Digital Experience Platforms 2024

DXP
MARKET GUIDE

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table of contents
Introduction.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....................................................... 3
What is A DXP?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....................................................... 3
Core DXP Functionality.. . . . . . . . . . . ....................................................... 4
Key Business Benefits of a DXP. . ....................................................... 5
What Can a DXP Do For You? . . . . ....................................................... 5
Market Overview. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....................................................... 6
History.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....................................................... 8
CMS-Heritage DXPs.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....................................................... 9
Portal-Heritage DXPs.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....................................................... 9
Commerce-Heritage DXPs.. . . . . . . ....................................................... 9
Headless-Heritage DXPs. . . . . . . . . . ...................................................... 10
Vendor Profiles.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....................................................... 11
Acquia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...................................................... 12
Adobe. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...................................................... 18
Bloomreach.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ......................................................25
Contentful.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...................................................... 33
Contentstack.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..................................................... 40
Coremedia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...................................................... 51
Crownpeak.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..................................................... 59
HCLSoftware.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..................................................... 66
Ibexa. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...................................................... 76
Liferay. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..................................................... 85
Optimizely.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..................................................... 94
Sitecore. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..................................................... 101
Uniform. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..................................................... 110
Zesty.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..................................................... 116
Sources. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .................................................... 122
About Us. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .................................................... 123

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Introduction
In 2023, digital customer experience (DCX) continues to be a high priority for many
organizations. The pandemic accentuated the need for digital channels to cover
everything from building brand awareness and loyalty to actual service delivery. And
the impact is lasting — DCX is now a priority focus area and a place where organizations
can establish an edge against their competitors.

The go-to technology for delivering such high-quality customer experiences is the
digital experience platform (DXP). The CMSWire INSIGHTS team has been covering
and analyzing the DXP market for more than 15 years. This market guide is intended
to provide you with a solid foundation for understanding this market, with in-depth
guidance for selecting the right vendor and platform for your unique business
requirements.

With that said, we wish to underscore the importance of the DXP implementation
partner or partners you work with, your internal teams and your overall approach to
organizational agility. We encourage you to tune into these broader conversations on
CMSWire and participate in our CONNECT conferences.

This guide includes not only leading classic DXP providers, but also headless CMS
and DXP solutions, and all offerings in between. Headless and indeed composable
architecture is increasingly an option for digital customer experience teams, particularly
those who want to pursue a best-of-breed approach to their DXP. This is not only
through ‘headless-first’ providers, but now through established DXP providers who are
emphasizing their headless credentials. While it’s open to debate what exactly a DXP is
or isn’t, the fact is that these headless vendors are now part of the DXP space, and we
think marketing teams should consider all their options.

What Is A DXP?
For the purpose of this guide, a DXP is defined as an integrated set of core technologies
whose goal is to support the creation, management, delivery and optimization of
customized digital customer experiences . At the heart of every cohesive DXP is a web
content management (WCM) system or content management system (CMS). In fact,
many of today’s DXPs historically derive from portals and WCM systems.

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While the classic DXP is an existing integrated, monolithic environment, increasingly

the idea of the “composable DXP” — an integrated ecosystem of one or more
solutions that work together cohesively as a whole — is coming into play too.

Core DXP Functionality

• APIs for administration, authoring, interoperability,
decisioning and delivery
• Content authoring, workflow and collaboration
• Content and experience analytics
• Content indexing, metadata and search
• Content modeling and extensible content types
• Content presentation and delivery
• Content security and access control
• Content versioning and change management
• CRM and marketing automation integration
• Customer experience (CX) personalization
• Digital Asset Management (DAM) integration
• E-commerce or e-commerce integration
• Experience design (low-code site or page design)
• Experience personalization
• Experience/site versioning and change management
• Experience testing and optimization
• Forms design, integration and delivery
• Image management and editing
• Multi-lingual support and/or localization integration
• Multi-site, multi-channel, multi-device support
• Platform account and access service
• Platform/back office extensibility
• Social media integration

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Key Business Benefits of A DXP

• Centralize omnichannel content and experience
delivery via integration with other back office,
e-commerce and customer focused systems
• Coalesce content, customer intelligence and
experience delivery from across your organization
• Provide a strategic focal point for customer experience
improvement and customer satisfaction feedback
• Reflect the ontology of your organization via content
types, metadata, experience personalization and
customer journey pathways
• Support new customer acquisition and nurture via
intelligent experience optimization and streamlined
information delivery
• Support rapid prototyping and customer experience
evolution agility

What Can a DXP Do For You?

