What actually lies ahead for EPiServer?

“Acquisitions are usually seen as positive signs for those being acquired. Somehow, this one leaves a strange aftertaste with hints of turbulent times and notes of uncertainty for EPiServer. Customers and prospects in the US market may want to speak (and by “speak” I mean “really question”) to EPi about their future plans in this geography before planning on further investments in this Web CMS vendor.”

From CMSWire: Web CMS Vendor EPiServer Acquired by a Surprising Buyer (Nov 10, 2010)

It has now been a few weeks after the change in ownership for Sweden-based Web CMS vendor EPiServer and the initial critical posting by industry publication CMSWire. Typical for this industry, the news has left many customers, including several of our members, puzzled. EPiServer was bought by a European private equity firm on November 10, but was that really a bad thing?

Here’s our take from conversations with the wider community: While competitors are naturally fast to spin tales of doom, this is actually at worst a  “non-event” for prospects and customers, but may well turn out to be good news.

Since the EPiServer founder sold out to investors with global ambitions back in August 2007, EPiServer has been on a rapid growth path internationally and has successfully managed the transition from founder-led to investor-led. Unlike Danish arch rival Sitecore which went big internationally much earlier, EPiServer actually did not hire their first international employee until 2006 (in Denmark) and did not set foot in the US until early 2009. Today, EPiServer has partners around the world and staff in several European locations as well as a US team with local solution architects, sales, marketing and support. Experienced integration partners may still be few and far between in certain regions, but EPiServer has certainly come a long way since the founder left the company.

Unlike most direct competitors EPiServer has effectively been using venture funding to grow the company and it is highly unlikely that the newest owner, experienced European private equity IK Investment Partners, would have bought the company without being impressed by the management team and without having a detailed plan for continued growth. Replacing family ownership and multiple venture capitalists, this new single owner, positions EPiServer well in terms of preparing for 2011 and beyond in relation to their competitors Alterian, Ektron, Kentico, Sitecore and Telerik. To customers this should mean increased investments in local sales & marketing as well as engineering.

According to LinkedIn, EPiServer has been outgrowing their nearest competitors

As this unfolding story illustrates, it is difficult to conclude what actually lies ahead for EPiServer. As a prospect or customer, our advice remains:

• select implementation partner carefully

• negotiate license and support cost, since modules and bundles can quickly get confusing and expensive 

• talk to the vendor

Next steps

For an in-depth evaluation of EPiServer, I recommend the CMS Vendor Evaluations from Real Story Group.

To learn more about EPiServer or assistance with selecting the right CMS, please contact us for professional services. If you are interested in meeting with other EPiServer customers, consider joining our community or attending one of our industry events.

“As someone who’s gone through an acquisition when Autonomy bought Interwoven, I’ve learned that actions speak louder than words (and press releases) when it comes to trying to understand the future direction of the acquired company. It’s way too early to have any insight into the future of EPIServer, we won’t know much until a year from now. There is one interesting data point on the IK Investments website at http://www.ikinvest.com/templates/Page.aspx?id=2008:

“An important element of IK’s strategy is to acquire companies that are well-positioned in their local markets and to transform them into regional or pan-European market leaders through geographic expansion as well as strategic and operational improvement. IK believes that the successful execution of this strategy requires both an intimate knowledge of local markets as well as a pan-regional reach. ”

It would seem IK doesn’t have a track record in expansion outside of Europe, but then again actions will speak louder than words. To me, the acquisition is another sign that this space is on fire, as we’re seeing high double digit revenue growth from vendors across the board.

-Tom (disclosure, I work at Ektron)”

— Tom Wentworth, November 25th, 2010 0:03

“I would echo Tom’s words having been through the Mediasurface acquisition of Immediacy – which is probably why there has been this growing FUD around the EPiServer announcements.

In general, the CMS community has been ‘socialising’ a lot more in recent years – both online and offline – so the experiences of those who have been at the mercy of the ‘money men’ in these acquisition scenarios and the after-effects of post acquisition directions and decisions have been revealed and discussed far more openly than before.

As an EPiServer customer, I’ve experienced changes in the company over the last year as they’ve been preparing the company for sale that I think have impacted negatively on the ease of doing business with them. I think it has been described well in John Goode’s recent post about the ‘profit imperative’ http://johngoode.com/company-for-sale where milking what you can out of the license model takes precedence over improving user experience.

My real hope for the EPiServer team now is that they don’t start having the types of ‘product management’ meetings with their new owners that happened after the Mediasurface acquisition of Immediacy where all the focus was on maximising license revenue from the existing product and customer base and the long standing pain-points and usability issues in the product set continued to be ignored.

