3,200+ Sites Still on Kentico 12 or Older. What’s the Real Story?

Following up on my recent article analyzing thousands of sites potentially running Kentico, I found that there are still more than 3,200 live sites running Kentico 12 or older.

When browsing the Solution Partners section on Kentico.com, it’s clear that many top partners reference hundreds of Kentico websites in their portfolios. However, when you take a closer look, the majority of those projects seem to come from the Kentico 12 (or earlier) era.

Looking even deeper, you’ll also find that some of those sites are no longer running Kentico at all or a portion of them still appear to be running Kentico 12 or even older versions.

I’d be really interested to hear from representatives of those partner companies, or from anyone who has experience with such end clients:

  • What’s the typical story behind clients who moved away from Kentico?

  • And what about clients who still remain on Kentico 12 or older versions?

Of course, there’s probably no single universal explanation, but it would be interesting to see whether any patterns emerge.

Why do some end clients leave the Kentico ecosystem, while others continue running versions that are 5+ years old?

Tags:
Community members Kentico partners

Answers

I'll start!

Licensing has changed considerably since version 11 and 12 were released. In order for Kentico to remain their solution of choice, clients were forced to make a very hard decision and choose between at least the following:

  • give up the paying the fixed 30% maintenance I've been paying for X years and move to the subscription option and stay on an old unsupported version.
  • Migrate to v13 and .net core (major expense) AND have a license fee that has been converted to a subscription that continues to increase every year.
  • move to a new non-Kentico solution and pay for rebuild and possibly licensing fees.

Not only has licensing changed considerably but so has technology. Some large companies are not ready or can't keep up with the changes. Some small companies can't either. But then other companies, small or large, can.

It's all based on who's in the driver's seat. I worked with a company for 12 years and they came to our regular weekly meeting and told me their senior management has decided to move all their web properties to AEM. She had no idea this was even a discussion or that something was needing to change. In fact, we had often talked that Kentico would support their needs across the board.

I had another client after a switch at the marketing director position come to me and say they are moving to Wordpress because that's what the marketing director likes and sees is the future of all web sites.

We had another client that had a huge shift in their development staff. With multiple web properties they decided to not hire Kentico specific developers but to more towards a general stack instead. None of the new devs wanted to deal with asp.net, so this is the reason their site remains on v12 portal engine and they intend to move off. I think you'll see this option be the main option clients use.

Just recently I had to prove to a one of our 10+ year clients that Kentico AND my agency were the right choice for my client. So we evaluated the clients needs, the different solutions available to them and provided suggestions. While Kentico was in the list, it was heavily discussed. Mainly because everyone in the room had experience (good and bad) with it. While others were discussed too, no one, except my agency could speak details about the other solutions. So while the grass may be greener on the other side, this client didn't fall for that and fully invested in us and Kentico.

These examples are all in the last 1-4 years. And every one of them plus the ones not mentioned, were dependent on who was driving the initiative.

To response this discussion, you have to login first.