DXPs are the centerpiece of any serious data-driven, DCX strategy. Prior to engaging in any
level or type of digital transformation or customer-centric business initiative, a DXP needs
serious consideration since it can serve as the hub for delivering a cohesive customer
experience across multiple channels.

DXP integration with the rest of your systems is critical to enable you to leverage valuable
customer data to provide a tailored experience to your customers.

It’s important to note that no vendor is capable of meeting all the needs of every organization.
Admittedly, some of the vendors in this guide do not have all the features in our Core DXP
Functionality list above. Each DXP product has a different footprint, different strengths and
comes from its own unique software legacy.

The best DXP systems serve as a foundational platform, allowing organizations to use that
foundation and extend it by integrating with other internal and external systems.

Since many companies are not prepared to take on a DXP implementation themselves, in many
cases finding a mature and dependable implementation partner becomes absolutely essential
to DXP project success. This is confirmed by research from Gartner, which has previously
reported that 85% of effort and cost in a DXP program will be spent on integration with other
systems. Also, 90% of global organizations will rely on system integrators and partners to
create and execute their DX strategies.

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Market Overview
In 2023, the DXP market appears to be in a relatively healthy state. Even though business
conditions have remained volatile since the pandemic and the start of the war in Ukraine,
there still seems to be a demand for DXPs. SMG’s annual State of the Digital Customer
Experience report indicates that while only 25% of digital executives say they operate a
DXP, a further 42% plan to use a DXP at some stage.

The propensity for marketers to invest in DXPs may also be explained by growing
confidence in the tools. Over the last five years of the State of the Digital Customer
Experience report the proportion of those saying their CX tools are either “satisfactory” or
“working well” has risen from 54% to 75%.

Investors are also seeing great potential and obvious opportunities for growth in the
sector. In 2021 we reported that several of the vendors featured in this guide received
significant levels of investment, a trend that continued in 2022 with Contentstack and
Bloomreach both receiving substantial funding.

This financial injection continues to support product investment, raises marketing and
sales activity, and leads to the acquisition of smaller niche players in the DCX space.
Confidence in the sector will attract more investment and that ultimately means better
platforms, more choice for clients and the creation of better customer experiences.

While acquisition activity has slowed in the past year, providers like CoreMedia are still
active, having recently announced two new acquisitions. Additionally, Adobe’s potential
acquisition of Figma is still waiting on regulatory approval.

Forecasts for longer term growth also paint a rosy picture. According to analysts Grand
View Research, the global DXP sector is forecast to grow at a compound annual growth
rate (CAGR) of 11.9% between 2023 and 2030, and will eventually be worth a staggering
$30.4 billion. Other analysts like Fact.MR predict similar growth patterns, with a 10.2%
CAGR between 2022 and 2032, with the market set to be worth $29.5 billion.

In last year’s guide we reported that many DXP providers were making more noise around
their ability to support headless publishing and the “composable” DXP. This year, the
marketing hype around this has reached a crescendo – every DXP solution (including
those that were previously resolutely monolithic) seems to be repositioning themselves as
a headless, hybrid headless or composable DXP.

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Providers have also continued to actively make individual services across their
platform available as independent, cloud-native products, and invest in the APIs that
can help organizations stitch them together in a best-of-breed ecosystem. Many have
also invested in their marketplace facilities, making it easier for customers to source
connectors and for partners to sell extensions.

The argument is that headless and composable DXPs provide more flexibility in a
highly volatile world, avoids vendor lock-in and supports omnichannel publishing.
While we assume that market testing shows there is some demand, the long-term
commercial viability of the composable model is still not guaranteed.

In our view there is a considerable gap between the implied ease and cost of building
and managing composable architecture and the reality of making it work, which
requires reliance on IT resources and (arguably) investment in an orchestration layer.
However, some providers are investing in low-code interfaces that enable business
users to better manage integrations. This may help make composable architecture
more achievable for some teams.

