On July 1^st, Sitecore announced changes to their North American pricing. More than just the dollars and cents, the new pricing provides insight into Sitecore’s trajectory and strategy in the Web Content Management (WCM) software space and as a broader software company.

• No More Free Lunch: Sitecore has been bundling its Online Marketing Suite (OMS) product with its core WCM product since OMS was first launched. This made sense at first: Sitecore was jumping into a whole new category of online analytics with an innovative new product and needed time to grow adoption and receive low-risk market feedback. But now that the product has matured and been proven with many successful deployments, Sitecore has re-launched the product as Digital Marketing System (DMS) and begun to charge for the software license separately. The list price is just a bit more than 1/3^rd of the base price for the WCM product, so Sitecore DMS can still add considerable value at a reasonable price for the right companies.  Sitecore has even sweetened the deal by bundling its E-mail Campaign Manager (ECM) product functionality into the DMS.
• Moving Up in the World: Sitecore has long been a value buy: great functionality at a very reasonable price. But as licenses for WCM have increased across the board, Sitecore’s lower relative price point has sometimes had the inadvertent effect of signaling a lower quality or capability versus its higher-priced competition. Sitecore wanted to be judged fairly on its feature set and keep up with rising prices across the WCM category, so it raised the price of its WCM product about 15%.

The bottom line to these changes is that Sitecore’s price is still a bargain compared to the most expensive products on the market, but the gap has narrowed. The price changes bring Sitecore more in line with other sophisticated WCM products and signals that Sitecore likely plans to compete more regularly at the top-end of the market.

Bonus Update: As I was writing this blog post, Sitecore has made another announcement worth mentioning. Sitecore is launching its App Center, an online marketplace for third-party applications that bolt into Sitecore’s products.  The App Center is included in all Sitecore installations.