This is just a friendly reminder that I'll be on this Friday's 11:30 AM CDT live broadcast of CMS-Connected. I'll be covering the Bridgeline iAPPS Platform in their "In the Spotlight". This will the first proprietary CMS I've reviewed for that show and as I'm more familiar with open source solutions, I've had to do some homework for this one.
Acquia announced significant growth in revenue and bookings as the company’s open source solutions are becoming more widely adopted. Acquia’s year-over-year revenue grew by 108 percent in 2012. According to the Boston Business Journal, this puts Acquia's revenue for 2012 at $45.3 million. Momentum continued in the first quarter of 2013, as Acquia’s bookings increased 52 percent compared to the first quarter of 2012 and more than 15 percent over the quarter prior.
Acquia reportedly achieved significant growth in bookings and revenue as organizations accelerate their adoption of solutions to manage their digital experiences, particularly among life sciences, high tech, media, government and higher education. According to Acquia, with businesses of all sizes seeking ways to fast track their digital marketing efforts, increased demand for solutions that blend content, community and commerce have been particularly popular among chief digital officers, digital executives and digitally-focused CMOs.
Given our open source roots as well as our broad definition of a CMS, we thought this would be a good time to revisit Moodle by mentioning that Moodle 2.5 was released last week. This is the first release under their new May/November release schedule. With version 2.5, the Moodle community has managed to address 705 issues through code contributions from 112 developers. Moodle is a software package for producing Internet-based courses and web sites that we like to call a learning content management system (LCMS or LMS).
"The last thing you want your IT department to be is a joke because you waited too long to make changes. The easiest thing in the world to do is to play it safe, but it's probably not the best strategy for your professional development or the bottom line of your organization. You have to push new technologies that are going to propel your company forward or you risk being the IT equivalent of a company that waited too long to move to the next generation of technology."
- Ron Miller, "What your IT department could learn from Sony's disruption", CITEworld, May 17, 2013.
At the 2013 CMS Expo Learning & Business Conference I have the privilege of moderating a panel focused on the Cloud. That's actually a broad topic, but I think it's a topic that is increasingly becoming well understood by the CMS community. Last year, I moderated a similar panel and, in my opinion, we spent way too much time trying to define the Cloud. This year, I'm hoping we're past the "what is it" phase and spend much more time talking about real problems, real benefits, and the challenges the content management industry may be facing by moving toward a Cloud solution.
"So much ink has been spilled deriding the false concept of a "Facebook friend," but I can tell you that a "Facebook friend" is better than nothing."
- Paul Miller, "I’m still here: back online after a year without the internet", The Verge, May 1, 2013.
I guess I shouldn't be too surprised. The custom CMS discussion has reared it’s ugly head a few times this year. Ron Miller asked his Fierce audience “why would companies still be building a custom CMS” as recently as this past February, which also spawned a discussion on CMS Connected the same month. For us, this is the third time this year we've come up against this most ethereal of competitors. The first was in a pitch in March with a local ad agency who insists that a custom CMS is the most efficient way to go. That was followed by an ongoing discussion with one of our long-time customers about whether they would renew this year in the wake of building an internal development team.
A few days ago, the Joomla Project introduced a new version of their content management system, Joomla! 3.1. As usual with these updates, Joomla 3.1 introduces a number of changes and bug fixes. While better late than never, the most significant new feature in this release is dynamic tagging across content-types.
Petr Palas, founder and CEO of Kentico software, lets his voice be heard to in this week's CEO Corner. In this article, he provides rebuttal to an earlier CEO Corner written by Agility's Michael Assad. Where Assad favors a "best of breed" approach and questions the validity of CXM, Palas believe the future is in fully integrated CXM solutions. Which CEO is right? We'll let you decide...
On my to-do list for quite some time has been wanting to talk briefly about some of the new features included in the latest release of Agility CMS. You may recall that CMS Report migrated over to Agility's Magazine Publishing Suite last Fall. So, keeping up to date on new features added to Agility CMS is not only a news story but also something of personal interest to me.
