When large organisations expand beyond the home-market, they often need local help with their web projects. However, local markets can be difficult to understand, so in an effort to help organisations with a presence in Finland, we asked local CMS expert Perttu Tolvanen to provide a brief overview of the current marketplace.
Following the general market trends, the local Web CMS market in Finland has evolved from one with thousands of different home-grown content management systems to a still very competitive market with now only a handful of strong players and a long list of occasional challengers.
Before you go Web CMS shopping in Finland, bear in mind that many of the ‘leading’ international vendors don’t have any real presence in Finland and even bigger players like Oracle or IBM don’t offer much choice, if any, among local integrators. Also, only a small number of projects have been done with heavy-weight systems like Oracle‘s WebCenter Suite or with IBM‘s portal systems and expensive pure-play Web CMS products like FatWire or SDL Tridion are rare in Finland.
There is still a strong presence of in-house agency content management systems
in Finland, but in recent years the SharePoint wave has hit Finland (as is the case in many other countries). Many CIOs are looking at SharePoint from a platform point of view and opting to use SharePoint for web publishing as well. As for intranet, it is actually beginning to be quite rare to hear from a large company that is not using SharePoint.
.NET vs. open source in the Finnish CMS market place
Finland is in general a .NET country with many clients and developers preferring Microsoft products. If SharePoint is not chosen for web publishing then the second choice is usually some other .NET product. This has in particular enabled Swedish-born EPiServer to get a strong position in Finland. Currently EPiServer boasts a list of 22 integrators with competitor Sitecore still seeking a stronger footing.
Open source has also been a significant trend during the last years, also beyond CMS. A few years ago Joomla seemed to be everywhere, but now Drupal has been gaining ground fast and has built an impressive developer base. Also Norwegian-born eZ Publish and New Zealand based SilverStripe are more common. Many smaller websites now use WordPress instead of in-house tools or heavier systems. Also a local player Kotisivukone (internationally known as Moogo) has been pushing the “do-it-yourself-website” system strongly for smaller companies. Finland has also seen some projects done with LifeRay which is still holding a challenger position, similar to Sitecore for .NET.
Recommendation
With the dispersed market smart clients can really get a lot of return for their money. However, quality and price are not aligned, so make sure to carry out a proper vendor evaluation process. There is a huge number of skilled digital design agencies and many small integrators which can build world-class websites. The hard part is finding those top guys from the small design agencies and web-focused technology companies. Another challenge is finding a partner that doesn’t run away right after the project is done.
If you have any input to the Web CMS market in Finland, please leave a comment below.
Learn more
Read about who’s big in the European CMS marketplace.
If you are working with CMS as a big part of your job, then consider joining our CMS Expert groups. CMS and all the related challenges is also a regular topic in many other J. Boye groups for web & intranet professionals.
CMS is also a hot topic on the web content management conference track at J. Boye Philadelphia 12 on May 10.
James Robertson March 2nd, 2011 14:06
Interesting insights! I’m still amazed at how dynamic some local CMS markets are, against the backdrop of a globalised world.
Denmark has dozens of local products, as dozen Sweden. International products have little impact in Norway. There are 140+ products in Australia. And the list goes on…
It just goes to show that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all CMS solution across the globe, let alone within a single country…
Perttu Tolvanen March 14th, 2011 14:06
Thank you for your comment James. It has been interesting to follow the market for the last ten years or so since there hasn’t been that much dramatic changes. Local products are getting better and better and there isin’t that significant benefits for choosing a bigger player. Quite the opposite in many ways since larger products have a very limited integrator network.
SharePoint and EPiServer are pretty much the only commercial products that have gained some market share. Although the SharePoint wave with web CMS projects is not really that significant from a competitor perspective since SharePoint competes so differently than other products. Microsoft isin’t even really selling SharePoint as a Web CMS anymore. They are focusing heavily to intranet features and platform benefits – which of course makes sense. But this also leaves a lot of space for smaller players that are very competitive in terms of features and pricing.
Some experts and clients are even questioning the “CMS paradigm” and pushing more agile/flexible models. Many smaller agencies are using frameworks like Zend and Django to build very impressive sites and power their “CMS-style” systems. Also HammerKit (http://www.hammerkit.com) is a very interesting product that is riding this “custom website building machine” trend.
And then we have the public sector which seems to be playing quite a different game sometimes. Public sector is starting to see the benefits of open source, but unfortunately they are not really understanding those benefits in similar ways. Many are just building another custom CMS on top of some open source system and not really gaining any ecosystem benefits while doing it.
It is interesting to hear that many other countries have similar situations. It really seems that the CMS market is not going to become a static place