Right now, we have the complete contrast to this approach illustrated by the development and release of Drupal 7 – where the absolute focus of the development community has been on getting the product right which has resulted in delay after delay in it being released. The ‘profit imperative’ means that commercial developers simply can’t operate like that but sadly it also means that these products tend to degrade over time rather than continue to improve at their core.”

— James Hoskins, November 26th, 2010 0:03

Use EPiServer for your website and keep SharePoint behind the firewall

Congrats to DSB, our former monopoly railway company in Denmark, on a recent relaunch of their website at dsb.dk using Swedish CMS vendor EPiServer. DSB seem to have come up with a successful recipe by adopting EPiServer for their public website and keeping SharePoint behind the firewall for knowledge sharing and collaboration. If you take a closer look at the site, please note the harmless URLs. Also, Urchin Software by Google is used for website analytics.

EPiServer opened their office in Denmark early in 2007. This represents a major milestone in terms of establishing local presence. I’ve talked to many customers around Europe who use the same combination of EPiServer and SharePoint. In some organisations they are closely integrated, e.g using EPiServer Connect for SharePoint, while in other organisations the 2 overlapping products simply co-exist. Both products are based on the same underlying technology, but many editors and business users considers EPiServer easier to use and implement, at least for public websites. In general, if you have requirements like accessibility or multiple languages, you’ll probably need an alternative to SharePoint.

EPiServer has grown in recent years, yet it can still be hard to find experienced implementation partners  outside Sweden. I witnessed an extreme case of this last month, in Geneva where I met an English and a Swedish consultancy pitching for the same project and both offering EPiServer. If you don’t mind travel costs, there is always the option to put consultants on the train and have them travel to you.

Finally, it is interesting to note that DSB is still listed as a featured case study on FatWire’s website. FatWire CMS used to be the engine behind the DSB site and the English part of the DSB site is still based on FatWire. If they also migrate the English site, I expect that the link will stop working as it is vendor specific. FatWire no longer has an office in Scandinavia, so perhaps that’s why nobody noticed that they actually migrated the site. This does not reflect particularly well on FatWire and serves as a useful reminder to the rest of us: be careful with where and when your let yourself use as a reference. Successful cases studies are extremely valuable for vendors and this is worth remembering, in particular when you negotiate discounts.

Update Dec 23: DSB is no longer listed as a customer case study on the FatWire site

“Thanks for this blog post – it’s interesting to get a top-level insight into the DSB site.

The only point that I strongly disagree with is at the start of the third paragraph: “EPiServer has grown in recent years, yet it can still be hard to find experienced implementation partners outside Sweden”.

EPiServer now has over 250 partners around the world. There are still some countries where partner support is light but here in the UK there are over 35 partners including my company, Netcel, which is one of four UK companies accredited as an EPiServer Premium Partner. We have developed and now support over 15 EPiServer sites for clients. Other UK partners have similar levels of client engagements.

So although I agree that partner support cannot be found in all European countries, your statement that “it can still be hard to find experienced implementation partners outside Sweden” is factually incorrect.”

— Tim Parfitt, February 3rd, 2009 0:17

Swedish CMS-vendor EPiServer keeps growing – still without setting foot in the US

I’ve been tracking Swedish CMS vendor EPiServer since late 2005. Many milestones later the company has now expanded far outside beyond its home shores, but unlike other ambitious and growing vendors, they have so far resisted the usual European temptation to attempt venturing into the US market. Quite unlike local competitor Sitecore, which have built a very visible presence in the US over the last few years.

In recent news from EPiServer they announced the release of the second edition of EPiServer CMS 5 in early October 2008. CMS 5 R2 has several improvements for editors and also a few more business user reports. Moreover, in October, EPiServer World reached 5,000 registered members, which is quite impressive for a CMS vendor community.

As a Microsoft ASP .NET 3.0-based Web Content Management system, EPiServer CMS seems to have been able to successfully fight off the immense interest in SharePoint 2007, even for public websites. Now 2 years after the release of MOSS 2007, my impression is that even Microsoft has recognised that their portal product has some shortcomings, and until Microsoft significantly improves the product, there is still a large market for website vendors like EPiServer.

Still, if you are considering EPiServer CMS for your projects, I would recommend that you set aside adequate  time to select the right implementation partner, in particular if you are based outside Sweden, where competent help may be harder to find. Some European countries, like Austria and Switzerland, still don’t have any local EPiServer partners according to the listing of partners. If you are in a country without a local EPiServer office, interesting things have sometimes been known to happen when you talk to system integrators that have proposed EPiServer. Some might pull in help from HQ in Sweden, while others may work with another regional office.

Finally, I recommend taking a closer look at the detailed EPiServer evaluation in the Web CMS Report from CMS Watch.