Since the Philadelphia 2009 conference, SilverStripe managed to make it into the the second annual 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report published by CMS Wire with water & stone, an APAC-based interactive agency. While market share numbers are very difficult to track in this industry, the report consisted of 20 of the most significant open source systems. Across several charts, SilverStripe scored somewhat similar to eZ Publish and Umbraco in terms of rate of adoption and brand strength.

As a corporate-backed product based on PHP, SilverStripe might be most easily compared to eZ. With 40 employees today (roughly 30 a year ago), SilverStripe remains around half as big as eZ in terms of head count.

So, why did the DNC choose SilverStripe? You can read the background on the seemingly unlikely selection of an open source package from New Zealand in a posting on Why the 2008 Democratic National Convention used SilverStripe. A great win for SilverStripe surely, but from my perspective, I could not find any unique reasons that could not have lead to the selection of competing open source packages.

SilverStripe was recognized at the 2009 New Zealand Internet Industry Awards. Is this a project you need to take serious beyond the Kiwi shores?

Now 12 months later, EPiServer has announced its intention to go public and the US operation has grown to a team of almost 10 employees, signed up 30+ partners and several customers.  EPiServer now confidently and in true American style claims to be “the world’s fastest growing WCM vendor”. From the buyer’s perspective this statement is impossible to validate, but the growth for EPiServer, in particular in the US, is very visible.

Competing with EPiServer in the crowded US marketplace for .NET content management systems are other European vendors such as Kentico, Sitecore, Telerik, Tridion (SDL) and open source Umbraco. Among the US-vendors Ektron is one of the main players in the space.

For prospective CMS buyers, my advice is that both a local vendor team and experienced local partners are really important. At the moment far from all 30+ US partners have got strong EPiServer project experience under their belts, although this might change rapidly.

Equally important is a local community of customers. EPiServer has been serious about building their community for several years and has almost 10,000 registered members on their EPiServer world.  Even though the US based community is growing fast, and everything you need is available in English, the vast majority of the community members are still European.

You can meet EPiServer at our conference in Philadelphia and learn more about their US growth plans.

The integration between WCM and portals has been a source of frustration for many customers. Vendors have not been good at telling customers where the integration did have some shortcomings. This has been costly for some organizations as they have been forced to reconsider basic features such as preview and navigation which have a tendency to fall in the gap somewhere between the two systems

CMS Wire recently ran a popular article on 5 Things to Consider when Integrating your Content Management System and Portal, which covered different technology options for integration. The article caused Hippo Chief Technology Officer Arje Cahn to comment that “integrating Portal and CMS is more than just adding a ‘content portlet’.”

In his view content is not simply another application running inside a portlet. as content behaves very differently from legacy applications. To give an example: users expect content to be reused across different sections in a portal, wherever that makes sense.

Hippo is originally from the Netherlands, but also has a strong US-base, which includes David Sean Taylor who has been very active with portal projects at the Apache Software Foundation.

You can meet Arje Cahn with a fellow Hippo colleague at our conference in Philadelphia and discus their take on portals and how to make projects happen. Hippo will also be a part of our Web Idol competition, where you will have the opportunity of experiencing a demo of the product side-by-side with other vendors.

Telerik supplies ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight, WinForms and WPF controls and components, as well as .NET Reporting, .NET ORM , .NET CMS, Code Analysis, TFS and Web Application Testing tools. Building on its expertise in interface development and Microsoft technologies, Telerik helps customers build rich applications with strong responsiveness and interactivity.

Talk to Telerik about their offering at this year’s J. Boye Conferences. We are very happy to welcome this new partner onboard!

23 also gives delegates and vendors the chance to borrow a camera and produce their own conference video. All conference attendees thus have of leaving their own visual mark on Philadelphia 10.

23 offers a visual sharing tool for personal and organisational use. Their products are used by individuals, groups, businesses and institutions in more than 200 countries across the globe on a daily basis.

The party is for all attendees: delegates, speakers, sponsors; everyone, and offers a unique opportunity for networking in a relaxed and informal atmosphere. The main conference dinner at the last Philadelphia conference was hosted onboard the famous 105 year old ship, Moshulu at Penn’s Landing.

We have not yet decided on the venue for our 2010 conference party and are open to hear your ideas.

Beyond their standards focus, Day is mostly a Web Content Management vendor, also known for their standards-based repository.  The Day delegation visiting Philadelphia will count Chief Marketing Officer Kevin Cochrane, who is among the very few CMS stars famous enough to be mentioned on CMS Watch when he changed to Day from competing WCM vendor Interwoven in late 2008. Kevin has promised that you will also be able to meet him at our popular social events.

In the crowded open source marketplace, the clear differentiator for Umbraco is that it is based on Microsoft’s .NET-platform, where most others are based on PHP, Python or Java.

Join us in Philadelphia to find out whether Umbraco will eventually rule the CMS world?