AI continues to be utilized in the DXP space, powering personalization, optimization

and other features. The release of ChatGPT will undoubtedly prove to be a catalyst for
the development of more AI services. Some DXPs have already introduced the ability
to leverage the OpenAI API within the DXP, bringing the full power of generative AI
and ChatGPT into their solution, and continuing to evolve what a digital experience
platform can offer.

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History
The history of DXP systems begins in the 1990s, with the first generation of content
management platforms that were used in publishing and media organizations at the
advent of the internet and digital technology. About 20 years ago, those CMS platforms
began to evolve into web content management (WCM) systems as companies of all types
began to publish content themselves.

Over time, these WCMs included not only the content creation and management
functionality of a CMS, but have added broader applications including website
management features (layout, menus and navigation), personalization and analytics
capabilities, as well as the ability to easily integrate with the rest of the tech stack
through APIs. WCMs have evolved to deliver content to a wide variety of digital devices
and formats. CMS/WCM vendors needed to keep up with market and customer
demands, and added to their portfolios to expand their capabilities.

After 20 years of development, the WCM market is now in a mature phase and is
evolving into digital experience (DX) management, as WCM systems expanded to
become the modern digital experience management platform (DXP). Even though the
WCM market is at full maturation with some consolidation, there are still a significant
amount of products for consideration. While this growth is in process, WCM systems
continue to be a core technology driver for many companies. Today, with demand from
marketers and customers for a unified CX across all touchpoints, WCMs are expanding
their functionality and integration capabilities producing an omnichannel experience to
customers and employees. With these demands, they are naturally evolving into sDXPs.

The demand for continuous innovation and digital agility has led many organizations to
move past traditional centralized cloud hosting to more mesh applications and service
architecture (MASA), microservices and serverless and containerized architectures. DXP
vendors are also sensing an opportunity and supporting more headless publishing and
composable architecture, to allow customers to weave together best-of-breed DXPs
made of independent, SaaS-based components that work together through API’s. We’re
potentially entering the age of the composable DXP.

One issue organizations face is that it is typically two different people who are buying
a DXP vs. overseeing the CX strategy. This IT and business disconnect can potentially
impact the uptake of DXP systems, as CX decisions are being made in a silo and may
incur overlapping systems.

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DXP Heritage
To provide a framework around where some DXPs started in terms of legacy
solutions, we have categorized DXPs based on the software packages they
traditionally have evolved from.

CMS-Heritage DXPs
These platforms evolved out of more traditional CMS platforms that are designed to
create, manage and publish digital content. They focus on the needs of marketing,
editorial and creative departments. They can collect customer data, but it tends
to be anonymous and generalized. These types of systems perform well in B2C
applications such as retail. Industry leaders in this space will have a variety of
software packages that can be integrated with the core DXP platform to include
functionality like web analytics, user roles and permissions, advertising campaign
support and email campaign support.

Portal-Heritage DXPs
As the name implies, these DXPs evolved out of the customer portal space. Some
DXPs in this class will be focused on the presentation layer, while other more
inclusive systems will include a broader feature set, including content management
capabilities, targeting, mobile support and workflow support. These systems tend
to be strong on integration, which is of benefit to companies undergoing digital
transformation, allowing them to employ reusable modules and services for rapidly
changing strategies and customer needs. Portal DXPs are particularly suited to
nurturing long-term customer relationships post-sale, and helping organizations
understand customer loyalty, retention and renewal.

Commerce-Heritage DXPs
These DXPs are focused on servicing organizations in retail and commerce with
seamless integration with ecommerce capabilities. Base functionality in these systems
include e-commerce product content delivery, inventory management, shopping
cart functionality, payment integration and fulfillment. Many commerce DXPs will also
have content management capabilities related to the management and promotion of
product content.

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Headless-Heritage DXPs
These newer solutions are not necessarily fully-fledged integrated DXPs, but have been
founded as primarily headless-first solutions based around a CMS that is designed to
be decoupled from front-end experiences. Headless-heritage DXPs are cloud-based
with strong API support. (Arguably they are actually CMS-heritage DXPs and have
focused on the CMS experience.) Increasingly, some are offering additional solutions
and services through investment or acquisition, including front-end options to deliver a
hybrid-headless approach.

