Crownpeak named Contender in Forrester Wave Web Content Management (WCM) Systems

Recognized for multi-site management, modernizing legacy applications, localization and digital governance

Being included in a Forrester Wave report is an achievement for any company. By their own description, the “Forrester Wave™ reports provide you with an overview of the leading providers in a market space with robust analysis of their current offering and strategy”. So Crownpeak’s recognition as a Contender is an accomplishment of which we’re extremely proud.

But what does it mean to be a Contender in the Wave? To Forrester, it’s a combination of a strong product offering, solid market awareness, and positive customer feedback. But as a cloud-native WCM provider, being included in the Wave for Web Content Management for the first time ever is a sign that the industry is finally catching up to where we’ve been for years. Yes, cloud-based WCMs have officially hit the mainstream.

Born in the cloud over 15 years ago, we and our customers have long realized the benefits of using a cloud-based WCM to deliver scalable and repeatable experiences in multi-site and multi-language environments. While leading analyst firms like Forrester and Gartner are increasingly taking note, this shift shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, and we’re baffled it didn’t happen sooner.

In 2015, Forrester’s Ted Schadler posed the question “should your Web Content Management System run in the cloud,” to which he responded “yes”. In that report, he outlined problems that are all too familiar with on-premises WCMs – they take a long time to implement, require technical expertise to operate and maintain, involve significant investment in hardware, and can impede continuous improvement. He went on to outline scenarios best suited for a cloud-based WCM including having multi-product offerings or multi-country footprints, as well as the need to rapidly spin up microsites and landing pages. Even then, he cited Crownpeak as a “winner” in those scenarios.

Our competitors are just now playing catch-up as they begin to face this reality. But as they gradually migrate their legacy WCMs to the cloud, their customers must cope with their solution partner’s growing pains.   These growing pains, and they can be significant, are what we sometimes allude to as the difference between being ‘cloud-enabled’ versus being ‘cloud-first’ or ‘cloud-only’. 

Just as the term “contender” conjures up the notion of an athlete striving for every advantage to beat his or her competitors, over the last year Crownpeak has made a concerted effort to up our game. As Forrester highlights in this latest report, our merger with cloud-based ActiveStandards gives us the only WCM with built-in Digital Quality Management.

This past year, we’ve been working with esteemed customers to launch new solutions that address major concerns like DDoS attacks, while enabling others like Eli Lilly Japan, to relaunch their websites without replatforming their legacy systems.  

We’ve increased our R&D spend dramatically to build new features and solutions that make digital management for global companies easier, even as the complexity of the landscape increases.

So the way we see it, our inclusion in the new Forrester Wave for WCM is just another indication that we’re successfully achieving what we set out to do years ago: disrupt the content management space.