2012 global customer engagement platforms technology innovation award

BEST PRACTICES RESEARCH

© 2012 Frost & Sullivan 1 “We Accelerate Growth”

2012 Global Customer Engagement Platforms

Technology Innovation Award

2012




Customer Engagement Platforms

Global, 2012

Frost & Sullivan’s Global Research Platform

Frost & Sullivan is in its 50th year in business with a global research organization of 1,800

analysts and consultants who monitor more than 300 industries and 250,000 companies.

The company’s research philosophy originates with the CEO’s 360-Degree Perspective™,

which serves as the foundation of its TEAM Research™ methodology. This unique approach

enables us to determine how best-in-class companies worldwide manage growth,

innovation and leadership. Based on the findings of this Best Practices research, Frost &

Sullivan is proud to present the 2012 Global Technology Innovation Award in Customer

Engagement Platforms to Sitecore.

Significance of the Technology Innovation Award

Key Industry Challenges Addressed by Superior Engagement Platforms

Challenge #1: Web Content Management (WCM)

Companies constantly need to post or change things on websites. Marketing directors and

CMOs need to quickly position their companies to capture the hottest market opportunities

by letting the industry know that “the next big thing” is exactly what they have. An

organization’s web presence is now its front door, “the face of the company” to the world.

Organizations need their web and mobile presence to respond in real time to the needs and

demands of the business.

Some factors are undeniably human. There is no shortage of demanding customers in any

field, from programming to marketing to research & analysis, and the world of webmasters

is no exception. Another reason, however, or in some cases the primary reason why

websites and teams sometimes fail to support the business, may be the tools they are

asked to use. Sometimes the system available to them requires extensive programming

expertise to get things done. Programming, testing and debugging takes time, as does

administering a staging (preview) site where pages are viewed before going “live.” Frost &

Sullivan points out that these challenges and more are what some webmasters face on a

daily basis.

Challenge #2: Online Analytics

If companies do not know, at a granular and specific level, what their customers, prospects

and competitors are doing online, and what potentially anyone is saying about them online,

they then have a huge blind spot that will prevent them from maximizing their success and

ultimately threaten the survival of the organization. Frost & Sullivan feels that companies

© 2012 Frost & Sullivan

need to properly attain mastery of both Site analytics (how online users are interacting with

a company’s own web properties) and Social analytics (what users are doing an

anywhere else across the web).

Challenge #3: Analyze, then Act

Online analytics is extremely important, but what companies need to be able to do is

perform detailed analysis of both their own sites and other traffic that impacts them

anywhere on the web—and act upon it,

Key Benchmarking Criteria for Technology Innovation Award

For the Technology Innovation Award, the following criteria w

Sitecore’s performance against key competitors:

• Uniqueness of Technology

• Impact on New Products/Applications

• Impact on Functionality

• Impact on Customer Value

• Relevance of Innovation to Industry

Decision Support Matrix and Measurement Criteria

To support its evaluation of best practices across multiple busines

Frost & Sullivan employs a customized Decision Support Matrix (DSM).

analytical tool that compares companies’ performance relative to each other with an

integration of quantitative and qualitative metrics. The DSM fe

Award category and ranks importance by assigning weights to each criterion.

weighting reflects current market conditions and illustrates the associated importance of

each criterion according to Frost & Sullivan.

market and Award category.

objectively analyze each company's performance on each criterion relative to its top

competitors and assign performance ratings on t

that allows for nuances in performance evaluation; ratings guidelines are shown in Chart 2.

Chart 2: Performance

BEST PRACTICES RESEA

3 “We Accelerate Growth”

attain mastery of both Site analytics (how online users are interacting with

a company’s own web properties) and Social analytics (what users are doing an

anywhere else across the web).

Challenge #3: Analyze, then Act



and act upon it, often immediately.

