The DXP industry is drowning in loosely-defined buzzwords.

Despite being a necessary evil, vendors have to constantly balance between addressing each buzzword (how else are you supposed to get organic Google traffic?) while simultaneously explaining whatever it is that makes their product unique.

Unfortunately, it's no walk in the park for enterprise customers or agency partners, either.

Glass-walled Echo Chambers

I want to welcome you to the arduous task of choosing a CMS or DXP.  

Imagine walking into a large warehouse, filled with 100 glass rooms.

You can see eager teams of people inside each room, vying to get your attention with their marketing speak.  

You stroll around the warehouse, trying to understand which room to visit first.

But they all seem so similar at first glance, and they're all using the same buzzwords to describe themselves, too.

You could enter the first room you see to hear more, but you'd need to visit a large number of rooms to truly get a feel for the landscape. You don't have that kind of time–or patience.

Hm. You better just take that analyst’s advice and call it a day. Right?

Choosing a CMS Shouldn't Be This Hard

There's no doubt that the DXP landscape is expanding. There are more players than ever before, and they're all publishing blog, video, and webinar content to educate and nurture potential customers.

And that's awesome.

But with every vendor holding conversations inside their own echo chambers, it’s a painful process for enterprises and agencies to holistically evaluate the industry. To truly understand which vendor would suit them best.

Leaning on Gartner Quadrants and Forrester Waves to narrow down the search can be useful, but for how long can these massive financial and technical decisions be outsourced in this way?

Enterprises, agencies, and integration-seeking software vendors alike need to know the difference between a Sitecore and a Magnolia and a Crafter CMS. They need to know about the long-term ramifications of selecting certain technologies over other options in the market.

After all, Gartner and Forrester will be the first to admit that their reports are far from comprehensive industry maps. In fact, I’d argue that those reports are, by design, dismissive of genuine niche players and up-and-coming industry disruptors.

That doesn't sound like a smart way to approach technology selection to me.

Agencies aren’t immune to this confusion either. Whenever a new buzzword emerges, or a seemingly substantial paradigm shift occurs in the CMS world, agencies are unsure of their next steps.

As a result, they tread carefully when clients ask for CMS recommendations, erring on the side of caution and away from the cutting edge.

Or, to avoid the whole fiasco altogether, some agencies select a single vendor to anchor themselves to, making their CMS recommendations a generic and thoughtless process in a world where brands are desperately seeking a unique edge over their competition and potential disruptors.  

Let's Break the Glass

This warehouse full of glass-walled echo chambers doesn’t help anybody.

Enterprise customers have more questions, agencies want to broaden their horizons, and vendors have a lot more to say, with nowhere new to say it.

This industry needs to free those siloed conversations, and the discussions we have must dive deeper than those Quadrants and Waves have ever done.

We need to usher in a way for CMS buyers, CMS vendors, and CMS practitioners to discover one another and witness the industry evolve organically and in real-time–not just through the lens of an analyst report.

Well, we couldn't see anybody else doing it, so we're breaking the glass. Join us, won’t you?