Ektron adds services, new deployment options to serve larger customers

The 451 Group - May 26, 2009 

Event summary

- A number of changes at Ektron point to growth in its Web content management (WCM) business and its increasing appeal with larger organizations. It recently brought in new management for its enterprise group and beefed up its services organization.

- The most recent round of product enhancements included a new content and code synchronization model intended for large or complex deployments.

- Ektron has grown to 200 employees, with new offices in San Francisco and Austin, Texas. We peg the company's 2008 revenue in the $30-40m range; it reported 26% yearover- year growth in Q1 of this year.

The 451 take

Ektron is another WCM vendor that shows continued vigor despite consolidation in the sector. The company is hardly a newcomer (it claims 7,500 CMS customers), but its focus has been shifting since its .NET-based product is appealing to larger customers. It is not keen to alienate its longtime base of SMB customers and partners, so it has to walk a fine line in that area. Its average deal size, about $40,000, is indicative of this; it doesn't actually sell much software at this price, but does many smaller deals and a few much larger ones. A .NET base is likely to continue to serve Ektron well, especially in the midmarket. It also has international growth potential since it only gets about 20% of business today from outside of North America.

Details

When we last profiled Ektron, we noted it was bringing in larger customers. It has continued in this vein, although it is not abandoning its SMB customers or partners that target that market. It made some packaging changes late in 2008 to tier the product for accounts of different sizes.

In the past, we noted that Ektron did about 40% of its sales via VARs and little services work. That has changed as Ektron has built up its services organization substantially in the past year, in part for enterprise customers looking for best practices and deployment Ektron adds services, new deployment options to serve larger customers assistance. Ektron has also started offering a hosted option for its software. A new VP, Mark Wilson, will lead Ektron's efforts in the enterprise market.

The latest product release, Ektron CMS400.NET v7.6, brought a new deployment framework: the company's new eSync module. This is meant to automate the movement of code and content from staging to production environments in a way that syncs only changed content. Therefore, it can be used to refresh a single bit of new content or a whole site. Furthermore, it's bidirectional, so it can pull in user-generated content and sync it across server farms.

Ektron, which is also known for its Web editor, eWebEditPro, also added some end-user tools in the last release. These included a new page-builder tool so a less technical marketer or business user can build and manage sites via dropdown menus and drag-and-drop capabilities. It also includes improved in-context editing to emulate the Web editor experience in the browser on live or staged content.

Competitive landscape

Ektron's customers use its software for both internal and external sites, and competition can be quite different for these two use cases. For intranets, Microsoft SharePoint is often the main competition. That is much less the case for customer sites, where SharePoint doesn't really have a strong play. Ektron has added a good deal of social capabilities – from blogs to social networking to group workspaces – potentially bringing it into more competition with SharePoint over time since SharePoint is headed in this direction as well. Ektron tries to distinguish itself from SharePoint by combining these capabilities with its Web content delivery, where SharePoint isn't as strong. Still, this will likely be a stickier area for Ektron, mostly for internal sites, going forward.

On public websites, Ektron competes more with other .NET-based WCM products. Sitecore is here and has become a much stronger competitor in the past couple of years. EPiServer is strong in parts of Europe and is expanding into the US market. Other potential competitors include SDL Tridion, Percussion Software and Ingeniux. Ektron also sees some competition from open source, particularly in smaller deals. Improving its services organization is one of its strategies versus open source projects.

Reproduced by permission of The 451 Group, copyright 2009. This report was originally published within The 451 Group’s Market Insight Service.

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