Key Benchmarking Criteria for Technology Innovation Award

For the Technology Innovation Award, the following criteria were used to benchmark

’s performance against key competitors:

Technology

Impact on New Products/Applications

Impact on Functionality

Impact on Customer Value

Relevance of Innovation to Industry

Decision Support Matrix and Measurement Criteria

To support its evaluation of best practices across multiple business performance categories,

Frost & Sullivan employs a customized Decision Support Matrix (DSM).


integration of quantitative and qualitative metrics. The DSM features criteria unique to each

Award category and ranks importance by assigning weights to each criterion.


each criterion according to Frost & Sullivan. Fundamentally, each DSM is distinct for each

market and Award category. The DSM allows our research and consulting teams to


competitors and assign performance ratings on that basis. The DSM follows a 10


Chart 2: Performance-Based Ratings for Decision Support Matrix


“We Accelerate Growth”

attain mastery of both Site analytics (how online users are interacting with

a company’s own web properties) and Social analytics (what users are doing and saying



ere used to benchmark

s performance categories,

Frost & Sullivan employs a customized Decision Support Matrix (DSM). The DSM is an


atures criteria unique to each

Award category and ranks importance by assigning weights to each criterion. The relative


Fundamentally, each DSM is distinct for each

The DSM allows our research and consulting teams to


hat basis. The DSM follows a 10-point scale


for Decision Support Matrix



This exercise encompasses all criteria, leading to a weighted average ranking of each

company. Researchers can then easily identify the company with the highest ranking. As a

final step, the research team confirms the veracity of the model by ensuring that small

changes to the ratings for a specific criterion do not lead to a significant change in the

overall relative rankings of the companies.

Chart 3: Frost & Sull ivan’s 10-Step Process for Identifying Award Recipients

Best Practice Award Analysis for Sitecore

The Decision Support Matrix, shown in Chart 4, illustrates the relative importance of each

criterion for the Technology Innovation Award and the ratings for each company under

evaluation. To remain unbiased while also protecting the interests of the other

organizations reviewed, we have chosen to refer to the other key players as Competitor 1

and Competitor 2.

Chart 4: Decision Support Matrix for


Measurement of 1–10 (1 =

lowest; 10 = highest) Award Criteria

Uniqueness of

Technology

Impact on New

Products/Applications

Impact on

Functionality

Impact on Customer

Value

Relevance of

Innovation to Industry

Weighted Rating

Relative Weight (%) 20% 20% 20% 20% 20% 100%

Sitecore 9 8 10 9 9 9.0

Competitor 1 7 8 7 6 7 7.0

Competitor 2 4 8 7 7 8 6.8



Criterion 1: Uniqueness of Technology

Stratecast is tracking and analyzing 85+ companies in the online analytics space, and Frost

& Sullivan has done the same for content management systems (CMSs), including web

content management systems (WCMSs), as well as digital media/marketing platforms, for

the better part of a decade. Competitor 1 is one of the better recognized WCMS providers

and is now offering analytics and digital marketing capabilities as well. Frost & Sullivan

notes that what makes Sitecore’s technology more unique is that it offers capabilities in four

areas: WCM, online analytics, digital analytics and digital marketing, pre-integrated “under

one roof,” and does it better than anyone else at a price point that is far more attainable for

a wide range of organizations to purchase than the higher-priced solutions, including those

from Competitor 1. Competitor 2 offers a certain standard of excellence, but Competitor 2

opportunistically leverages multivendor technology, with little of its own native technology,

and thus falls short of Sitecore when it comes to consideration for a Technology Innovation

Award.

Best Practice Example: By using Sitecore, a company can manage its own web properties;

be proactive rather than reactive (or caught unaware, as are many companies) when it

comes to things being said about it on social media; personalize web content ‘on the fly’ via

real-time personalization, such that a visitor from one region sees one page (or set of

content on a page) while a visitor from another region sees different content, or a different

page entirely; collect granular data and perform advanced analytics; and apply those

analytics to its very next digital marketing campaign, even one that starts within the hour.

