Breaking Up Is Good To Do: The 'Four S's' Of A Decoupled Web Content Management Architecture

By Vern Imrich, CTO, Percussion Software

The Web and online presence for most businesses today are a "splinternet" of increasingly different mediums and channels (dynamic web sites, social networks, email, mobile, syndicated content, etc.) through which visitors, customers and prospects are hungrily consuming information.

And even as the sheer volume of online content is growing, businesses are challenged with being increasingly proactive, responding nimbly to a variety of competitive and natural threats, and innovating at an accelerated pace.

But despite the quickening pace of new web-based content demands with which businesses are grappling, most Web Content Management (WCM) systems continue to adopt the same coupled architectures as yesterday's static sites. These coupled WCM architectures join the content management system to the web delivery platform at every step in the process and place the entire web visitor load on the WCM application. This results in a "locked in" approach that slows businesses and often results in increased costs.

However, innovative decoupled WCM systems are freeing organizations from these issues and giving them the capabilities to securely and cost effectively keep pace with online business demands. The attributes of what we call the "Four S's" of WCM Decoupling – Scale, Stability, Security and Speed – are essential for companies operating at "web speed" today.