CMS Wire has collaborated with Water & Stone ( a full service digital agency located in Bali, Indonesia specializing in content-oriented websites using Joomla!, Drupal, WordPress or Magento ) for the past couple of years to produce their annual CMS Wire Open Source CMS Market Survey. The survey is intended to measure brand strength and market share of the most popular open source web content management systems and provide consumers with important information relevant to selecting a CMS for their organizations. Last year (2009) was the first year that DotNetNuke was represented in the survey and although we found it to be fairly comprehensive, we did have some concern in regards to the information which was used to drive its conclusions.
For example, although we scored well in market share and brand recognition ( usually in the top 5 alongwith Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla! ) we were categorized as having very poor brand sentiment. Brand sentiment was derived from an on-line survey where 644 respondents had provided feedback to the question of “What is your general feeling about these companies or projects?”. Since most of the respondents were more familiar with LAMP CMS solutions, it should come as no surprise that DotNetNuke received a low score; in fact, it received the lowest score of all the open source CMS systems represented. To further support this result, the survey also noted that DotNetNuke had the lowest ranking of all .NET CMS systems in the Windows Web App Gallery, behind Umbraco, mojoPortal and Kentico. Well, it was not until the fall of 2009 that we actually started directing download traffic to the Windows Web App Gallery and since then we have established ourselves as the clear leader in that channel – pulling far ahead of both the .NET and LAMP offerings available there.
As a final conclusion in the survey, DotNetNuke was identified in a category with two other open source CMS systems titled ”A Closing Window of Opportunity?”. Basically, the survey suggested that we were struggling to maintain market share and concluded that it was due to two critical areas: negative brand sentiment, and evidence of declining interest over time. Negative brand sentiment was derived from the online survey mentioned above and declining interest was based on search trends and downloads. In closing the survey indicated that despite the large amount of marketing and promotional activities which DNN Corp was aiming at the product, interest in the system was continuing to drop and was cause for serious concern.
Needless to say, we were definitely caught off guard by the results of this survey. We spend a lot of time and energy on an ongoing basis measuring the vitality of our ecosystem and we certainly were not seeing the same indicators that were raised in the report. Unfortunately, there is little that can be done to defend yourself in these situations; and because CMS Wire is such a reputable industry organization, we saw the conclusions from this survey show up in other media coverage and research reports as well, which unfortunately did begin to affect our brand reputation. This was not only unfortunate for DNN Corp but also for all of the systems integrators, module developers, value added resellers, web hosting providers, etc… who provide valuable products and services within our ecosystem.
A few weeks ago CMS Wire ( and Water & Stone ) announced that they were running the 2010 edition of their Open Source CMS Market Survey. They posted the link to the online survey which allows general respondents to provide feedback on various open source CMS systems. Since we now know that surveys like these can have tremendous influence on the market,I highly encourage everyone in the DNN community to take a few minutes and complete the questions located at the link below:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/oscms2010
I believe that if our ecosystem demonstrates its commitment to the DotNetNuke product in this years survey, we will receive a substantial improvement in terms of brand sentiment and will earn a rightful place alongside the “big 3” open source CMS systems - Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla! & DotNetNuke!