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Vendor Profiles
To help potential buyers in their selection process,
this guide provides details on a number of leading
DXP vendors. With these profiles you will get a solid
background on each provider, key strengths and
potential weaknesses of the platforms, as well as a
record of recent acquisitions.

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HISTORY
Acquia is a private enterprise SaaS company founded by Dries Buytaert and Jay
Batson in 2007. It is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts with approximately
1,200 employees. Acquia also has offices in the UK, France, Australia and Japan.

It is majority owned by Vista Equity Partners, a US-based investment firm that focuses
on technology companies. Vista bought their controlling stake in Acquia in 2019, then
valuing the company at $1 billion. Before this, Acquia had been through seven rounds
of funding spanning from 2007 to 2015, totalling $173.5 million.

Acquia initially provided support for Drupal and Drupal-related products, with
hosting as a top use case. Media and entertainment companies were among its first
customers. In 2008, Acquia redeveloped their digital stack (still fully based on Drupal)
to provide new tools (like AI) for the automation of the content production lifecycle.
Since then, Acquia has expanded their platform — principally through a number of
targeted acquisitions — to build an open digital experience platform (Acquia Open
DXP) that aims to help enterprises build, operate and optimize websites, apps and
other digital experiences.

ACQUISITIONS
• In 2011, Acquia acquired Cyrve, a provider of Drupal migration services.

• In 2011, Acquia acquired Growing Venture Solutions, a provider of Drupal

security services.

• In 2012, Acquia acquired Mollom, an anti-spam service.

• In 2014, Acquia acquired TruCentric Inc., a personalization platform.

• In 2019, Acquia acquired AgilOne, a CDP platform.

• In 2019, Acquia acquired Mautic, an open marketing automation and

campaign management platform.

• In 2019, Acquia acquired Cohesion, an enterprise-grade, low-code Drupal

website builder.

• In 2021 Acquia acquired Widen, a provider of Digital Asset Management

(DAM) and Product Information Management (PIM) software.

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PRODUCTS
Acquia Open DXP is an integrated platform that consists of a number of solutions,
along with services and APIs to allow organizations to grow their technology stack
with their digital strategy. The platform aims to bring together the content and data
necessary to create digital experiences that are safe, accessible to everyone, and
built on a platform that gives all the freedom to participate and integrate. With Acquia
Open DXP, teams can perform the following actions:

• Launch digital experiences faster using repeatable components and services

• Use workflow tooling and automation to manage and maintain the breadth of
components across all experiences
• Use packaged integrations to enable cross-team collaboration
• Consolidate customer data into a single customer view and activate it
across channels
• Scale customer touchpoints through segmentation and machine learning
• Connect martech solutions for a productive customer journey
• Manage content on multiple channels from a single source
• Apply flexible delivery models

Acquia Open DXP includes the open-source Drupal content management system. The
CMS is positioned to support both marketers and developers, with the former having
access to low-code tools to manage and present content with tools also covering
areas such as structured content (taxonomies, reusable blocks and more), SEO, multi-
language and enterprise search. Developer tools include APIs to support headless
publishing and composable architecture, a CDN, security and more. Some of the tools
are described below.

The Acquia Cloud Platform is a hosted Acquia environment, which is “architected for
maximum Drupal performance.”

Site Studio is a low-code offering that allows marketers to build content through
an editing experience called the Visual Page Builder. Tools include pre-built design
elements, drag-and-drop functionality and pre-built components like surveys and
quizzes. Components that have been populated with content can be saved as entities
and reused across different pages. Layouts can also be saved and reused as part of
a “helper library” when creating pages. You can also provision site studios across all
parts of an organization for setting and enforcing brand guidelines.

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Site Factory enables teams to manage multiple sites; they can easily launch microsites
(B2B or B2C), spin up instances on different stacks, use over 50 pre-built components
for a faster time to market, manage permissions, create custom dashboards and more.

Code Studio is a full-stack Drupal DevOps environment with a set of tools that allow you
to build, test and deploy Drupal sites, and manage the ongoing Continuous Integration
and Delivery (CD/CI) pipeline. Code Studio is based on the GitLab DevOps platform, but
is hosted by Acquia.

