CMS Watch Subway Vendor Map 2009
Mona tried to tell me
To stay away from the train line.
She said that all the railroad men
Just drink up your blood like wine.
- STUCK INSIDE OF MOBILE WITH THE MEMPHIS BLUES AGAIN
The good folks at CMS Watch have released another version of their Subway Vendor Map. This thing is quite brilliant, and easy on the eye. In my office, the walls are plastered with pretty A2 posters of work created by our strategy, creative, experience, marketing and other teams. It’s great to be able to stick the Vendor Map post on the wall for the Tech Department – it looks much better than a technical architecture diagram. Click the diagram for a large version.
A few things I’ve also been wondering about.
- Does the order of items on a line mean anything? Why is Lithium closer to the centre than FaceBook? And poor WebTrends seems to be quite far into the suburbs.
- I find the size of the stations slightly misleading because, to me, they imply vendor size or market share. In reality, I think the size is simply proportional to the number of lines on which the vendor sits.
- I think the fact that this map shows Vendors could be misleading. Maybe it should show Integrated Product Suites or something similar. This becomes especially true when talking about the recent merged companies, such as Autonomy/Interwoven.
- I am glad to see EPiServer has made it onto the map (pretty close to Nichy), but I would have thought that they would also be on the Social Software and Collaboration line near Fatwire. They have a large community product, not just a Web CMS.
- I would like liked to see Vyre having a station on the DAM line, somewhere near Day. It is their heritage.
- We’re seeing a surprising number of clients talking about building their public facing sites using SAP Portal. The fact that SAP still isn’t on any CMS lines encourages me. Does anyone consider SAP / Netweaver a viable CMS / ECM option these days?
- The red SoCo line is a real jumble of vendors, which shows that the terminology is still being defined. Probably the only line on which the vast majority of the vendors don’t really compete with one another. I’m not sure why IBM is on there.
- I find the XML and Component Management line quite alien (my lack of understanding, not the report’s fault). I don’t see many of those products. I’d like to understand the rationale for including EMC and SDL Tridion on there ahead of other CMS vendors.
For those that like a bit of history, here is the version from 2008. Note the death of the Email Archiving And Management line, being replaced with XML Component Management. Is this because Email Archiving and Management is commodity now, or just not interesting any more? And the Social Software line suddenly has a whole lot more stations, which seems to be a sign of the times.
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Answering all of your questions would take the fun out of the map
It’s one of the ways of trying to make (some) sense out of the market for our readers. Without suggesting you should actually take the metro from Recommind to University, with stops at every search vendor 
IBM is quite a logical choice to have in social software. They’re very active in that area (though maybe not always on everyone’s high profile or hip radar). We cover Quickr and Connections.
And I’m sure the XML and Component Management line is quite alien to you. It’s totally different from the scenarios you deal with. I.e., tech writing, and roots in SGML.
Adriaan also pointed me at this: http://informationarchitects.jp/web-trend-map-4-final-beta/
I’m not sure it is the map I meant (he says the older ones had a white background like the one flashed past on the slide deck I saw), but it’s pretty cool.
With the proliferation of so-named “social media (SM) specialists”
virtually outnumbering telephone users, numerous in the marketing and advertising profession
are beginning to query regardless of whether it is clever for a business to use a social media company.
I encourage exploring different options to find out what works best for
your small business. Technically, Gimble didn’t really “replace” Nebin so much as “give him a good shove” as the
preferred class for gnomes changed from illusionist in 3.