Re: CMS Differentiating Factors

(cms-list added as CC, hope you don't mind)

Boris Kraft wrote:
> On 06.10.2005, at 07:07, Rickard Öberg wrote:
> 
>> Boris Kraft wrote:
>>
>>>  From our experience (before we started Magnolia) I can say
>>> a) customization is always necessary to some degree unless your 
>>> requirements are low or your company is average (in the sense of 
>>> "like most others") because vendors will usually built what most 
>>> companies (== average) need
>>
>> Well, just to contrast that I'd say 90% of our customers use our 
>> CMS/portal as it is out of the box. I suppose it depends on what you 
>> mean by "customization"? If you are saying anything that involves 
>> programming in some way that is done with typically less than 5% of 
>> all our installations.
> 
> 
> So whats your percentage of license vs implementation at a typical site?

Small to medium sites are typically up and running in 3-5 days. This 
includes installation, training, getting the basic site up with 
templates, metadata, search, styles. Implementation in terms of what 
they pay us compared to the license, which is about $10.000, is thus 
very very small. We don't make much money on the implementation part. 
Licensing and annual update/support fees (i.e. we have included support 
in the annual fee) is where we make our money. We like it, and our 
customers like it, because it makes them easy to put it into a budget. 
They don't care that much about the amount of money as much as they care 
about knowing beforehand how much they will pay. Very few, if any, of 
our competitors (at least here in Sweden) can provide that.

Then it depends on how much information is to be entered, as the 
customer typically had something else previously (FrontPage or 
DreamWeaver typically). The really large customers (like malmo.se and 
skatteverket.se) were(/are) much much longer projects, since it involved 
so much information and training, but those are things that are hard to 
put into a "general" equation.

> yes ok thats a special market segment, and of course we see that more 
> and more vendors target a specific niche - probably exactly because 
> needs ares so different across the world

Yes, indeed.

>> Even most of our integration techniques are done through point and 
>> click. The most advanced of our packaged integration portlets 
>> implements a proxy that allows for custom XSL transformation of the 
>> underlying content, but that's about it.
> 
> congrats (I mean it) - I am sure some stuff out there is pretty cool

It is :-) I donated a copy of this stuff to portletbridge.org, so others 
can use it as well. Feel free to use it if you have a JSR168 container.

>> We don't make much money and support, and we don't have much to offer 
>> in terms of consulting services. So, our way to scale to lots and lots 
>> of customers is to simply make the tool as packaged and easy to use as 
>> possible, and it has worked out quite decently. My own estimation 
>> (which others will contest, I am sure) is that we are now nr 2 in 
>> Sweden after EpiServer, and gaining fast.
> 
> Congrats again!
> Its an interesting business concept, somewhat contrary to ours, where we 
> give away the software and hope somebody asks us for help :-)

Yes, we are almost the opposite :-) It has worked out quite well so far, 
and as I said, for those cases where the customer wants consulting 
services for integration and such things we have partners (like 
objectware.no, wmdata.se, pulsen.se) that deal with that. We are small 
alone, but big together.

regards,
   Rickard

-- 
Rickard Öberg
[email protected]
@work +46-(0)19-173036

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