It has been a busy week at US-based CMS vendor Percussion. They’ve released version 6.6 of their CM System (formerly known as Rhythmyx), announced a new vision and relaunched their website. Despite being used by very few in our community of practice, Percussion still remains among the most significant vendors in the market.
Version 6.6 comes almost exactly 2 years after their last product update (version 6.5). New in version 6.6 is the ability for business users to add or move around elements on the site (like widgets or portlets), a simpler publish feature and improved search using the open source Lucene search engine. Considering the 23 months of work, it is hardly an impressive “what’s new list”; it seems like Percussion has been more busy with strategy and organisation than with engineering. According to Percussion the first customer is still to go live with version 6.6, making it rather difficult to find experienced and happy customers to talk to about the new release.
The new vision is quite bold: Percussion state that they will make every customer “The Google of their Space”. I won’t attempt to explain what this entails and unfortunately there is no mentioning or explanation of this on the new website. The most interesting feature on the new website is the user interface elements that business users can move around with version 6.6. As a prospective buyer you wont find details on pricing on the new website and you won’t find any technical product documentation either. There also seems to be very little by the way of community, except for some links to notable blogs, not including this one.
Interestingly, many URL’s from the old site no longer work and Percussion have been busy creating redirects. I am always curious how vendors eat their own dog food, sometimes with mixed success. Percussion uses harmless URL’s on their website, but evidently it still requires work to make all old links work.
Percussion is a privately-held vendor, which does not release any numbers in terms of revenue or profit, unlike other privately-held vendors such as FatWire or Sitecore. According to Percussion they have 65 employees, which clearly indicates their size. If you are excited about all the buzz around Percussion this week, but you or your management would like more details on the financials, I encourage you to talk directly to Percussion; they might just be willing to disclose more details.
