Congratulations to the Sitecore team who defended the prestigious Web Idol competition in Aarhus at the J. Boye Conference last week and once again took home the enormous trophy.
Sitecore beat competing CMS vendors e-Spirit, Microsoft and Terminalfour as well as data migration vendor Kapow and video start-up 23.
Just like in 2008, it was a refreshing, funny and well-prepared demo, even though the Sitecore rep managed to say “CMS system” at least once. The demo focused on a non-sexy sign-up form with a complex captcha and finished up with an example of behavioural targeting.
Sitecore entered the Web Idol competiton for the first time in 2006, but were beaten by Norwegian open source vendor eZ Systems. However, they returned in 2008 to claim victory for the first time. Sitecore decided not to defend their title at our Philadelphia conference earlier this year, where eZ Systems won again.Perhaps the 2 winners will manage to meet at Web Idol 2010 for the ultimate showdown?
You can watch the full 7 minute winning demo, including the comments from the 3 judges:
Among the comments from the judges (fast forward to end of video), note the comment from Jon Marks, Head of Development at LBi, who liked the fact that the Sitecore representative showed some of the new stuff from Sitecore Online Marketing Suite. My colleague has previously questioned whether the upgrade is worth it, something which was certainly not answered in the 7 minutes.
If you watch the other Web Idol videos you’ll see examples of what vendors like to demonstrate in late 2009, including a Microsoft representative who showed SharePoint using Firefox.
In my view, the Sitecore demo was certainly the most humorous. The audience voted and decided it was also the best demo, and while it might have been better than the other contestants, I did not see much which couldn’t have been shown by most vendors in 1999! This might be a sign that requirements in general have not evolved much, or perhaps that vendors are not all that good at doing sales demonstrations? Either way, I don’t expect vendors to improve much, until buyers become more critical and start asking for more demonstrations and less slides.
Let us know if you have ideas for future Web Idol competitions; which contestants would you like to see? Do you have ideas for improving the format?
NB: If you want to learn more about Sitecore and exchange experiences with other practitioners you can join our Danish community of Practice group focused on Sitecore.