Criterion 2: Impact on New Products/Applications

Nothing can kill the launch of a new product or application like incomplete market data,

introducing a product based on anecdotal ‘hunches’ or instinct alone, or introducing it using

the same old traditional “marketing AT you” techniques that are no longer effective when

attempting to reach today’s increasingly sophisticated, perpetually-mobile audiences and

buyers. No one launching a new product or application can afford to do so without gaining

insights into the engagement tendencies and buying behaviors of customers, not just

through sales activity and offline records, but through online behaviors and dialogues. In

this sense, what Sitecore is offering, in a single Customer Engagement Platform, and at a

competitive price point, benefits anyone launching any new product. It also raises the bar

for its competitors, such that a company not offering CEP capabilities in its own product

suite (such as Competitor 2), or offering CEP piece-parts at a higher price point (such as

Competitor 1).

Best Practice Examples: A company launching any new product can use Sitecore CEP to

collect and analyze data from all relevant online sources and distill that into a savvy,

sophisticated campaign that effectively launches its new offering in digital media that will

reach prospects “where they live” (work)—thereby positioning both product and company

itself positively in the market. In addition, any company that hopes to compete with



Sitecore now has to either go to market with a full-featured CEP suite of its own, or build

one by collaborating with partners. Frost & Sullivan is of the opinion that digital analytics,

online analytics, or WCM alone will not pass muster.

Criterion 3: Impact on Functionality

Sitecore offers features most competitors do not, or not within a pre-integrated platform.

On-site Social Engagement offers the ability to build a community on a company’s own site

with Sitecore’s out-of-the-box blogs, wikis, forums, polls and email-a-friend features, plus

integration with external social media sites. Multisite Deployment enables a company to

manage all of its web properties from a single management platform to enforce brand

consistency. Real-time Personalization enables the site to automatically deliver targeted

content to each visitor based on user behaviors and preferences. Predictive Personalization

leverages the widest range of available insight from other channels, offline and online, and

is managed by business users, not IT, so that it empowers marketing teams and content

authors. Some of its products are most comfortably used by web developers; its modules

for synergizing online plus offline data are focused mainly on one vertical (retail marketing

and merchandising); and all of it comes in at a higher price point than Sitecore. So not only

does Sitecore nicely enable resources to contribute in more places, it also opens the door

for a wider range of organizations to obtain ‘enterprise-level’ CEP. Competitor 2 offers

specific solutions, but since those solutions depend on combining and building on other

vendors’ existing solutions, functionality and quality can vary from contract to contract.

Best Practice Example: on a day-to-day basis, a company uses Sitecore to leverage all

available data about all online behaviors impacting the company; places analytics-driven

insight in the hands of business users, who immediately develop web and e-marketing

content capturing the essence of what the analytics have revealed; and combines online

insights with offline (physical world) data to ensure that it is meeting its customers,

prospects, competitors, partners and (potentially) investors wherever they are, with

integrated data/message/approach.

Criterion 4: Impact on Customer Value

As referred to in Criterion 3, Sitecore offers a wider range of capabilities at a more

competitive price point than Competitor 1, thus creating more value for a broader spectrum

of customers and prospects—which may be one reason why Sitecore has 32,000+

deployments and counting. Competitor 2 is actually positioned better than Competitor 1 in

this regard, because by serving as something of a ‘broker’ of various partner solutions, it

can craft effective solutions that are not dependent on the quality and pricing of a single

vendor. Yet integrating multiple solutions together into a cohesive, unified solution is a

challenging proposition, and despite all assurances that “one call” (to Competitor 2) is all it

takes when problems inevitably occur, multivendor solutions always seem to lead to

multivendor trouble calls, which provides less value and convenience than one call to

Sitecore.



Best Practice Example: Sitecore provides a lot of functionality at an attainable price point,

so those 32,000+ customers, including many SMBs, are able to afford what are normally

considered ‘enterprise-level’ functionality. This is an encouraging market dynamic, because

the midsized organizations are usually the ones who need it the most to try to keep pace

with their large multinational competitors.

