Automattic, with its WordPress VIP platform, was recently named as a leader in the report IDC MarketScape: Content Management Systems for Persuasive Digital Experiences, (Doc# US47412821), September 2021.

Findings from the report

There are many content management solutions available in the market today. Determining which is right for you can be daunting. Reports like the IDC MarketScape are a great resource for considering key needs and trends in content management and digital experiences. They help guide evaluations and provide a strong vendor assessment tool. 

This latest report provides a clear framework for comparing each vendor’s product and service offerings, capabilities and strategies, and current and future market success factors. 

Highlights from the report include:

•  Customer satisfaction: “Customers and partners interviewed for this evaluation rated Automattic highly for customer satisfaction and delivery.”
  
• Strong authoring environment: “Automattic recently added the Gutenberg block editor that allows multiple teams to create, edit, and publish content. The editor also supports changing the shapes and preview of reusable blocks.”
  
• Empowering developers: “Automattic offers an integrated GitHub code base for continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) practices. Automattic deploys with a command-line interface and a dashboard for managing sites and versions.”
  
• Content analytics: The IDC MarketScape listed Automattic’s recent acquisition of Parse.ly as a strength: “Automattic acquired Parse.ly for content analytics at the atomic level while also adding AI auto-tagging and classification of content.”

The IDC MarketScape noted: “Consider Automattic when seeking an open-source solution or a system that has a broad ecosystem of community plug-ins for the technical team and an easy-to-use content editor for the business team.”

The increasing role of content

More than ever, content sits at the core of marketing. To be successful in today’s hyper-competitive market, marketing teams need to produce content faster, produce more content targeted at an increasingly diverse audience, and continuously measure and optimize their content programs. Demands for content are only picking up speed as the world continues to shift from the physical to the digital.

As Mallory Russell, Head of Content at Square, explains it: “Businesses can’t operate the way that they used to. Everything has to be content.” IDC, too, has seen these trends. In the IDC MarketScape report it was noted that “content is the core to reimagining what it means to exist within the digital economy.” We agree.

WordPress VIP delivers an agile content platform that is flexible, easy to use, highly scalable, and secure. It empowers your whole organization to build content faster and improve their performance. As the IDC MarketScape noted: “Owing to its heritage in the digital publishing industry where quick delivery of breaking news is essential, WordPress VIP tools are designed to help teams with content at the core of their marketing practice.”

Flexibility and openness 

The needs of digital teams have changed. The days of rigid, single vendor, and one-size-fits-all approaches are long past. To build great digital experiences, organizations need their CMS to flexibly integrate with a variety of marketing tools. 

Built on one of the most ubiquitous technologies available—WordPress—WordPress VIP provides access to thousands of plugins, themes and templates. However, these can be daunting to navigate. As the IDC MarketScape stated: “Native WordPress has thousands of plug-ins that are difficult to navigate and potentially open to security risk. Automattic verifies and supports select connectors either in partnership with trusted technology partners or at customer request but does not organize these as a marketplace.” 

WordPress VIP works to ensure every piece of your environment is robust, secure, performant, and easy to use without sacrificing flexibility. 

Increasingly, organizations want flexibility in their overall digital experience architecture. Many are embracing headless or decoupled architectures. While not ideal for everyone, the IDC MarketScape noted “headless CMS, is a good fit for organizations that need a fully customized front-end delivery and have strong development skills in place.” That’s why we recently announced several enhancements to our headless offerings. The IDC MarketScape noted these as a strength of the company: “Automattic will deploy a Node.js instance and set up a GitHub option upon request with a reference implementation for Next.js to preview content in the headless environment.”

Read the report excerpt

The IDC MarketScape report also covers other key trends such as evolving CMS requirements, content management value streams and the impact of the pandemic on marketing practices and priorities. To guide your own evaluation of CMSes, download a complimentary excerpt.

And if you’re curious and learn why customers and partners interviewed for this evaluation rated Automattic highly for customer satisfaction and delivery, contact us to learn more.