By Janus Boye
The secret is out: Norwegian-based CMS vendor eZ has been reborn as Ibexa. In what’s more than just a rebranding exercise, the company also announced a more substantial shift from their previous content-focused approach to a broader focus on the B2B digital challenge.
It’s quite common in the crowded vendor marketplace that is centered around digital experience platforms to hear about mergers and acquisitions and also new vendors securing substantial funding. Product names also come and go, in particular combined with mergers and acquisitions, but having said that, it’s quite rare to hear about established vendors both changing their name and substantially changing direction.
So what’s behind the brave move and what does it mean to you?
20 years of eZ closing with a strong 2019
Let’s first take a step back to understand what brought eZ to this big decision.
The roots for eZ goes back to eZ Publish, an Open Source CMS in development in Norway since 1999. With a growth journey and some international success, eZ Publish became eZ Platform in 2015 and has since been the main product for the company called eZ Systems.
We’ve followed eZ since 2004 as a part of vendor selection projects and I’ve personally written eZ product evaluations. They’ve also been a long-time member of our peer groups and with regular participation in our Boye conferences.
With ups and downs throughout the years, they’ve successfully established Germany and France as core markets. They’ve also built both an impressive customer list and equally notable partner channel, also with reputable customers and partners in other countries, like the US and Spain.
Clearly they’ve moved beyond their CMS roots to a broader scope with digital experience as their focus for the past years. Earlier this year, they acquired e-commerce tech from Silver Solution, a long-time German-based partner, so that they could better offer e-commerce solutions.
Co-CEO Bertrand Maugain earlier this month announced A New Era for eZ, where he shared that 2019 was the best so far for eZ, including substantial revenue growth, improved operational margin and more new business. The word focus stood clear to me in both the announcement and our recent analyst briefing.
Enter: Ibexa. What does it mean?
In our experience, rebranding, including changing the name, usually has little impact on customers. In our recent analyst briefing, it was mentioned that the product name remains eZ Platform DXP and that’s also what you find on the new Ibexa website. It’s probably a safe prediction, that the eZ name will become a thing of the past in a not too distant future.
It’s a big job changing the name and it does have a short-term impact with the confusion that goes with it and changing all the digital properties, including websites and social media profiles.
The bigger impact is the clear focus on the B2B digital challenges. That's interesting and a wide open competitive landscape. When it comes to the large B2B corporates, there’s many other vendors claiming for their fortunes, but if you look among the usual suspects like Adobe and Sitecore, they don’t have that focus and their tend to use the fame of the well known consumer brands rather than the often lesser known B2B firms.
Some B2Bs are late arrivers to the digital world, but we are also seeing huge investment and innovation among our B2B members. It is these companies which are now being the most impacted by digital transformation. They understand that they must adapt their business by transforming and digitalising their sales and business models in order to address the shift of mindset and behavior of the B2B buyers. Placing the buying experience at the heart of their business is going to be critical. If they don’t discover and diversify new marketing and sales strategies and channels now, they’ll lose market share and become irrelevant.
To be fair, B2B is still quite broad, and much broader than say the Higher Education sector focus for Terminalfour. Still it is more focused than the many general purpose digital experience vendors.
Looking beyond the actual product and features are actually quite important and we always recommend to take a close look at vendor intangibles, like community, documentation and roadmap.
You don’t need to be a marketing expert to notice the disconnect between the name eZ (as in easy) and then the desire to take on large, complex and global organisations and their digital challenges which are not easy to solve. It’s a marketing challenge when you have a name that doesn’t connect with your brand.
With Ibexa it becomes easier to build a brand around that name. While a few might know that Ibex is a wild mountain goat, Ibexa is a new brand that enables the vendor to build a reputation without having to explain the CMS roots and without saying that it’s easy.
Time will tell how far Ibexa will come with these hurdles out of the way, but it’s less friction for sure. We wish them good luck and will be sure to follow closely.
Learn more
If you want to learn more about vendor selection, then our member Deane Barker has a new book out titled: Things You Should Know: 25 Lessons I've Learned About Buying Content Technology and Services. One of the lessons is on the importance of the vendor ecosystem.
On the topic of rebranding, I personally have some experience as J. Boye became Boye & Co in 2018. To say the least, that was also more than a branding exercise. The only other example of a rebrand in the CMS space, that I could find was a bit less substantial than from eZ to Ibexa: In November 2015, the Episerver rebranded itself, changing EPiServer to Episerver, and including the shortened name “Epi”.
You can meet some of the good folks from both Epi and Ibexa at our CMS Expert Group or in the Product Management community.