By Janus Boye
It’s not so long ago that content management systems were something you installed on your own servers and then replatformed every couple of years. At the same time most content teams either struggled to catch up or complained about how the system was holding them back. Either way, content was usually created somewhere other than in the actual CMS.
Today the vendor marketplace is crowded with new options that almost makes the old way of doing CMS look medieval. Innovative tools are driving new ways to communicate, new ways to collaborate and a strengthened focus on content as a strategic asset.
Building on 20 years experience as a CMS vendor, Kentico Kontent aims to address the shortcomings of the old approach by moving to content as a service and enabling increased flexibility in terms of creating your own content stack.
An ambitious and bold dual product strategy
Let’s first take a step back to understand this seemingly seismic change. There are no sane reasons not to take your digital experience to the cloud was my take in 2016 as cloud-first became the de facto standard among most of our members.
It was actually one year earlier in 2015, when Kentico went cloud-first with a new offering called Draft. In their own words Draft was:
“a cloud-based service that provides you with a single space for web content production, where everyone on your team can deliver content that is neatly structured and aligned with your content strategy”
Unlike many other competitors, which simply took their existing CMS and certified it for Azure or AWS, this was an entirely new product from Kentico build from the ground up since the inception as an internal project in 2014. Kentico at the same time kept investing in their traditional CMS with new and improved releases.
In 2016, Kentico Cloud became the umbrella name for the new product line name with Draft a part of it alongside Deliver as a headless CMS and Engage for digital marketing.
Finally, 2 months ago in September 2019, Kentico announced the release of Kentico Kontent. A new brand, intentionally misspelled content with K, but also an improved product and a further focus on serving the content needs of the customers. Content operations isn’t directly mentioned as a term from Kentico, but the focus is similarly on bridging the gap between strategy and delivery and managing content at scale.
Illustration from a Kentico slidedeck showing the target audience for Kontent as those with high DX maturity
Having multiple and somewhat overlapping products, in particular at vendors smaller than the giants like Microsoft and Oracle, is often a source of concern from buyers, partners and analysts. Kentico for their part is transparent about how they are continuing to invest in both product lines and also do a good job of explaining how they cater to different audiences. According to Kentico, the target audience for Kontent are enterprises with high digital experience maturity.
What does Kentico Kontent mean for customers?
The marketplace for headless CMS is already quite crowded, so why another one? A quick look at the G2 listing of headless CMS reveals many known and also lesser known vendors, including several Boye members like Contentful, Contentstack, Craft CMS and Core dna..
According to Adam Judd, from UK-based Kentico partner Discover IT:
“The safe place of a monolithic CMS with the tool-packed box, is making way for an even more complex MarTech landscape jigsaw puzzle. Kentico Kontent has understood this shift from the beginning. The recent additions of well-chosen integrations further confirms its position as the content centre for this new landscape.”
TrueLime is a Dutch-based Kentico partner and according to their Managing Partner Eddy De Ridder, Kentico Kontent addresses a different type of customer compared to the Kentico CMS product. To quote:
“We recommend use Kentico Kontent for customers looking for a tool with a focus on user friendly content creation in an omnichannel environment and a micro services architecture.”
Speaking to Graham Barden, solution architect at another UK-based Kentico partner Positive Technology, he praised the great integration possibilities, good customisation abilities of the CMS editor and the competitive pricing model. To be fair, he also raised the point that the introduction of a new tool comes with a required training investment from agencies and also raised the point that the deprecation of features in the past has left a nervousness over Kentico EMS, the traditional CMS. .
Bart Omlo on stage in Aarhus showing Kontent
As a part of the Small Feature Award at the Boye 19 Aarhus conference, Bart Omlo from Kentico showed the content analyzer as a part of Kentico Kontent. With one click it would analyze the text and the editorial interface to make adjustments afterwards was both modern and intuitive.
Today content management systems carry quite some baggage in many organisations. With Kontent, Kentico clearly appeals to a new buyer where it can offer an energizing and usable approach to collaborating on content. In particular, if you have arrived at a dead-end with your legacy CMS and find the current tools coming up short, you might want to have a look at Kontent.
Is this back to basics for content management?
In the world of fake news, micro-targeting and a general lack of trust, it’s timely to consider content a strategic asset and part of the answer.
We certainly have many members, where they are not seeing a satisfactory return on content. They are clearly investing in content, but a combination of skills shortage, tech pains and also to be blunt a misunderstanding of the customer expectations seems to be holding them back.
When working on this blog post, Bart Omlo asked the question that many organisations seems to have forgotten:
What’s the content you really need to have?
Having had websites for 20+ years, it seems we are finally returning to the basics which remain unsolved. With the arrival of Kentico Kontent, it’s a welcome focus on the editorial experience and trying to address some of the core content management problems using modern technology.
Learn more about Kentico Kontent and the fast moving CMS marketplace
Technology decisions have huge impact and at SFMOMA they selected Kentico Kontent. Read more in our case study: SFMOMA Selected Kentico Kontent To Separate Content From Code.
You can also get out from behind your screen and join our community. Our peer groups, like the CMS Expert group, meet regularly in person to learn, network and ultimately built better solutions.