In another guest post, Percussion Director of Product Management, Aparna Srinivasan writes about the value of web content management systems, and connecting solutions to business problems.  Read on to get her take on how to consider business drivers in the context of selecting a web content management system. 

Percussion recently held its annual Boston user conference and one of the highlights of the conference was the discussion around the value Percussion Products deliver to its customers –both tangible and intangible. At Percussion, we believe that we must deliver on this value by solving the right business problems for our customers. This blog post focuses on how Percussion products accomplish this.

If I frame the results of the conversation with our customers, the key business drivers are:

• Web Content Management (WCM) should power the users to perform frequent and relevant content updates to the managed websites to achieve the twin goals of increasing traffic and/or conversions. 
• Further, WCM should achieve this with a low Total Cost of Ownership.  

How do we reduce the total cost of ownership and empower users to accomplish their WCM goals? Most WCM vendors in the market can do one or the other, but not necessarily both. In fact, most of these vendors sell capabilities grouped into frameworks which require substantial services effort to perform basic web content management functions. In some cases the ratio exceeds 5 services dollar for every dollar in license.

In contrast, Percussion’s mission is to ‘Productize’ the WCM foundation for the web experience which means:

• When you buy Percussion Products, services are meant to speed deployment by bringing the services ratio closer to 1:1, lowering total upfront cost invested.
• Product upgrades don’t break existing implementations between successive versions, lowering the maintenance and upgrade costs.
• Every capability and feature built utilizes an intuitive and easy to use interface that does not compromise functionality reducing costs associated with inefficiencies.

Percussion CM1 delivers on this Productization promise by delivering drag and drop technology and a tray of widgets and gadgets that any type of user—whether they are a contributor or an admin—is able to use with ease. Every capability and feature is built in such a manner that the complexity involved is eliminated or dramatically reduced. For example: Percussion CM1 lets a user create a blog index page and a default blog page with just 3 clicks using the Blog Wizard. Users can then manage all their blog activities from the Dashboard via the Blog Gadget.

Percussion CM1 also makes certain its users see the forest for the trees with a Dashboard of Gadgets that the users can drag and drop and customize. These gadgets help the user consume data and take action directly by:

• Seeing the big picture–Traffic, Work Status, Comments and Blog activities to name a few.
• Identifying where best to invest time and effort in order to produce content that generates the most return on effort.

Through three key ingredients: Intelligent Dashboard, Widgets, and Gadgets, Percussion CM1 empowers its users to create, compose and deliver meaningful and relevant content frequently. This results in increased traffic and conversion. More importantly, Percussion CM1 does all this for its customers with a significantly low total cost of ownership.

But don’t just take my word for it – Check out our intro video or sign up for a personal demo today.

--Aparna Srinivasan

You are surely asking what is going on with our site? What is up with the crazy drawing style, and why are you putting up a splash page of all things?!!

Well, we didn’t like our web site. We knew it and you knew it. Despite powering some of the most innovative websites out there today, from Autotrader.com to Weather.com to USA.gov, we hadn’t paid much attention to our own site and it was time for a refresh.

And even though we had gotten to the goal line with a brand new, more sophisticated, more elegant, site design, we pulled the plug.

“Wow, really?”.

Yep, really. We threw it in the trash (ok, it’s still sitting on my desk if you want come by and take a look.).

We took a good hard look in the mirror and realized we needed to release our inner web company. Our product approach is different, our mindset is different, and our entire rationale for existing is different than any of our so-called competitors. Why in the world would we want to look like them too?

It was amazingly cathartic to scrap the design direction. We had been under such intense, self-inflicted pressure to get the new design up and out from under the current one that we were starting to make rash decisions.  The designers did a nice job of implementing our requirements, we just had bad requirements.

We had to take a BIG pause, and remember what we are doing, remember how we are working to change the market, and how we are changing the way YOU view web content management. Once we did that, it was amazing how fast the energy started flowing.

We were so happy with the idea, we decided to tell you about it.  In a world of “Webspeed”, why should you wait the 3 months or so it would take us to get something designed and live?  Why not participate in the journey with us? Why not come inside and experience this together?

We know that some of you won’t get it, or are wondering why we should be so open and transparent, or even think we are too clever by half. That’s ok, you can still join us, we promise it will be fun.

In the end, in order to BE different, you have to DO different.

That starts now.

Enjoy!!