Interview with Martin Kirov, Executive VP of the Sitefinity Division at Telerik

Hi Martin, thank you for taking time to talk to us. Could you tell us a little bit about your role at Telerik?

I am the Executive VP of the Sitefinity Division at Telerik. My main responsibility is running the Sitefinity business team and making sure our product and services offering are in line with ever-increasing demands of the market. Sitefinity is the fastest-growing product in our portfolio and as a result we are the fastest growing team in the company which makes my job both interesting and challenging.

Could you tell us a few words about Telerik and its products?

Our goal at Telerik is to provide tools and solutions that aid every step of the software development lifecycle, from idea generation to planning, development, testing and delivery. Our tools and products help developers, project managers, QAs and business owners collaborate efficiently and be more productive.

The company was founded in 2002 and is growing with a fast pace. Today Telerik employs close to 400 professionals and has 9 offices worldwide - Boston, Huston, Austin, San Diego, London, Munich, Sydney, Winnipeg and Sofia.

Telerik serves more than 100 000 customers worldwide and has long, long awards list. That's huge! What's behind that success? What's the "secret"?

I can’t say that there’s one secret, but a lot of our products were initially developed to serve an internal need and were then productized. We use all of our products internally and since we are a very demanding organization, what works for us also works for our clients as they face similar challenges. We don’t deliver just software products, we help our clients deliver business results and we are always the first to test and adopt our own products.

Let's focus now on Sitefinity CMS. In short, how would you describe it?

Sitefinity is a modern CMS platform designed to help organizations pursue their online goals. Sitefinity delivers all the tools for a successful web presence - from web content management and collaboration, lead generation and campaign management to e-commerce, all wrapped in a very minimalistic and intuitive interface.

Extensibility and customization options are always discussed when evaluating content management systems. How does Sitefinity stack up in those areas?

Sitefinity was designed to be an extensible CMS platform. All Sitefinity functionality is fully exposed through its API. The API is accessible through .NET classes or RESTful web services. Sitefinity is also fully template driven, enabling developers to customize all aspects of the CMS. In addition, Sitefinity has aligned strongly with standard .NET technologies such as ASP.NET controls, Master Pages, Themes, providers, WCF, WWF, etc. By aligning with familiar .NET technologies, Sitefinity enables .NET developers to be instantly productive.

Who should use Sitefinity?

In short – organizations with a growing web presence. Sitefinity was designed to scale with the growing needs for a web presence of modern organizations. Both our product and licensing can scale efficiently from websites of small business to multinational corporations. Our clients know that they can rely on Sitefinity as their business grows. We have a showcase gallery of more than 2000 websites of companies with different sizes, from different countries and industries to prove that we cater well to organizations of different sizes and needs.

Could you give us some examples of Sitefinity based websites?

Sitefinity powers over 8,000 web solutions worldwide. Major corporations like Coca-Cola, IKEA, Chicco, Dannon, KRAFT, Microsoft Dynamics are among our valued customers. Among the most recent websites running on Sitefinity are Adidas Golf, Appalachian Trail Organization, and Teachers Building Society. For a list with other showcases, you can review: http://www.sitefinity.com/showcases.aspx.

What are the biggest advantages of choosing Sitefinity over other .NET based options, such as DNN, Kentico...?

There are several important factors that are unique about Sitefinity. Telerik was founded on developer productivity tools and we’ve accumulated a decade of experience helping developers get more done. Telerik’s RadControls (AJAX, Silverlight) is a suite of UI controls that enable developers to quickly create rich user interfaces. Telerik’s OpenAccess is an enterprise-class Object Relational Mapper (ORM) for creating an application data layer. These products were used to build Sitefinity and they also come packaged with Sitefinity. Using these tools, developers will be more productive.
At the same time, we are really focused on the end-user experience, as this is what drives internal adoption. The Sitefinity interface is very minimalistic and task-oriented and the rich personalization options of the Sitefinity administration back-end eliminate user frustration and make complex tasks feel simple.

With version 4 came some important improvements in licensing. Could you tell us a bit about the new licensing options?

Based on the extensive feedback we received from Sitefinity customers and partners, we created a licensing model that is flexible and simple in the same time, with the goal of making Sitefinity suitable for projects of any size. There are 5 different license editions- targeted at organizations of all sizes – from a free license for personal, hobby websites to the enterprise license for corporate websites and portals. We follow a transparent licensing model and all Sitefinity licenses are listed on our website with their characteristics and price (http://www.sitefinity.com/purchase/license-comparison.aspx).

What are the limitations of the free license?

The Sitefinity Community edition is suitable for personal hobby websites or blogs. It works for 1 domain, 1 concurrent CMS user, unlimited public users. Since this license is offered for non-commercial websites, the number of sitemap pages is limited to 25 and the number of concurrent items to 250.

Do you offer a trial version of paid licenses?

Yes, we offer a fully functional trial version for every Sitefinity license and everyone is welcome to download a trial or experiment with the hosted trial version and build their own project prototype with the Sitefinity edition that meets their project requirements be it Sitefinity Small Business or Enterprise. The trial versions are fully functional and come with technical support and a dedicated sales and solution consulting to help you make an informed decision.