Acquia CDP delivers insights, segments, journey mapping, optimization and

personalization based on a foundation of cleansed, deduped and validated data
organized into customer profiles. Specific products within it include a CDP with machine
learning capabilities and an accompanying personalization module built on a no-code
basis.

Campaign Studio is a campaign management module to help marketers manage and

orchestrate multi-channel campaigns. It includes email marketing, contact management,
segmentation and related features, while Campaign Factory allows central teams to
manage multiple instances of Campaign Studio (for example, for larger organizations
with distributed marketing teams).

The Acquia DAM is a rebranding of the Widen DAM, which was acquired in 2021 and
represents an upgrade on the legacy DAM previously available on the platform. Its
features include the management of multiple asset types, custom metadata, faceted
search, a range of workflows, automatic cropping of images, analytics, granular
permissions, integrations and more. The Widen Product Information Management
system has also now been rebranded as Acquia PIM and is tightly integrated with the
DAM system.

Acquia does not offer native commerce solutions, but has integrations with e-commerce
partners, as well as complementary tools such as PIM.

TECHNOLOGIES
Acquia Cloud Platform is based on Drupal, a free and open source web content
management framework written in PHP. Acquia CMS is based on Symfony, the
leading PHP framework. Acquia DAM is based on Java and React.

DEPLOYMENT MODELS
Acquia Cloud Platform is available on a cloud subscription model on a PaaS basis,
with some elements, such as Acquia DAM, available as SaaS. Acquia says that all of its
clients are deployed to the cloud.

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PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS

Stack Integration
Drupal is a free and open-source web content management framework written in
PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. It includes nearly 50,000
modules developed by the Drupal community, as well as dozens of integrations created
by Acquia to products such as Acquia DAM. Acquia’s open platform can support any
framework (React, Angular) for customers to build applications and any API type (REST,
JSON, GraphQL) to integrate with any legacy or homegrown system.

Content & Experience APIs

• Acquia offers full support for GraphQL.
• Customer Data Platform API: A secure REST API to search and find customer data
that accesses the “360-degree profile” of each customer profiled in Acquia’s CDP.
• Cloud Platform API: Extend, enhance and customize the Cloud Platform using a
RESTful API web interface, Drush commands and Cloud Hooks (scripts executed
by defined triggers). It includes over 200 endpoints covering developer workflow,
website management and provisioning capabilities.
• Acquia Edge API (Cloudflare and Akamai): Acquia Edge utilizes Cloudflare and
Akamai for CDN and security capabilities. The Edge API refers customers to the
existing APIs for Cloudflare and Akamai, and is provided by these suppliers.
• Site Factory API: REST API to create and manage your hosted websites and to
obtain the status of jobs in the Site Factory Management Console.
• Content Hub API: A RESTFul API enabling you to create, read, update and delete
content entities in the Content Hub service.
• Acquia DAM API: Allows Acquia’s DAM solution to connect assets and data, making
assets searchable within other tools.
• Personalization APIs: There are a range of Personalization API’s that cover
personalization options. These include:
• Content Hub API (see above)
• Decision API: Set and review administrative functions on how decisions
about content are displayed to users
• File Import API: Import user information from other sources
• JavaScript API: Send more information about users and activities
• Integration API: Enable integration between personalization and other
websites
• Push API: Real-time notifications when users enter selected segments
• Campaign Studio API: A REST API to programmatically create, read, delete
and update different components within Campaign Studio

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Support for Headless

The Drupal CMS can support traditional, hybrid, headless or decoupled applications
depending on the needs of the customer. Acquia supports customers’ Drupal apps and
provides Node.js hosting for additional decoupled application support. Drupal offers full
API support, including GraphQL. It is also positioned to be able to work within a “fully
composable architecture.”

ECOSYSTEM

Clients
Acquia DXP is often deployed in financial services, manufacturing and government
verticals. Clients include Big Lots, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Charles
Schwab, Crayola, Edward D. Jones & Co., J.Crew, NBCUniversal Media, Nestle, Novartis
and PVH Corp.

Partners
Acquia's partner ecosystem consists of 700+ digital agencies, system integrators,
implementers and technology partners. These Solution and Technology Alliance Program
(TAP) partners are organized into Elite, Preferred and Community tiers. They specialize
in Acquia technologies and some have developed tailored solutions for industry sectors
like government, healthcare, higher education, financial services, retail and high-tech.
Notable partners include Bounteous, KPMG, IBMiX, TA Digital, Perficient, Phase2,
Wunderman Thompson, EPAM Systems Inc., Ci&T, Elevated Third and more.

