When I originally released DotNetNuke way back in 2002, I must admit that I never could have imagined the impact it would have on the technology landscape. Over the past 8 years, user and developer adoption has made it the leading Web Content Management Platform for the Microsoft stack. With this much adoption, we have recently started to get noticed by the leading industry analyst firms.
It is important to note that the criteria which these firms use to evaluate product offerings is heavily focused on traditional business metrics such as revenue, number of employees, etc... all of which attempt to rate overall maturity of vendors and their products. As a result, even though we have known for a long time that DotNetNuke has had great penetration within enterprise organizations, it was not until we formed a more substantial company and released a commercial product that the analysts considered us worthy of official consideration.
One of the holy grails for independent software vendors is to have a product recognized in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. As a leading analyst firm, Gartner has staked out a reputation of providing highly objective and thorough analysis of enterprise software solutions. Decision makers in large enterprise organizations rely heavily on the information provided by Gartner to make educated technology decisions. Therefore, Gartner recognition is critical to the success of any independent software vendor.
So DotNetNuke has not been included in the Gartner Magic Quadrant ( yet! ) but I am very proud to announce that we have been selected as one of the six vendors included in Gartner’s "Cool Vendors in Content Management, 2010" report. It’s a great honor to have our work recognized!
We completely agree with one of their Key Findings in the report:
- Open source continues to demand respect in content management. Several vendors are emerging that focus on open-source software (OSS), even as they add new twists such as a .NET foundation.
And we also fully support their Recommendation:
- Movement toward cloud hosting and hybrid content architectures is obvious. Understand vendor plans to build extensible architectures that allow third parties to build and deliver content applications as add-ons.
Extensibility has been a fundamental aspect of our architecture since the very beginning and has been absolutely critical to the success of our ecosystem. The next step for us is leveraging this extensibility to an even greater extent to streamline the entire experience of installing DotNetNuke, acquiring extensions, and deploying a live website.
