Q: When was CrownPeak founded?
CrownPeak was founded on the first day of the new millennium: January 1, 2001.

Q: How big is CrownPeak?
A: Well, that all depends on what you think "big" is.   But right now we have about 50 people working at the company.   CrownPeak is the market leader in Web Content Marketing as a Service. We provide strategic online marketing services such as Web content management, online marketing measurement, web search and web hosting for hundreds of customers and thousands of live web sites.  Our software is publishing millions of documents and pages across the entire range of industries and company sizes. We're pretty proud that we've averaged over 90% growth year-to-year since our founding, and have added at least one major product release in every of our operation. We're also really proud to have a 95+% client retention, year-to-year.

Q: What is CrownPeak’s Mission?
A: It's pretty simple.  CrownPeak enables marketers to create, manage and optimize web content to drive measurable results and maximize the effectiveness of marketing spend.

 Q: What Services does CrownPeak offer?
A: We offer a number of services - but are really focused on helping our clients maximize their marketing effectiveness.  So, the types of services we provide are implementation assistance with technology, strategic services for maximizing search marketing and other content marketing initiatives, training (of course) and ongoing technology support for those customers that want it.   Our product support - which is 24X7X365 - and comes with the technology subscriptions include support for CrownPeak CMS, CrownPeak Search, CrownPeak Community and CrownPeak Hosting. 

Q: Do you provide some sort of a guarantee that our web site and related services will be reliable?
A: Yes.  We provide a Service Level Agreement (SLA) covering each aspect of our services.  It guarantees up time, support levels, disaster recovery procedures and maintenance.

Q: How secure are CrownPeak services and applications?
A: CrownPeak is very secure.  We are providing web site management for mid-sized organizations through the Fortune 1000, to Government agencies, and major publishing companies.  We have a full-time security staff monitoring and managing our systems 24/7/365, and manage all of our applications out of Tier 1 Data Centers. 

Q: Does CrownPeak offer design, content creation, custom development, or consulting services?
A: Yes, as mentioned in one of the previous questions, we do offer some strategic marketing services - and we also offer a number of services through our Summit Certified Agency Partners.   If you'd like, you can review our partners section for more information about the specific services and firms.  Our customers always have the option to work with their own design resources or design firm, or contract with one of our partners.  If our customers work with one of our partner firms, CrownPeak can also manage and bill directly for these services, acting as a single-source provider.

Q: Can I leave CrownPeak if I’m not happy?
A: Yes.  That’s the whole point of a software service.  However, we think you’ll be happy.  We average over 95% customer retention year-to-year.

Q: Can I add new web sites to the CrownPeak services over time?
A: Yes.  You can manage multiple web sites using CrownPeak.  In fact, many of our customers manage both their web sites and intranets using the CrownPeak CMS.  For each new site, CrownPeak will typically add an incremental fee to your services to cover system usage.    Similarly, if you’re using CrownPeak Search, CrownPeak can help you customize it for each new project.  

Q: Does CrownPeak charge for the number of users or hits my site gets?
A: No, under most circumstances.   If you are using CrownPeak Search or CrownPeak Hosting, you will have stated limits on the amount of bandwidth available on a monthly basis.  If you exceed those limits on a consistent basis, we’ll let you know and we can upgrade your account if warranted.    Very few customers have such high levels of traffic, though, so for most customers, this isn’t an issue.

Q: Does CrownPeak offer training?
A: Yes. We're holding training in many cities each month - and that includes end-user training, developer training and other types of classes.  Additional, customized classroom training for Administrators, End-Users or Developers is also available, either onsite, or at our location in Los Angeles, CA.

Q: Does CrownPeak offer Email Campaign Management, Ad Serving, CRM and other services?
A: CrownPeak offers all of the above services as integrated components from our Software Services partners.  In these cases, our clients typically prefer to contract directly with the partner, whether it be ExactTarget, Salesforce.com, etc.

Q: Does CrownPeak offer its applications as installed products?
A: No.  Hosted applications are better managed, better supported, and more cost-effective.  We would have to charge much more for our applications if they were installed, and they wouldn’t come with any support or services.  We are here to do away with installed software applications – not to release new ones.

Q: Does CrownPeak release its software as Open Source?
A: No. We deliver our software as a service. If our clients need any changes to the code to accommodate special requests, we are here to make those changes, which we then support as part of our code base. In our opinion, only organizations with very specialized requirements that necessitate the modification and ownership of source-code should consider acquiring that rather than having the support, cost-effectiveness and reliability of a hosted application.

Q: Are Open Source applications less expensive than Software Services?
A: No.  Many Open Source applications are free, but the cost of implementing and supporting an application is typically 2 to 5 times the cost of the software itself.  So, if the software itself is free, that will save 15% to 25% of the cost of a project.  Software Services tend to be in the range of 50% or greater cost savings, when compared to installed applications, and so are typically less expensive than a custom or installed application – even if there is no application license fee.