Acquia maintains a Practice Certification Program that acknowledges a partner’s

team as trusted advisors that actively contribute to Acquia’s business strategy,
product development, UX design, integration and professional services. Partners offer
comprehensive solutions across the martech stack, addressing key challenges while
providing accelerated implementations of Acquia technologies.

Notable technology partners include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Commercetools,

RWS, Siteimprove, Yext, Canva, Asana and CI HUB. Acquia is committed to strong
partnerships to empower marketers to leverage an interconnected ecosystem of
composable technologies.

Marketplace
An “integrations hub," Acquia Exchange, launched in Q3 2023, to help users find
connectors developed by Acquia, third-party vendors or the Drupal community.

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Extensions & Contributions

Acquia leverages the global Drupal community and its nearly 50,000 free modules to
connect content to a variety of systems. Acquia customers have used these modules
to connect thousands of different technologies in the content, email, CRM, social and
commerce space, as well as emerging tech (chatbots, wearables, generative AI, etc.).

STRENGTHS
• The Acquia platform is mature, with a comprehensive range of services and features
aimed at both developers and marketing teams.
• The Acquia DXP is purpose-built for integration with open APIs and decoupled
architecture, supporting both headless publishing and composable architecture.
• Acquia is built on Drupal, an open-source solution, which can leverage the vast
resources across the Drupal global community.
• Acquia is a strong choice for organizations already using Drupal.
• The acquisition of Widen has brought more robust DAM capabilities to Acquia, as well
as introducing a new PIM offering, which will support customers with large product
portfolios. These extend existing marketing capabilities such as the CDP.
• Acquia comes with a very wide range of Drupal-based developer tools that help IT
teams to build sites but also manage their environment via a DevOps offering, as well
as migrate (or even re-platform) to Drupal.
• Acquia empowers marketing teams through low-code no-code tools, including the
Site Studio and Site Factory offerings.

CHALLENGES
• Acquia does not offer native commerce functionalities but provides an integration
package for commercetools, ElasticPath, Shopify and Magento.
• Although the Drupal community is wide and active, compared to some other leading
DXPs, Acquia offers fewer deeper integrations with other solutions. However,
an “integrations hub”, Acquia Exchange, launched in Q3 2023, helps users find
connectors developed by Acquia, third-party vendors, or the Drupal community.

TRAJECTORY
Acquia continues to build and acquire functionality (including the recent DAM and PIM
features) that helps take it beyond its roots as a content management platform toward
a true digital experience platform that addresses the needs of experienced designers
and marketers. These moves continue to advance Acquia in the market and position the
company as a full digital experience suite competitor against Adobe, Optimizely, Sitecore
and others. Recent direction includes a focus on AI, including managing AI-generated
content, powering digital experiences at scale and enabling digital experience
composition. An integrations hub was also launched in Q3 2023.

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HISTORY
Adobe Inc. is a public software company founded by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in
1982 in Mountain View, California. It is currently headquartered in San Jose, California. Adobe
currently has around 29,000 employees with $17.6 billion in annual revenue.

Adobe originally helped establish the desktop publishing industry with the development of
the PostScript print language. Throughout the 1990s Adobe began developing and selling
more application software, with Adobe Illustrator being the first introduced in 1987, and Adobe
Photoshop in 1990. In 1991, Adobe acquired video production software Adobe Premiere.
By 1997, close to 80% of Adobe’s revenue came from application sales. In 2005, it acquired
Macromedia and its Dreamweaver software, along with Shockwave and Flash applications.

In the last decade Adobe expanded into the enterprise digital experience space with
acquisitions of analytics provider Omniture in 2009, and web content management software
platform maker Day Software in 2010 for $240 million. The company has also expanded
into commerce and marketing automation with the respective acquisitions of Magento and
Marketo. More recent acquisitions include Workfront to enable marketing collaboration and
workflow, and Frame.Io, a video collaboration platform. The company is currently in talks to
acquire Figma, subject to regulatory approval.

