Study Shows Marketers Favor Open Source Web Content Management Solutions

By Mini Swamy
TMCnet Contributor

A Forrester Research (News - Alert) study commissioned by Acquia, a company that empowers enterprises with the open source social publishing system Drupal, was conducted to evaluate the adoption of open source Web content management platforms among enterprises that have never leveraged open source.

The study entitled, "Is It Time To Consider Open Source (News - Alert) WCM For Digital Experience?" revealed that open source Web Content Management (WCM) is preferred more by marketers than by their IT counterparts for creating dynamic, multichannel digital experiences, indicating their dissatisfaction with existing content management platforms. So, they are now the ones more aggressively pushing for flexible and open WCM solutions like Drupal.

The study mentions Acquia, which in combination of Drupal's WCM platform, helps marketers easily create amazing digital experiences. The Drupal platform powers millions of websites and applications and is used around the world. Majority of the 160 senior business, marketing and IT decision-makers, who were surveyed from July - August 2012, prefer the 'best-of-breed' approach offered by open source. Additionally, the study noted that while 72 percent of organizations using open source indicated that open source gave them greater flexibility, 58 percent were considering it for their WCM initiatives and 31 percent planned on switching WCM platforms.

The study recommended that while considering switching WCM solutions, organizations need to explore open source as an option, especially Drupal, which figured among the top five WCM solutions.

So what are the benefits that open source WCM give users?

The ability to quickly add new functionality, customize, meet the changing needs of business decision makers, and availability of the developer network all make open source WCM solutions more attractive than the proprietary ones, according to Tom Erickson, CEO at Acquia.

The study noted that organizations that were focused on key business drivers and organizations that made specific plans to engage third-party providers like Acquia, had greater success with open source WCM implementations.

Edited by Amanda Ciccatelli