March 2009
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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.

CMS Watch Vendor Subway Map 2009

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.

CMS Watch Vendor Subway Map 2008

Finally, I recently saw a presentation by a Forrester Analyst. In this, he quickly flashed past a slide which looked like another subway map for CMS/WCM. However, Google doesn’t seem to be able to shed any light on this. I was wondering if anyone knows if other such maps exist.
I’m looking forward to seeing the version from 2010.
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