The evolution of the content management market is, has, and will continue to be deeply discussed by a group of insiders, analysts, and pundits. And for a relatively brief period from 2010-19, I was one of them as an analyst for Forrester Research.
In 2016, I helped recognize and substantiate the rise of headless CMS, and I coined the term “Agile CMS” in 2018-19. This new market label reflected how dramatically CMS customers’ needs had deviated from the solutions provided by CMS vendors.
Thus, my vision for the ‘collaborative creation, curation and reuse of assets across channels and journeys’ and my decision to join Oracle are connected. I continue to believe that Oracle Content Management’s strategy and features set it apart from the crowd in achieving this vision.
As the creator of the Agile CMS wave category at Forrester and a member of the product management team shaping this product, here are a few thoughts on how Oracle Content Management fits in this category.
To understand the need for a new category, let’s first review a few givens:
Over the years, Oracle acquired many products in the CMS space (e.g. Stellant, BEA systems, Fatwire, Compendium, and most recently Sauce Video). And much of the expertise of the founding architects and engineers remains at Oracle. But despite the alignment to “WebCenter” branding for a number of years, I won’t hold it against you if you haven’t heard much about Oracle’s CMS strategy.
However, when Chris Stone and Girish Bettadpur joined Oracle in 2018, everything changed. Oracle Content Management (a.k.a. Oracle Content and Experience) refined and accelerated its product strategy to offer a powerful tool that supports every channel, type of asset, and practitioner.
The CMS space is one of the most mature (20+ years old) and least consolidated (50+ vendors) enterprise software spaces around, which can lead to wild claims that are hard to validate. But given my track record, I hope you take this one more seriously than most:
Very few competitors in the CMS landscape have cloud native roots and developer-friendly tooling, diverse asset-type and lifecycle support, or broad practitioner tooling, and I’m confident that no one but Oracle can make all these claims at once—with one product.
And we continue to accelerate. The rate at which we identify and solve customer and partner needs, including Oracle’s diverse corporate and software business unit partners, is absolutely dizzying and fun.
I’m keen to start the Forrester DXP Wave coming later this year to showcase our CMS strategy and how it fits into Oracle’s broader Marketing strategy. Join us on Oracle’s Cloud Customer Connect to ask questions and learn about our roadmap, or take a trial instance for a spin. I for one am looking forward to the future of the Agile CMS market!
Mark Grannan is a senior strategist with Oracle Advertising and CX's Outbound Product Management team. Before Oracle, Mark focused on CX as a senior analyst at Forrester Research, where for much of the past decade he led the digital experience (DX) and content management (CMS) research areas. At Oracle, Mark helps steer and advocate Oracle's strategy for unification of applications and services across CX to drive customer and partner value and innovation.