Why Are Companies Still Using Legacy CMS Products?

Hey, have you refreshed your MySpace Top 8 recently or jammed out to the latest Oasis single on your Zune? Probably not unless you’re living in a time capsule. Digital experiences and technology trends have radically evolved in the past 20 years. Why then are brands still trapped in the early 2000s when it comes to their content management systems (CMS)? 

OpenText offers sunk costs with no added value 

OpenText is where legacy web content management products go to die. For years, OpenText’s business model has been to acquire legacy CMS products like Vignette, TeamSite, and RedDot and then to let them remain stagnant with no plans to add new features or enhancements. Instead of a future-looking product roadmap, OpenText is fine with letting its CMS offerings idle at a dead end. 

If your company is still using one of these legacy systems like Vignette,TeamSite, or RedDot, you’re paying a software licensing fee for a status quo solution that isn’t pulling its weight. It’s a one-sided relationship where your organization continues to invest more money and time in a system to keep the lights on, but OpenText doesn’t invest in their products or provide any new value back to your organization or your customers.

When web content management (WCM) took off in the 90s, it was mainly viewed as a standalone tactic for businesses to manage documents and components across their main brand website. Back then, content management systems like Vignette and RedDot were viewed as leading platforms where developers structured web content as a series of pages. Basically, they were digital card catalogs. This rigid approach doesn’t match today’s multichannel, experience-driven world.  

The typical customer experience isn’t a one-off interaction on a homepage; it’s a continuous journey. For example, someone may hear about a new type of makeup on Twitter, watch video tutorials of others using the product on YouTube, compare prices of similar items on their smartphone, download a virtual reality app to see how it looks on their skin tone, discuss options in-store with a sales rep — all before even making a purchase. 

Beyond that, brands then need to develop a strategy for nurturing customer trust and loyalty past the point of purchase if they want to stay competitive. This kind of personalized, extendable experience isn’t possible with a legacy CMS like Vignette or TeamSite that can’t integrate with other parts of your martech stack. But what if your CMS could be an advocate for your future innovation rather than a barrier?    

Break free from the OpenText graveyard with a fast, simple migration  

If your company is still using Vignette, it's just a matter of time before you’ll need to switch. The State of Georgia switched from Vignette to Drupal at an estimated cost savings of nearly $5 million over five years. But too often, organizations stay stuck on Vignette or other legacy CMS systems not because they’re receiving any true benefit, but because they’re afraid of change. For large enterprises that have been using an OpenText CMS for a decade to manage their content, they may have thousands of content pieces and data points in their digital ecosystem, and the idea of migrating all of this information onto a new platform seems like an extreme investment of time and developer resources. 

However, making the move to a modern digital experience platform (DXP) doesn’t have to be intimidating. Acquia offers easy-to-use tools, such as Acquia Migrate Re-Platform to make migration quick and painless. This solution helps organizations move their website’s content and data from other content management systems to Drupal 9 up to five times faster than traditional replatforming timelines. And if you’re still on an OpenText solution, you don’t have any more time to waste. 

High-code complexity vs. low-code innovation 

If you’re still using a legacy CMS, your developer and IT teams are forced to continuously maintain a complex, error-prone system every time they want to add new content when they could otherwise focus their attention on projects that would actually contribute to business growth. This idea that devs and IT specialists are the only ones controlling digital experiences is as out of touch as the legacy CMS design itself. Digital transformation spans all sides of an organization. Empowering non-technologists to create and deploy their own digital experiences is critical for a business hoping to stay dynamic and competitive. 

Low-code solutions and content templates allow marketers to shape modern, accessible customer experiences and allow developer teams to distribute the workflow, so they can prioritize long-term innovation. However, legacy CMS systems like Vignette and TeamSite are weighed down by a high-code, difficult-to-navigate interface. Even just making a code update or publishing a landing page becomes an inefficient and burdensome task.

Low-code solutions, such as Acquia Site Studio, give organizations the chance to mobilize all of their teams and live up to their full potential by providing a simpler user experience. Gartner recently forecasted that the global market for low-code development tools would grow 19.6% in 2023 to reach nearly $27 billion. Instead of wasting time on endless maintenance cycles, a digital platform with low-code capabilities boosts productivity and allows marketers and developers to collaborate on creating fully integrated experiences. 

The open, API-first architecture of Acquia’s Digital Experience Platform (DXP) readily embraces all current and future tools. We believe that brands shouldn’t have to settle for the status quo. Built on the open source foundation of Drupal, Acquia’s DXP allows companies the freedom to integrate with any bought or built tool that enters the market. And unlike the monolithic, presentation-specific layout of OpenText content management systems, Drupal and Acquia embrace a composable and flexible content strategy, meaning that experiences can be deployed across multiple channels and formats to meet today’s (and tomorrow’s) customers where they are. 

To learn more about how you can leave OpenText legacy CMS solutions behind, get our data sheet: OpenText to Acquia.