In Part I of our series on the rise of the digital marketing suite we laid the foundation for the categories that the CMO buys within. For Part II we moved on to talk about the broad landscape of who is currently operating in the space today and selling into the CMO suite. In Part III we continued to understand how all the major players got to where they are covering the largest players in the space like Adobe Systems, Salesforce, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. As we know that is not the full picture of who is operating in the space so for Part IV we will move outside of the Big 5 to see “who are the major independent companies that are talking to CMOs?“ We will follow our categories and cover the content management players going from the earliest market leader in the space to today.
The space overall does not date back as far as the Analytics category but does have it’s roots beginning around 1995 and 1996 with the launch of 2 core companies that still today have strong market share.
In 1995 we see the launch of Vignette which was one of the earliest commercial CMS products in market. The company was acquired by Open Text in 2009 ($310M EV / Undisclosed) and has lost market share recently but still has some strong presence in a number of industries.
In 1996 Core Media goes live which still commands presences in a number of categories like government, media and telecom. The company has “bolted on” well to other core solutions from IBM and SAP and sells well into these categories as a result.
We have a lull in the action again like in the Analytics space for a few years and then in 1999 Blogger launches to the world. The company was acquired later in 2009 by Google for an undisclosed sum and remains widely used and the pioneer within the blogger community.
In 2003 WordPress launched to the public and the business continues to be the largest company from a market share standpoint in this space today at over 60 million websites under management.
Following, in 2005 we begin to see many open source frameworks emerge in the content management space that ultimately have become large companies. Many of the original engineers from Documentum and Oracle started Alfresco in this year and also Joomla! launched to the public which remains the second most used CMS out there today.
In 2007 the CMS space saw the launch of the last large player in Acquia. The company has over 4,000 enterprise customers and continues to do well in the open source community.
As you can see, the CMS space like Analytics still has a fair amount of large independent vendors out there and unlike the Analytics category there has been limited M&A within this space. We still admit there are more companies in the space on the independent side but these represent the largest today in our opinion. If you have any additions let us know and next up we will move on to Social and take a look at the large independent vendors in that category.
