Recently in Rich Internet Applications Category
As the consumption of Web content becomes more highly scrutinized by business managers measuring the effectiveness of corporate information portals and online retailers analyzing conversion rates for their marketing campaigns, the importance of rich media as a fundamental enabler of the ideal user experience has reached the critical point both for enterprises choosing WCM solutions and vendors selling them. Over the past year, companies have begun prioritizing in their selection criteria the ease with which business users can create highly-usable Web sites containing multiple rich content types. Because design agencies are repositories of expertise in site usability, it is not surprising that the market has seen a dramatic rise in their influence on enterprise selection processes. Web design firms now influence 15-20% of all enterprise-wide WCM solution purchases in the U.S. and 25-30% in Europe (including systems integrators with usability domain expertise).
What does this mean for enterprises? First, it means that they can use design agencies as leverage points to ensure that vendors with the most usable solutions win their business. Secondly, it means that WCM solutions themselves are improving rapidly in terms of usability. Software vendors know that no longer can corporate IT departments prioritize low-level feature-functionality over interface design, and therefore enhancements to user interfaces are far outstripping those to extended feature-function lists. Lastly, the increased use of analytics packages to measure the performance of WCM systems against pre-defined goals means that the ROI for these systems is becoming both more quantifiable and – very likely – more positive.
“Web 2.0” is a term that gets bandied about far too often with far too little associated meaning. Essentially, Web 2.0 refers to multi-directional interactivity between one or more humans and one or more Web applications (with their associated back-ends) -- period. The term often pops up in descriptions of any of the following: social computing, blogs, wikis, folksonomies, Web services, RSS feeds, online applications, collaboration, mash-ups and the Web as a platform. Don’t let the diversity of topics given as examples of Web 2.0 distract you from the fact that the key operative term is multi-directional communication. What does this mean for WCM?
For the end user, it means that Web applications such as online banking, which now rely heavily on technologies like Flash and AJAX, provide better customer service by building-in higher levels of interactivity between the user and the data within a browser session and by encouraging more efficient communication between the browser and the host. Whereas before, every user request meant a round-trip to the server, now far more data is sent at once to the browser, often in the form of an object with which the browser can interact. The user then manipulates the data multiple times – transferring funds between accounts, paying a bill, and updating an address, for example – and upon logging out, transactions are sent to the server all at once for processing. Because technologies like Flash and AJAX provide for easier inclusion of rich media in the user interface, the combined effect of these Web 2.0 technologies is reduced development time for programmers, a more satisfying user experience for consumers, server processing efficiency for the host, and bandwidth savings for everyone. Another significant advantage of Web 2.0 technologies for WCM is the tendency to be so highly based on well-defined standards that functional components of Web applications are often interchangeable. When built on Web 2.0 technologies, the “address update” function in the Web banking example above would likely be usable by the bank’s credit card Web application as well. This component swapability is the underlying principle behind enterprise mash-ups, a developer-oriented topic for an upcoming blog entry.
As consumer behavioral patterns across verticals (including retail, media and entertainment, and financial services) increasingly shift toward online channels, Web content must become increasingly monetizable. Factors which improve the monetizability of content relate primarily to rich user experiences, which require Web applications to combine behavioral analytics with the cross-platform, targeted delivery of digital media of all types (audio, video, streaming content, Flash, myriad image types), all available customer data, and content from Web services-based sources (maps, shipping information, weather reports, stock quotes, news). Not only must successful Web applications seamlessly wrap these components together behind the scenes, they must supply an interactive presentation layer that is aesthetically pleasing and easy-to-use. The primacy of the trend toward monetizable content will fuel other trends in the WCM space, among them, the heightened importance of:
* Design agencies as WCM solution providers. Vendors to watch: Blast Radius, Avenue A | Razorfish, Molecular.
* Analytics functionality within the WCM application to support multi-channel marketing campaigns. Vendors to watch: Interwoven, CrownPeak.
* The ability to incorporate rich media at the content creation stage. Vendors to watch: Adobe, ClearStory Systems, EMC/Documentum.
* Support for integrated search and advertising/merchandising. Vendors to watch: Endeca, FAST, Google.
* The emergence of WCM applications as primary brand managers. This is a channel strategy decision and is not vendor-oriented in nature.
