Analysts Agree: The Time Has Come for Web Experience Management in the Cloud

Late last year, Gartner released the results of an extensive survey into enterprise cloud adoption that revealed that "SaaS deployments are now mission critical." Global buyers cited cost reduction, innovation and operational agility as the top reasons. The C-suite is finally realizing that cloud is a modern approach that safely delivers solid business advantage, according to Gartner.

The traditional deployment model for on-premises software is expected to significantly shrink from 34% today to 18% by 2017. Still, most organizations will live with a mix of SaaS and traditional application deployment models, so the importance of solutions that offer high native interoperability with other third-party solutions should be favored. That being said, cloud solutions are moving up the value chain. Many enterprises are now deploying SaaS for “production grade” applications that routinely handle mission-critical process workloads.

Cloud Web Experience Management is being swept up in this encouraging worldwide trend. Rapid deployment and faster access to digital experience delivery innovations is driving its growth. SaaS vendors lower upfront costs with “pay-as-you-go” subscription pricing, and lower future operational costs by taking responsibility for ongoing maintenance and support. IT is able to redirect limited in-house website support staff to other responsibilities.

Gartner deserves kudos for recognizing this trend and giving true multi-tenant SaaS solutions their due in its most recent Web Content Management market assessment. And after a recent sneak peak at Forrester's upcoming research agenda for "Digital Experience Platforms" (their term for our market), it looks like they are ready to jump into this conversation too.

Over this summer and into 2016, Forrester’s DX team will be increasingly exploring cloud offerings and whether the weather is changing. They’ll complete a deeper investigation into how the cloud is improving digital experience platforms, sometimes disruptively. The best upcoming report of all: sorting out the confusion created by sound-alike marketing by rating web content management vendors on their level of “cloud maturity”. It turns out that only some components of these “cloud platforms” are delivered as SaaS, while others remain stubbornly on-premises.

It’s clear that the time has truly come for Web Experience Management in the cloud.