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Open source WCM solution tops user satisfaction rate

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Supriya Rai
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BURLINGTON, USA: Acquia, the enterprise guide to Drupal, has announced that a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Acquia, titled "Is It Time To Consider Open Source WCM For Digital Experience?" found that open source Web Content Management (WCM) solutions have the highest satisfaction rate for creating dynamic, multichannel digital experiences.

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Of those who said they were 'very satisfied' with their existing WCM solution, open source had the highest satisfaction rate (37 percent) over "homegrown" (22 percent) and proprietary solutions (8 percent).

The Forrester study, commissioned by Acquia, surveyed 160 senior business, marketing and IT decision-makers from organizations with 1,000 to more than 20,000 employees. The survey revealed that 31 percent of organizations plan on switching WCM platforms this year and 58 percent indicate that their organization has considered or is considering open source WCM.

The Forrester study recommends that when organizations consider switching WCM solutions, they should explore open source as an option. Drupal was among the top five WCM solutions used by organizations that participated in the survey, and the leading open source solution. Among those who currently use open source WCM solutions, 72 percent said it gave them greater flexibility, and 68 percent said it was easy to customize.

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"As organizations retrench to become more dynamic and customer-centric, it's abundantly clear that proprietary WCM solutions are not meeting the changing needs and expectations of business decision makers, who don't want to be locked in to a rigid platform for the sake of convenience," said Tom Erickson, CEO of Acquia.

"The Forrester study revealed that marketers - who are responsible for creating compelling content, community and commerce experiences across multiple channels - are now the ones more aggressively pushing for flexible and open WCM solutions like Drupal," added Erickson.

When asked what other enterprise applications they would like to have bundled with their WCM solution, the majority of respondents (35 percent) said they prefer the 'best-of-breed' approach offered by open source WCM, as opposed to using all-in-one suites of pre-packaged tools and services offered by proprietary WCM solutions, which the report says often don't live up to their promise.

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According to one survey respondent from a UK educational institution, adding new functionality enhancements took nine to ten months with a proprietary WCM solution, but with open source, they were able to add new functionality within days. Another respondent said: "the ability to customize, along with the availability of the developer network, helped us keep up our pace of innovation."

Planning leads to open source success

The study also noted that organizations that were focused more on key business drivers and objectives had greater success with open source, as opposed to leveraging it for its proven cost-cutting capabilities alone.

For instance, the report showed that web site redesigns were more of a business driver for open source (30 percent) versus proprietary WCM solution users (14 percent), perhaps reflecting the more complex requirements of creating customer-facing multichannel digital experiences (as opposed to corporate intranets or other corporate/IT uses), and the dissatisfaction with current solutions in supporting those requirements.

Similarly, organizations that made specific plans to engage dedicated third-party providers (such as Acquia), and leverage pre-packaged modules from the open source community, had the most success with open source WCM implementations.

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