ACQUISITIONS
• In 2009, Adobe acquired the Omniture digital analytics platform.

• In 2010, Adobe acquired Day Software, the foundation of Adobe’s current

DXP offering.

• In 2018, Adobe acquired the Magento commerce platform.

• In 2018, Adobe acquired the Marketo marketing automation platform.

• In 2020, Adobe acquired marketing workflow and collaboration start-up Workfront

for $1.5 billion.

• In 2021, Adobe acquired Frame.io, a video collaboration platform for $1.3 billion.

• In 2022, Adobe announced the intended acquisition of Figma, the online design
and collaboration tool, for around $20 billion. At time of publication this deal is
still being reviewed by EU, UK and US regulators.

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PRODUCTS
Within the Adobe Experience Cloud, there are several products dedicated to
marketing, commerce and customer experience.

Adobe Experience Platform is positioned as an “open system” that helps unite

data from multiple sources to create real-time customer profiles; you can also
perform data analysis and leverage machine learning. On the platform, you can run
many of Adobe's own cloud products, connect non-Adobe products through REST
APIs and create custom applications.

Adobe Analytics is a leading analytics platform used across B2B, B2C and B2E
scenarios. It can cover data across multi-channel environments, covers attribution
analysis of content and campaigns and delivers predictive analytics through an
integration with Adobe’s Sensei AI engine. Adobe Product Analytics is an analytics
offering aimed at product teams, while Adobe Customer Journey Analytics is a
cross-channel analytics solution focused on customer journeys.

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is a content management system (“Sites”)

combined with a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system (“Assets”). There is
also a related Forms capability, as well as an extension to use AEM for digital
signage (AEM Screens). AEM Guides creates and manages product and user
documentation, and other structured content such as knowledge bases.

Adobe Real-Time CDP is a customer data platform (CDP) that allows teams to
collect, normalize and unify data from multiple sources and channels, profiling
customers and delivering insights in real-time. Privacy controls and data
governance are built in. The CDP is designed to meet both B2B and B2C scenarios.

Adobe Marketo Engage is a comprehensive marketing automation and AI platform

covering account-based marketing, predictive analytics, personalization, lead
management, email marketing and more.

Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento) is a multi-channel B2B and B2C

commerce platform covering multiple features including the Page Builder content
management tool, product recommendations, inventory management, reporting
and more. The platform is supported by a partner ecosystem developing thousands
of extensions and themes.

Adobe Campaign is a campaign management platform covering CDP capabilities,

email marketing and workflow management. A newer solution, Adobe Journey
Optimizer is a similar campaign orchestration tool but adds further personalization
and cross-channel capabilities.

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Adobe Workfront is a workflow management and automation platform that allows

organizations to plan, create and automate workflows, introduce forms and more. It
is a result of the 2020 acquisition of Workfront.

Adobe Advertising is a programmatic advertising platform.

Adobe Sensei is Adobe’s AI engine that serves the Experience Cloud, while Adobe
Sensei GenAI is an accompanying generative AI engine that can produce and
improve content.

Adobe Learning Manager (formerly Captivate) supports the creation of learning

content and capabilities that can be integrated into websites and apps.

TECHNOLOGIES
The Adobe Experience Platform is a customer experience management platform
with real-time customer profiles and an open architecture. Features include content
management, analytics, personalization, customer data management (CDP), and
campaign management. The Adobe Experience Cloud is built using RESTful API-
first development with all platform functions, services, adobe solutions and third
party integrations.

For an improved data foundation, Adobe introduced Experience Data Model (XDM),
a standard for representing customer data. Adobe Sensei machine learning offers
predefined models, as well as the capability to develop custom machine learning
models for specific tasks. Audience activation features include services that
work together to enable organizations to build and activate audiences based on
customer profiles containing individual attributes and behaviors.

DEPLOYMENT MODELS
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and on-premise. Some of the individual products
within the Experience Cloud are available on a SaaS basis.

PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS

Stack Integration
Built on RESTful APIs, the Adobe Experience Platform exposes the full functionality
of its system to developers, supporting the integration of enterprise solutions using
familiar tools. Experience Platform also allows partners to build and integrate their own
products and technologies as needed.

