This week, Gartner released their "Magic Quadrant" study of the web content management system market.
"This Magic Quadrant will help CIOs, and business and IT leaders that are analyzing their Web strategies to assess whether they have the right WCM offering to support them."
While acknowledging the "increased popularity and traction for open-source offerings," once again Gartner has failed to include any open source CMS's in the report. The reason, Gartner claims, is:
"Open source still accounts for less than 4% of the revenue by which Gartner defines the size of the WCM market. This percentage is growing slowly, based on the inherent licensing models used for the offerings. This year, no vendors offering open-source software (OSS) have reached the revenue threshold for inclusion in our formal analysis."
Later in this article, Gartner clarifies the revenue threshold, stating:
"WCM total software revenue (including new licenses, updates, maintenance and/or subscriptions, SaaS, hosting and technical support) for 2008 must exceed $8 million. The software must be available as a stand-alone product or offering."
The thing is, this is entirely unfair. One of the major advantages of open source software is that licenses are free, as in $0, as in no revenue whatsoever. So basically, Gartner is punishing open source software for this. For the most part, open source software only costs money for maintenance, hosting and technical support. Licenses and updates, which in the CMS world can cost a small fortune, cost nothing at all when using open source software.
In my opinion, vendor revenue is a particularly poor metric for evaluating whether businesses "have the right WCM offering to support them."
What do you think? Anyone from Gartner care to comment? Is vendor revenue a reasonable measure in a software market where there are an abundance of open source solutions?
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