As search engines started to put more emphasis lately on the website loading time, performance is currently a very hot topic. How does Sitefinity stack up? Complex CMSs often have negative impact on the site speed.

Website loading times have always been of high priority to the Sitefinity team, and we are constantly working to improve the platform. As I mentioned before, we use all our products internally and our websites are very performance demanding. There is a performance test conducted by an independent expert company that specializes in offering solutions for improving website performance. According to their recent analysis “Delivering Performance: How does your content management system score?“ Sitefinity-powered websites loaded much faster than other competitive websites being tested. There was an almost 5-second gap between Sitefinity websites, which scored first and the other websites that took longest to load. The results of the test are available here: http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2010/08/31/cms-performance/

WordPress rules the blogging world. That's a fact. Can I build my website with Sitefinity and use Wordpress for blog section?

Sitefinity includes its own blogs module, which offers full functionality and features needed to run a blog. Still Sitefinity’s open architecture allows for unlimited extensibility and customizations, and you can integrate any third-party module and use it with Sitefinity. Alternatively you can use Sitefinity’s publishing system to consume content from external websites and blogs and publish it on your Sitefinity-powered website.

What support options are available to Sitefinity users?

We realize that our products are used for solving business problems. As such our support is often vital for their success and we’ve turned our technical support into one of our main competitive advantages. Just search for Telerik support and see for yourself. We offer free support even during the trial period and our commercial support is with 24 or 48 hours guaranteed response time, though often it takes less time to respond. We are also planning on introducing a phone support option for our more demanding clients. There is also a large developer community around Sitefinity and we offer a rich collection of training resources including a Software Development Kit, comprehensive videos, samples, add-ons and documentation.

How do you make sure you have satisfied customers?

It’s very simple – we listen to our customers and treat them fairly. As any business, we’ve had our ups and downs and whenever we’ve under delivered we made sure to compensate our clients. I think we’ve given more free products and complimentary renewals than any of our competitors and this is because we do admit when we make a mistake and don’t rest until we make it right. We have one of the highest subscription renewal rates in the industry and that is because of our clients know they can rely on us in good times and in bad.

What are your main plans for future improvements?

We keep a transparent product roadmap and release new versions 3 times per year. The focus of our next release will be the Sitefinity ecommerce module which will include all features needed for creating a successful online store. Details are listed in the product roadmap on our website. Beyond that we are following our vision to deliver a complete solution for web businesses that covers all aspects of collaboration, customer engagement, and measurement and improvement of key business metrics.

Which Sitefinity features make you the most proud?

I’d say the overall usability is our biggest competitive advantage. We deliver an unmatched page creation and editing experience and all our clients love that. Most WCM users do very simple tasks most of the time and making their daily content collaboration and editing experience pleasant goes a long way. We have a unique page layout editor and with the August release we are introducing a unique template builder which allows non-technical users to modify their templates. These may be seemingly small things but a lot of small things make a big difference.

A year and a half ago you launched Sitefinity marketplace. Are you satisfied with the number and quality of contributions?

One of the competitive advantages of Sitefinity is the extensibility of the platform and the ability to create custom widgets and modules. The Sitefinity Marketplace is a proof of that. Currently we have over 100 components and more than 40 publishers who continue to submit different community resources – add-ons, themes and templates.
There are many more Sitefinity components out there and we are working on incentivizing the sharing and commercial offering of more components on the marketplace.

What would be your advice for those choosing CMS solution for a new website? How should they choose which one to use with so many available options?

Choosing a CMS is a long term decision that will make a strategic impact on every organization. There are plenty of Content Management Systems to choose from - ranging in price from free to extremely expensive and the price is not a good sign of whether this is the right system for you. My advice is to clearly differentiate between must haves and nice to haves, come up with your most common user stories and have the vendor demonstrate them. Every vendor claims they do everything, but the question shouldn’t be “can you do X, Y, Z”, it should be “show me how you do X, Y, Z”. Only by going through the experience yourself will you see the difference between the different systems.

What is your view on the Open Source vs. Commercial software debate?

Most open source projects are driven by developers and they are very developer-centric. As mentioned before, usability of the CMS solution for the end-user is a major requirement for adoption and if you ask developers about the most important features of a system, usability will probably not make the top 10. Many of these projects have a budget and with commercial software, customers receive technical support, which often times is the key to the project success and staying within budget.

If you ought to forecast, what is the next Big Thing in the online world?

I think the next big thing will be that more and more of our personal and business resources will be united in the cloud. We use too many tools and devices and it’s starting to turn into a synchronization nightmare. This creates a growing need of a central location with all your resources, personalized for you and accessible from everywhere through different devices. We are working hard on addressing the business side of this challenge for our clients so we have something to offer them before they come asking for it.

What are your points of interest outside Sitefinity? What do you do when you're not hard at work?

As most people I enjoy spending time with my friends. I’m a big fan of both summer and winter holidays and I take every chance I get to go snowboarding or just lie somewhere on a sandy beach. I love playing basketball, but that’s one of my favorite things I don’t find enough time for.

Thank you for talking to us, Martin. Any closing thoughts?

Our journey has been much like a rollercoaster and I just want to thank everyone who stayed for the ride :)

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