I’ve just released an article titled: Does your CMS vendor have product expertise?

Following on from that, I would argue that this is now the “ante” for CMS vendor to stay in the game, and will be one of the major differentiating factors in terms of who survives, and who doesn’t.

To expand on that…

Even the big international vendors started from humble roots, and still go through periods of “growing pain” whey they have difficulty supporting their ever-expanding client base. Some vendors have also gained quite a reputation for the difficulty in migrating from one product version to the next.

Alongside these established vendors, new CMS vendors are constantly entering the market. (In Australia alone, there are 140+ vendors, 120 of which are local to the region.) Some of these vendors have excellent products, having had the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of others.

For all these vendors, however, the challenge is in migrating their business away from custom development to “product management”. Those that cannot do that will ultimately fail.

(As outlined in the article, I include managing upgrades, code versioning, revision testing, support plans, etc in “product management”.)

For new vendors, I would also argue that if they don’t have a concrete plan (and the resources) to put in place the necessary product management from the outset, they shouldn’t even bother launching.

In some ways, maybe this even relates to open source vendors, where the community must play the role of managing the “product” instead of the vendor.

So, what do you think?
Does this match your experiences (good and bad) with vendors?