Gartner's MarketScope for Web Content Management 2008 was published late last month, and it's filled with valuable information and guidance on the industry in general, as well as what vendors to seek out (and which to avoid.)Their impression of the Web Content Management (WCM) marketplace has become more positive over the last year or so, as they indicate the products have matured and much of the disruptive vendor consolidation has settled down. That certainly reduces the risk of taking the time to research and select a product, only to find that they've been gobbled up by another company.

Gartner made its vendor evaluation across seven weighted categories: Product/Service, Customer Experience, Sales Execution/Pricing, Overall Viability, Innovation, Marketing Execution and Geographic Strategy. From this, they determined ratings for each vendor of Strong Positive, Positive, Promising, Caution or Strong Negative. The report looks primarily at Java EE and .Net based solutions, with open-source and free solutions taking a back seat, although they do mention Alfresco and Drupal as strong open-source offerings. So, of the seventeen other vendors discussed who are the winners and losers? Gartner called Ektron's CMS400.NET a "high-quality offering for lower-budget needs," and gave the solution one of the report's two "Strong Positive" ratings. The other "Strong Positive" went to Interwoven, stating "the Interwoven suite is built with business solutions as its primary focus and it should certainly be shortlisted for WCM strategies with demanding requirements in this area."

Solutions from CrownPeak, FatWire, Open Text, Oracle, SDL Tridion, Sitecore and Vignette each received "Positive" ratings, while rated as "Promising" were solutions from Clickability, Day Software, EMC Documentum, EPiServer, Microsoft Sharepoint and Percussion.

No vendor received "Strong Negative" ratings, but two vendors - Mediasurface and IBM's Lotus WCM - landed in the "Caution" category. According to the report, Mediasurface's Caution rating came from "concerns about Mediasurface's core strategy and financials rather than the quality of its product." As for IBM's Lotus Web Content Management (LWCM), its "user interfaces lack the elegance and ease of use commonly found in competing products," but they do add that "LWCM is a solid product offering."

You can download the report for a fee from Gartner, but if you poke around on some of the vendor sites (check their press releases or news sections) you may find a link for a complimentary copy.