Baynote

Forrester published an interesting report this week, called “The Online Customer Engagement Software Ecosystem”.

As the title suggests, Forrester believes that information and knowledge management professionals who deal with public websites need to use a mix of different technologies from an ecosystem of providers – no single platform will meet all of their needs.

According to the report’s authors, Stephen Powers, Matthew Brown and Peter Schmidt, the shaky economy has increased pressure on companies to engage customers more efficiently online. We agree that websites offer unmatchable economies of scale when it comes to interacting with customers, enabling better lead generation, increasing engagement, conversions and customer retention rates.

What the report doesn’t say is that the emergence of the real-time Web has also accelerated the need for technologies that can dynamically personalize the online experience and keep pace with rising consumer expectations for instant gratification. We believe this trend will be an even bigger catalyst for investing in these technologies in the months and years to come.

Forrester sees investments rising too:

“Our most recent data suggests this trend will continue into the next year. Consider that in 2010, 51% of organizations plan content management implementations, more than one-third will implement or upgrade customer relationship management tools, and one in four is planning marketing automation software investments.”

While investments in online customer experience technologies are on the rise, Forrester notes that time-to-market for site changes, campaigns, and customer experiences have suffered. According to their client inquiries, “disjointed technology has become a prime factor behind time-to-market issues and the ability to achieve improved online processes.”

If companies can’t rely exclusively on WCM or enterprise marketing suites to support online customer engagement, then what does the bigger ecosystem look like?

Forrester puts several players, including Baynote, into three categories:

Content management vendors include traditional WCM players like SDL, Tridion, Autonomy as well as ECM vendors that offer the fundamentals, plus interactive delivery.

Enterprise marketing vendors include Alterian, Aprimo, Omniture, and Unica, who mainly support campaign management.

New breed engagement vendors, such as Baynote, Backbase and Kapow Technologies, support next-generation Websites.

According to the report, new breed engagement vendors fill important gaps in the overall ecosystem and will be critical pieces of next-generation, more personalized and adaptive websites in the future. We couldn’t agree more.