In May 2009, independent analyst firm CMS Watch found a “third wave” of European Web CMS vendors hitting the North American market. This included Swedish-born EPiServer, having at that time just hired their first and only US-based employee.
Now 12 months later, EPiServer has announced its intention to go public and the US operation has grown to a team of almost 10 employees, signed up 30+ partners and several customers. EPiServer now confidently and in true American style claims to be “the world’s fastest growing WCM vendor”. From the buyer’s perspective this statement is impossible to validate, but the growth for EPiServer, in particular in the US, is very visible.
Competing with EPiServer in the crowded US marketplace for .NET content management systems are other European vendors such as Kentico, Sitecore, Telerik, Tridion (SDL) and open source Umbraco. Among the US-vendors Ektron is one of the main players in the space.
For prospective CMS buyers, my advice is that both a local vendor team and experienced local partners are really important. At the moment far from all 30+ US partners have got strong EPiServer project experience under their belts, although this might change rapidly.
Equally important is a local community of customers. EPiServer has been serious about building their community for several years and has almost 10,000 registered members on their EPiServer world. Even though the US based community is growing fast, and everything you need is available in English, the vast majority of the community members are still European.
You can meet EPiServer at our conference in Philadelphia and learn more about their US growth plans.
Joel Abrahamsson May 2nd, 2010 3:31
Interesting post! Have you got any data on how the other European born CMS’s are doing?
Klaus Brahms May 2nd, 2010 3:31
Don’t you find it a bit problematic, that an independent CMS advisor – which you claim to be – hosts conferences where the sponsored vendors get this kind of publicity? How are we as readers to know the difference between a sponsored advertisement and an critical, independent blog post? Not to mention your customers buying vendor selection advice or reports? At least you are decent enough to write that the whole basis for the post is impossible to validate:-)
Janus Boye May 2nd, 2010 3:31
Thanks for your comment, Klaus. You used a fake e-mail address for your comment, so I’m wondering whether Klaus might be your real name. Perhaps you work for another CMS vendor but prefer not to identify yourself?
At any rate: I have very smart and experienced readers, so I’m confident they can tell the difference between something clearly labeled “conference news” and our regular blog.
Unlike other conferences, we don’t just spit out press releases, but instead attempt to ask critical questions. For each speaker, sponsor and key theme, we aim to dive down and create a posting in advance of the conference. This takes quite some time, but we also learn a lot in the process and this informs the conference conversations.
In addition, and also unlike other conferences, we base our conference program on merit and not sponsor money. This means that we’ll work hard to get the best possible speakers and don’t blindly accept proposals from sponsors. As you might have noticed EPiServer is not even on the conference program.
Don’t be a stranger.
Cheers, Janus
Niels Hartvig May 2nd, 2010 3:31
I actually find this information relevant and objective. Notice a couple of things
1) The question mark in the header. JBoye doesn’t claim that EpiServer *is* the fastest growing
2) There’s nothing hidden in the post that they’re a sponsor – quite the contrary
3) As there *is* buzz around Epi and that they *are* coming to Philly10, I would say that it’s relevant information to delegates and anyone interested in the CMS industry and who wishes to hook up with Epi at Philly.
And as a sponsor (my company Umbraco is sponsoring Philly10) I can verify that the JBoye team doesn’t give in to presure. They’re frustrating hard to rock
Full disclosure. Umbraco is sponsoring Philly10 and I’m on the program as a speaker. However, that was also the case before we signed up as a sponsor.
Petr Palas May 3rd, 2010 3:31
I’d like answer Joel’s question (or was it a challenge?): I don’t have numbers of new clients, sites or sales of EpiServer in the U.S., but for Kentico, I can say we’ve been on the U.S. market for almost 6 years (our first client was actually Gibson Guitars) and we’ve had a U.S. office since the end of 2008. We currently have over 500 registered partners in the United States, out of which 34 are Gold Certified Partners and 48 Certified Partners. It makes 82 experienced partners who passed the certification requirements. There are 24 partners who built 10 or more sites with Kentico CMS (and these are only the sites they can use as a reference!). You can see the list of our U.S. partners at http://www.kentico.com/Partners/Solution-Partners.aspx. We don’t publish financial data, but we’ve been growing our revenues in the U.S. by 100+% consistently since beginning.