Congratulations to the Sitecore team who defended the prestigious Web Idol competition in Aarhus at the J. Boye Conference last week and once again took home the enormous trophy.
Sitecore beat competing CMS vendors e-Spirit, Microsoft and Terminalfour as well as data migration vendor Kapow and video start-up 23.
Just like in 2008, it was a refreshing, funny and well-prepared demo, even though the Sitecore rep managed to say “CMS system” at least once. The demo focused on a non-sexy sign-up form with a complex captcha and finished up with an example of behavioural targeting.
Sitecore entered the Web Idol competiton for the first time in 2006, but were beaten by Norwegian open source vendor eZ Systems. However, they returned in 2008 to claim victory for the first time. Sitecore decided not to defend their title at our Philadelphia conference earlier this year, where eZ Systems won again.Perhaps the 2 winners will manage to meet at Web Idol 2010 for the ultimate showdown?
You can watch the full 7 minute winning demo, including the comments from the 3 judges:
Among the comments from the judges (fast forward to end of video), note the comment from Jon Marks, Head of Development at LBi, who liked the fact that the Sitecore representative showed some of the new stuff from Sitecore Online Marketing Suite. My colleague has previously questioned whether the upgrade is worth it, something which was certainly not answered in the 7 minutes.
If you watch the other Web Idol videos you’ll see examples of what vendors like to demonstrate in late 2009, including a Microsoft representative who showed SharePoint using Firefox.
In my view, the Sitecore demo was certainly the most humorous. The audience voted and decided it was also the best demo, and while it might have been better than the other contestants, I did not see much which couldn’t have been shown by most vendors in 1999! This might be a sign that requirements in general have not evolved much, or perhaps that vendors are not all that good at doing sales demonstrations? Either way, I don’t expect vendors to improve much, until buyers become more critical and start asking for more demonstrations and less slides.
Let us know if you have ideas for future Web Idol competitions; which contestants would you like to see? Do you have ideas for improving the format?
Thomas Eldblom November 10th, 2009 11:06
Lets face it, the stuff shown in the presentation says more about the format of the competition than about the products. Therefore your statements about “that requirements in general have not evolved much, or perhaps that vendors are not all that good at doing sales demonstrations?” is not really valid. Sales presentations is rarely about making customers laugh and clap – at least in my company.
Lars Nielsen November 12th, 2009 11:06
Hi Janus,
Thanks for the compliment. And thanks for the conference, – great stuff there.
You see, our goal was to show something that was in reality really advanced behind the scenes, and make it look and behave in a very simple manner. The point that we were really trying to make in our presentation was to show a non-technical person, building out a registration form, selecting sophisticated options, and complex form handling, but done in such a simple way, it looked like something you could have seen in 1999. But really, what was happening behind the scenes was automated usability analysis, and form dropout monitoring, plus some very interesting profiling, creating the registered user in an abstract user repository, and real-time personalization, all within the reach of a the non-technical business user.
Now, I know you see a lot of demo ware in your travels, but this was not that. In fact, what we showed was entirely out of the box. This was out stock web forms for marketers 2.0 feature, stock real-time personalization and profiling, and stock user repository, with pure configuration. We didn’t write one line of code. Now let’s be honest, which vendor in 1999 could have done any of that, between the form building, the automated profiling, the user repository and the dropout and usability reporting (not to forget, the analytics and conversion tracking) and of course the whole zero lines of code to get it working part. Indeed, which vendor other that Sitecore does that even today?