Criterion 5: Relevance of Innovation to Industry

Before Sitecore crafted its Customer Engagement Platform, most of its competitors were

mired in WCM. With the advent of many free, open source blogging platforms, many

companies began using those more widely, first for their corporate blogs, then for their

online newsrooms, and finally for their core “home base” .com websites. WCM providers

found themselves trying to compete with free or extremely low-cost alternatives on a

downward spiral, a “race to the bottom.” Sitecore saw the (free) writing on the wall and

addressed it by doubling down on WCM with an incredibly advanced lineup of site content

features; adding online and digital analytics; and adding an array of marketing and

engagement capabilities. The resulting Sitecore CEP is one of the most relevant

developments in the history of the WCM area, simply because it is exploding that space, and

because it is showing down-on-their-luck WCM providers a profitable way out of their

dilemma. Competitor 1 also offers a relatively complete lineup in these areas, but does not

offer all of the same features, and in particular, its offline-plus-online functions are limited

to retail. Competitor 2 is innovative, particularly in terms of combining online plus offline

data, but since its solutions comprise a shifting lineup of partner solutions, the successes it

achieves for customers are less its own innovation than its ability to integrate and package

its partners’ innovations.

Best Practice Example: A WCM provider that thought it was still competing with Sitecore

strictly on WCM terms, much as Barnes & Noble thought it was still competing with Amazon

on the basis of book sales, wakes up one day and realizes the WCM market is a road to

nowhere. That competitor begins aggressively developing its own digital marketing

capabilities, partners with a company that offers deep analytics functionality, and within 18

months has crafted a customer engagement platform offering—and a survival strategy for

itself.

Conclusion

Commercially-developed WCMS software is still a viable business, but in recent years

companies have begun migrating in greater numbers away from their commercially-

developed websites and onto open source blogging-style platforms. WCM providers who

can function as more than mere site-builders not only improve their odds of survival, but

also give their customers the best opportunity to execute an integrated digital marketing

strategy. By incorporating features such as SEO, on-site social engagement, e-marketing

and campaign management tools, web analytics, and on-the-fly personalization—the latter



to present the optimal pages and in-page content to each visitor, to enhance

conversions—they transcend mere ‘WCMS’ to deliver what every organization needs

today: a customer engagement system.

Frost & Sullivan appreciates the fact that one of the most transcendent providers is

Sitecore, whose WCMS supports and manages more than 32,000 sites. Sitecore has now

added a digital marketing system to its product portfolio, and combining the DMS with its

existing WCMS has yielded a full-blown Customer Engagement Platform. This platform

checks every box when it comes to Stratecast’s list of both required and recommended

WCMS elements, and Frost & Sullivan particularly likes features that address today’s

hottest areas, such as community & social media, SEO, experience analytics and real-time

personalization.

Sitecore’s Customer Engagement Platform (CEP):

• Makes it possible to build, operate and maintain websites without requiring technical

knowledge of HTML code to do so. Busy webmasters now get the help they need

without that help necessarily having to come from programmers. Companies can

share the workload and eliminate the old webmaster-as-bottleneck model by

engaging employees outside the web team to contribute and publish content.

• Restricts how much impact these eager new contributors can have on the external

site, while providing an “expert layer” of functionality above what other users can

access. This functionality includes application programming interfaces (APIs)

whereby webmasters can enhance the WCMS with customized capabilities and

functionality.

• Offers what Frost & Sullivan considers WCMS “must-haves,” including Content

Management and Editing, Security, Collaboration and Workflow, Templates and

Forms, Content Syndication, Extensibility, and Mobile Sites/Front Ends.

• Offers a broad range of analytics-driven, online presence-enhancing capabilities

including Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Visitor Customization/Personalization,

On-site Social Engagement, E-marketing and Online Analytics (both Site and Social).

• Offers digital marketing functionality including Engagement Automation, Engagement

Analytics and Sales Intelligence.

Bringing such a broad product portfolio to market also means Sitecore faces a wider array

of competitors. Yet Sitecore enters the fray from a superior position of strength, with a

truly global customer base to which it can upsell its newer offerings, and it is already

moving in the direction of growth. Based on the aforementioned factors as benchmarked

through Frost & Sullivan competitive analysis, Sitecore is the recipient of the 2012 Frost &

Sullivan Global Technology Innovation Award.



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