Last week we made a great addition to our offering: The Enterprise Edition as part of our Hippo Enterprise Subscription. One of the great advantages is that we are now able to offer features and benefits that our increasingly demanding (Fortune 100) customers need.

How does this relate to our open source background and commitment? In the past I wrote some long blog posts on open source business models. My take is this. Open source is the robust platform for innovation and quality. The standards based approach that comes with open source benefits everyone: developers, customers, and the community itself. For a community and open source platform to be viable you need an open development approach and this is the reason we have and always will be committed to development in the Apache Software Foundation. Just recently we helped to create a great new lightweight personalization, portal and gadget platform Apache Rave, that now has considerable traction and was mentioned as Open Source Rookie of the year by BlackDuck.

What hasn’t changed either is that we are striving to help our customers to create the best online experiences. We are constantly experimenting, innovating, but also working on tedious invisible core stuff for stability and compatibility. What we see today is that companies are more familiar with open source in general and see it as less risky, which is a good thing! In the conversations we had with our customers they told us they really liked the Hippo CMS platform and wanted additional value on top of our subscription model. This made us think hard about how software development, innovation and open source actually work together.

Open Source is the platform for innovation, not the innovation itself

We think standards. And when there’s no standard yet, we help create them. Just as we are doing now as initiator, together with Adobe/Day, of the upcoming OASIS WEMI standard, about which our CTO Arje Cahn wrote in his blog. But naturally standards lag somewhat behind on innovation, they make the next level of innovation happen. This also holds true for the open source projects implementing those standards. Companies like Google, Amazon, IBM innovate on top of open source and in the same time give back to open source to ensure the platform grows and remains viable. We have reached the point where Hippo CMS is a viable platform for innovation for many companies. The Hippo CMS community edition is suitable for highly demanding web environments and you can be sure it’s in our best interest to keep it that way.

With the Enterprise Edition we can provide our most demanding customers with cutting edge innovation and tools for enterprise deployments. They like that their money buys them extra features, but that at the same time they like that they are not locked in on a closed source platform. Because vendor independence is worth a lot to them and to us. The Hippo CMS community edition is the core of the Enterprise Edition and to their solution, with no code differences. It will always be open source and with the majority of the code firmly embedded in Apache projects and Apache licensed, it is continuously improved by us and other contributors in the Apache community.

From the feedback we are getting, we now struck the right balance in our search for the best of both worlds: the robustness of open source and the advantages of a professional company. I hope you agree.

I’m just back and caught up with all the follow-ups from the Gartner Portals & Collaboration Summit in Los Angeles, where Hippo was proud to be a participant and exhibitor.

One of the things that struck me most about the conference was how closely aligned Gartner and Hippo are about the future of Web content management and the views I expressed in an earlier somewhat controversial post in Emerce (Dutch). One of the themes that kept coming up in the sessions were how organizations of all sizes are making increased investments in an expanded Web content platform in order to affect sales and customer service. This isn’t new of course. But what is new is how expanded this view is.

It’s not just about Web sites any longer. It’s an integrated Web experience across the Web site, mobile platforms, social, email and all of them across multiple languages. And, most importantly, it’s about delivering content that’s contextually relevant to the user no matter what platform, device or language they use to interact with the business.

In short – and contrary to the way most content management systems operate today – it’s about LOSING control over your web pages – and instead managing content in a way that empowers your audience to access it in any way they want.

Let’s look at it from 5 perspectives:

1. Our Strategy Is Now A Content Strategy – Not A Web Site Strategy
   Consumers now expect our digital content in a contextually relevant way – no matter where, when and what device they access it with. It doesn’t matter if it’s a mobile phone, a television a toaster or the bathroom mirror – the consumer now expects content to be available to them whenever and wherever they are. And, businesses are struggling to deliver that content across those channels with their traditional tools. As Endeca revealed in a study conducted earlier this year, businesses have made improving the user experience a priority, but are struggling to solve the technical challenge of which technology will deliver “cohesive user experiences”.

2. Use Context To Deliver Smarter ContentWe now know so much more about the context of a particular request on our Web content. We can know a user’s location, their preferred language, their device and their previous interaction with our content. So, we need to start looking at this context every time we deliver a search result, or our “home page” to that user. How can we start personalizing that content – and delivering a context-aware experience?

3. SEO Is Changing – Long Live Social Relevance
   With the addition of the “+1” - Google has finally recognized the importance of applying social filters on top of search results. This means that organic search and search engine optimization are changing forever. But, beyond what it means to our SEO strategy – it means that we too should be looking at using the social graphs of our users to deliver a more relevant experience. We’ve got to look at our content repository in context with the social graph of our audiences. We have to ask ourselves how can we start to deliver our product catalog, or our online magazine with more relevance to the networks of our audience? Ultimately this will mean greater sales, more page views, and higher loyalty.

4. Can Our Content Platform Help With CRM?
   Context goes beyond just the implicit attributes that bring a visitor to us (e.g. organic search or a banner ad campaign). Context is also “what do we know about this user explicitly” – and namely we should inherently know “is this visitor a previous customer?” Our content management and delivery system needs to integrate with our CRM so that we can begin to use that data to deliver a better experience to that user based on our relationship with them. If they’ve purchased a particular product – hitting them with in-house banner ads for that product makes no sense. It’s wasteful as well as irrelevant. Let’s optimize the customers’ experience based on our relationship with them.

5. Static Web Designs - Let It Go….
   This is a tough one – but we ultimately need to stop trying to guess how people will navigate through our content platforms. If we can empower people and our interfaces to conform to each other – based on their preferences and behavior -- then we will have truly delivered a contextually aware platform. Obviously, this vision is further down the road. But we can ask ourselves today “how easy is it to build and optimize interfaces on our content today?” Can we make our content available through an open and standardized API that allows us (or quite frankly our customers) to assemble interfaces on top of it. Look how Twitter has been able to cultivate an entire ecosystem of applications that sit on top of its content platform. 

   

    We should ask ourselves how we can do something similar.

All of these are areas, I’m proud to say, where Hippo is focused in our product and service development. We really do believe that there’s a new standard for how organizations can empower their audiences to engage with content. It comes from our passion about Open Source and Open Standards. We’ve been empowering our users for more than 10 years.

It was great to see this thinking also coming from the analysts and customers in Los Angeles at the Gartner conference. We’re really excited for the future of Web content.

And, of course we’d like to hear your opinion on it too.