EPiServer brings Warm Website initiative to India

NEW DELHI, INDIA: EPiServer, web content management company is introducing Web 2.0 Warm Website initiative in India. Sunny Ghosh, president of EPiServer India, shares with R Jai Krishna of CyberMedia News the objective of Web 2.0 Warm Website initiative and current trend of the World Wide Web excerpts:

CMN: Can you elaborate on the Web CMS Industry and trends?

SG: We are witnessing a growing awareness and recognized need for managing content better, sharing/reusing information with partners and suppliers with a healthy balance of IP protection within companies in the Asian region. More and more organizations recognize their need to better manage content to reduce cost for locating right information, increase internal content co-ordination across distributed teams, drive knowledge/content management, ensure compliance, manage risk and improve their product / service delivery and customer interactions via their websites. Content Management system is a key component for such Information infrastructure not only in the western countries, but in Asia, as well.

Particularly in India, organizations and communities are beginning to replace their existing Web sites that were built as brochure sites as they continue to strengthen their brand identity, improve customer interactions and bring sophisticated personal/one to one customer services offerings via the web. Intranets and extranets are fuelling the growth of Web CMS systems, clubbed with more sophisticated interactive experiences that combine Web 2.0 user interfaces, community models and transactional/back-office services in a way that still enables non-technical users to contribute and maintain content.

IDC predicts, content management market will accelerate growth and will cross the existing revenue of $3.6 billion in 2006 to $6 billion by 2010, almost double the 2005 market revenue set earlier.

CMN: What does EPiServer Web 2.0 ‘Warm Website initiative’ mean and how does it help the end customers?

SG: Warm Website Initiative is our version of the Web 2.0. We believe, that in the real world, we have learned from hundreds of years how to treat a customer, how to build a relationship and how to glue the customer to a store or a brand. Somehow that knowledge got lost in the internet revolution and was replaced with self-service. The Warm Website Initiative is an alliance program, which ties several large global product vendors in building this experience and is a direct effort of our founder and CTO – Mikael Runhem, to mimic the premium experience a potential customer gets when walking into an exclusive store using the EPiServer Web Platform.

Our goal is to provide the best of both the worlds, maintaining the anonymity of the self-service approach and combining it with the premium treatment by a real person! With today’s technology it is possible to compete with not just a pretty website or low prices. By combining the technology with manning the website with skilled sales/helpdesk staff you can provide a much more efficient business platform, increasing sales and customer satisfaction.

Imagine a visitor asking a question through a web chat on the home page, getting an answer that someone knows about this particular question and is available online (because she is online in his Skype client, reading email in a hotel room in Sydney) and redirects the conversation to that person! Or having a list of products on your website, with contact information for each product, showing “click here to chat with this vendor” or, see the fastest way to reach this vendors office, or, if the team member of that particular product is offline, “click here to send a message to this vendor”.

We at EPiServer have started rolling out such functionality, here are some examples to click and see for yourself: ‘Google Map and EPiServer’, EPiTrace. The end customers will get a premium experience when they visit the website, everyone can get a personal attention!

CMN: What is the rationale behind EPiServer setting up a product development and sales/support center in India?

SG: EPiServer is the fastest growing Web CMS platform in the world. Our India office is an essential part of EPiServer’s global expansion strategy and shows our commitment to partners and customers in emerging markets in Asia. The Indian office will support our global system integrators and solutions partners in Asia and Americas.

Our plan is also to engage with this huge pool of talented software engineers working for partners locally and with partners in other Asian countries. We will offer these developers a training route to become EPiServer certified developers. Today we have over 1200 developers as EPiServer certified developers and the demand globally for such developers is extremely strong.

Indian IT - ITES and Knowledge industry doesn’t need an introduction. It has attained a position, which could help us to foster speed of development and we intend to cross fertilize our experience to develop global benchmarks and roll out world class product deliveries from our Indian center.
We have started to establish an R&D team in Bangalore to support the development organization in Sweden and continue our expansion of product offering into new areas.

CMN: As a CMS product company, what are the challenges for companies who develop customized applications?

SG: EPiServer is a platform and our business model is based on ‘partners’ and ‘participation’ – these are the two pillars of our success. We survive on customized application vendors who make unique experiences and solutions using EPiServer platform. For them it’s a ready made canvas with all the color palettes available to drag and draw their solution and for us, we need hundreds of such partners to offer their expertise and solutions to our customers and end user community. We want to nurture and build this ecosystem, where customized application developers play a major role.

CMN: What is the addressable market for EPiServer and what have you got to offer for the SME segment in India?

SG:EPiMore is EPiServer's marketplace and alliance program. Under this broad EPiMore program, EPiServer is constantly erecting new business models based on fluid exchange of ideas, unique solutions and human capital - bringing innovation to the marketplace.

Unlike other traditional alliance models, niche ventures, global partners approach EPiServer to take advantage of current opportunities and publish their ideas, modules, products and services as offerings to our customers and communities.

We believe one specific industry product might help to create tremendous efficiencies in another industry offering. Embracing this new avenue, we have opened our framework for all such products and services and SME companies in India - to work closely with EPiServer CMS, helping us to cater to our market demands, create opportunities and to innovate together at a rapid speed. 

All products and services under this model are developed, sold, distributed and supported by each EPiMore partner themselves and under their own Brand, which is the most important aspect of this marketplace. The partners are licensed as EPiMore Alliance Partners to secure quality and support capability and are allowed to target our customer base with their offering.