module builders, marketers, and other users who leverage open source software to build effective solutions and drive web engagement and business success. Organizations evaluating open source WCM should engage with the community for references and to evaluate the level of community involvement for particular open source projects or products. Explore open source support options carefully. Companies reluctant to explore open source WCM frequently ask, Who will we call when the site goes down? and express concern about available support options because they are used to dealing with vendors and maintenance contracts. But the open source movement has spawned an ecosystem of developers and other system experts who have built for-profit businesses on top of open source software; this already happens frequently in other technology areas, such as operating systems. Now, some companies are building implementation, service, support, and infrastructure capabilities that allow companies to outsource the IT aspects of a WCM, offering core platform support, module support, module creation and enhancement, system upgrades, integrations, and 24x7x365 infrastructure and uptime. Organizations considering open source should evaluate agencies to discover which open source products they support, types of service-level agreements available, and whether or not they will support any community-authored modules needed to meet their requirements. Page 14

16 Appendix A: Methodology Forrester conducted an online survey of 160 organizations and interviewed seven respondents in the US to evaluate the adoption of open source web content management platforms among enterprises that have not traditionally leveraged open source. Survey participants included decision-makers for their firm s website or enterprise architecture and IT leadership. Questions provided to the participants asked about drivers behind their WCM solution, if and why they chose open source, and the details of their WCM implementation. Respondents were offered gift certificates as a thankyou for time spent on the survey. The study began in July 2012 and was completed in August Page 15