BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Website Management Platform Pantheon Focuses On The Agency Opportunity

This article is more than 9 years old.

Pantheon is a vendor that offers a specialized platform for the hosting of websites - in particular Drupal and WordPress-hosted websites. While it's not a huge thing for a website creator to set up their own infrastructure, doing so in a way that aligns with the workflows that designers and site creators use is more difficult.

To this end Pantheon has built two things - firstly a highly scalable hosting platform that guarantees reliability and performance. But alongside the automated infrastructure, Pantheon has built a platform that mimics the workflow that website developers use - with specific processes around development, testing and deployment, Pantheon enabled designers to follow a robust and consistent process across the full life-cycle of the sites they create.

Since its inception, Pantheon has enjoyed good uptake selling through design agencies. Co-founder Zack Rosen claims that .1% of the world's websites run on Pantheon - that may be a small percentage, but it still amounts to a huge number.

Pantheon is looking to extend that number with the announcement of an agency-specific offering today. According to Rosen, around 2/3 of their business comes through agencies. The growth of this part of Pantheon's business, alongside the macro growth of websites generally (websites are estimated to be a $130 billion per year industry, and growing) makes the agency opportunity an increasingly attractive one. There are a massive number of agencies out there - from the big multi-nationals like Razorfish, Publicis and Omnicon down to smaller Mom and Pop shops. Small shops can't afford to have development resource on staff whereas larger shops need to fund an entire development resource - regardless of the fact that it's not really their core business.

And there are a lot of agencies out there - Pantheon estimates over 100,000 globally. These agencies employ over a million designers and developers and have driven WordPress and Drupal to a position where they jointly claim over 60% market share for all CMS-powered websites.

In Rosen's mind, agencies are hired to do the creative and strategic work. The further down into hosting that an agency goes, the more the eyes of their clients glaze over. This is where Pantheon comes in - the aim of the company is to offer agencies everything that sits underneath their design and strategic work - in other words a platform that performs the totality of the development, testing, version control and deployment life-cycle and which is both flexible and robust.

In terms of differentiation from other website hosting platforms, Pantheon points to its dashboard which runs the entire development and deployment process. Rosen's perspective is that regular hosting services generally give an agency SSH access to the infrastructure - on top of the agencies needs full workflow management, permissioning and a consistent dev/staging/test platform - that's exactly what Pantheon is offering.

Of course if Pantheon truly embraces the agency workflow, it would be nice to see their tool integrated by the other tools agencies use - their billing system, the communication tool they use, their design tools etc. Pantheon isn't there yet, but I suspect work of this type is occurring as I type.

 

Follow me on TwitterCheck out my website