Our new Website rankings are rolling out. Here’s what happened when we changed the rules of the game
I just put the finishing touches on our new eBusiness Index report that profiles how CA.com, IBM Software Group, Oracle.com, SAP.com, and SAS.com fared (and compared) during our recent evaluations.
This was a particularly important evaluation since it’s based on our new benchmark that tracks and measures a ton of new requirements, including online communities and the Web 2.0 and social media behaviors that are now industry requirements. To get a gauge on the impact of these revolutions, our 2010 benchmark almost doubled in size — from 726 criteria in 2009 to 1,177 requirements this year.
As always, there’s lots of gems in the numbers.
For starters, IBM’s Software Group zone (www.ibm.com/software) – the perennial competitive leader over the past few years – slipped to third place based on these stiffer requirements. It faces plenty of challenges this year, including getting its search up to industry muster, fixing product marketing and ecommerce usability, and making its services and industry marketing zones more complete & effective.
Although Oracle.com ended up in first place on a technical basis, it’s really in a tie with CA.com. The numbers break down like this: Oracle.com has more ‘stuff’, but CA.com is more usable.
That’s not a real surprise for Oracle.com, which has always been a mega property (and even more mega after acquiring Sun). On an industry-wide basis, Oracle.com’s portfolio of content and resources puts it in fifth place overall. HP.com and the IBM.com mothership both rank #1.
On the other hand, these results are great news for CA.com which continues to have one of the industry’s most effective architectures and B2B click streams. Think of it as yet another example that small but mighty sites can deliver stellar usability results.
This leaves us with the other two enterprise software sites on the eBusiness Index: SAP.com and SAS.com.
SAP.com ranks fourth behind IBM’s Software Group zone. Like IBM SWG, SAP.com’s most important challenges include revamping its search capabilities to meet new requirements, and doing a better industry and services marketing job.
This leaves us with SAS.com, which made its debut on the Index this year. SAS.com is a great example of what you see isn’t necessarily what you get. Our initial review of the site suggested that it was a good candidate for comparison in 2010. 1,100 criteria and 119 usability metrics later, and it’s pretty clear that SAS.com isn’t even playing in the same ballpark as the rest of the sites on the list. We’ll keep them on the Index for the balance of the year, but there will be a new slot to fill in 2011. (If you want to nominate a favorite, send me an email at martygruhn@siteiq.net)
This brings me to one more ‘aha’ from this round of evaluations. As a group, enterprise software sites have some heavy lifting to do in 2010.
- None of these sites have figured out that ‘just the basics’ search capabilities won’t cut it anymore.
- Industry marketing content is a problem across the board (and don’t even get us started about call to action).
- From a services marketing perspective, the only site that got out alive is CA.com – but that’s faint praise since every other site in the group is so bad it’s embarrassing.
I’ll post a link to this new report when it hits the airwaves. Meanwhile, take a peek at the Website Challenges table in this post. The bubbles tell the story.
