Congrats to Norwegian open-source vendor eZ Systems, on beating the competition and winning the Web Idol competition at the J. Boye Conference in Philadelphia last week. Presented by co-founder and CTO Bård Farstad, the demo looked fairly similar to eZ’s previous wins in 2006 and 2007 at our European conference, but as always it was not the judges or yours truly, but solely the audience vote that decided.
As usual the 6-minute demos gave a very realistic impression of how well vendors demonstrate their own product in front of buyers. One of the vendors showed a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation coupled with and an unusual video from the office, while another vendor tried to role-play their way through the demo.
During the 6 minutes eZ demo the audience saw several updates to a sample site, including the addition of video and a multi-file upload of several photos of the audience. Not enough to impress the judges; Tony Byrne from CMS Watch in particular expressed that he was left a bit dissappointed, while Lou Rosenfeld was not entirely sure who eZ Systems was trying to target.
The list of companies eZ Systems have beaten in the Web Idol competition includes vendors like Ektron, FatWire, Hippo, Mediasurface, Sitecore, Terminalfour and Tridion. Sitecore is the defending champion from our 2008 European conference, but decided not to compete in Philadelphia.
Does this mean that eZ Systems is a good fit for your projects? Not necessarily, but I would say that winning 3 years proves that eZ is capable of showing a very experienced audience something more appealing than their competitors. Do make sure to get a live demonstration before you select your next web platform and don’t be any less critical than our Web Idol judges. Also remember that you are unlikely to get the CTO of your Web CMS vendor to carry out the demo – if you do, probably only for the pre-sales engagement. You are more likely to end up dealing with a local system integrator that might ask for 60 minutes to show what the eZ Systems CTO could convincingly show in 6 minutes.
I hope the Web Idol contestants at our European conference in November will show new demos that can really impress the audience and the critical judges.