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CONTENT & EXPERIENCE APIS

Documented APIs for the Adobe Experience Platform include:

• Access Control API: Access control in the Adobe Experience Platform allows IMS
Organization administration to assign roles and permissions for various
Platform capabilities.

• Audit Query API: Allows for the viewing of audit logs on the Adobe
Experience Platform.

• Batch Ingestion API: Allows you to ingest data into the Adobe Experience Platform
as batch files.

• Catalog Service API: Catalog is the system of record for data location and lineage
within the Adobe Experience Platform, allowing for metadata management for
datasets and batches.

• Data Access API: Data Access facilitates the access and egress of data within
Adobe Experience Platform.

• Data Prep API: Allows you to map, transform and validate data to and from the
Adobe Experience Data Model (XDM).

• Dataset Service API: The Dataset Service API provides several endpoints to help
you manage data usage labels for existing datasets within the Data Lake. Data
usage labels are part of Adobe Experience Platform data governance, which allows
you to manage customer data and ensure compliance with regulations, restrictions
and policies applicable to data use.

• Destination Authoring API (Destination SDK): A suite of configuration APIs that allow
you to configure destination integration patterns for the Experience Platform to
deliver audience and profile data to your endpoint.

• Flow Service API: The Flow Service API is used to collect and centralize customer
data from various disparate sources and to create and activate data to various
destinations within Adobe Experience Platform. The service provides a RESTful API
from which all supported sources are connectable. Adobe lists this as two separate
APIs — one for sources and one for destinations.

• Identity Service API: Adobe Experience Platform Identity Service provides a

RESTful API to help you to gain a better view of your customers and their behavior.

• Observability Insights API: This is used to collect and expose metrics data from
various components of Observability. It listens to events broadcasting on the data
pipeline and collects metrics on resources and statistics on data ingestion.

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• Policy Service API: Adobe Experience Platform data governance simplifies and
streamlines the process of categorizing data and creating data usage policies.

• Privacy Service API: This provides a common, centralized facilitation of access/

delete requests and opt-out-of-sale requests for private data.

• Query Service API: This gives you the ability to use standard SQL to query data on
the Adobe Experience Platform to support many different use cases.

• Reactor API: Manages extensions, rules and other resources related to tags.

• Real-time Customer Profile API: Real-time Customer Profile provides a holistic view
of each individual customer that combines data from multiple channels. The API
allows you to manage merge policies and other Profile-related resources.

• Sandbox API: Adobe Experience Platform provides virtual sandbox environments

which provide isolation and access control for Platform integrations.

• Schema Registry API: This is used to access the Schema Library within Adobe
Experience Platform. The registry provides a user interface and RESTful API from
which all available library resources are accessible.

• Segmentation Service API: This allows you to build and export segments from
your Customer Profile data. It provides RESTful endpoints for managing segment
definitions, exports, schedules and more.

• Sensei Machine Learning API: This API provides the ability to manage engines,
models and other resources related to Data Science Workspace.

• Streaming Ingestion API: Allows you to bring data into the Adobe Experience
Platform through streaming ingestion.

ECOSYSTEM
Clients
Adobe’s clients include some of the world’s leading brands, including IBM, The Coca-
Cola Company, Marriott International, Land Rover, Ben & Jerry’s and Walgreens
Boots Alliance.

Adobe’s primary use case is B2C, but some organizations also use it for certain B2B
purposes. It is also being used for B2E scenarios to deliver intranets, for example.

Generally, Adobe customers tend to be mid-sized to larger enterprises. It may not be

such a good fit for smaller companies with less complex customer experience needs.

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Partners
One of Adobe’s priorities has been developing a rich partner ecosystem to extend the
value of Adobe Experience Cloud. Subsequently, the Adobe ecosystem is very extensive.

There is an extensive global Solution Partner program with over one thousand certified
agencies and systems integrators at Platinum, Gold, Silver or Bronze status. Platinum
partners include Accenture, IBM, Deloitte Digital, Valtech, Merkle, Tata Consultancy
Services, Infosys, WPP (Verticurl), Capgemini, Cognizant, Reply, HCL and Wipro.

The partner community also includes software vendors, data vendors and technology
partners that power a large collection of third-party apps and integrations.

Marketplace
Adobe Exchange lists over 400 apps and integrations from partners. The catalog is
filterable by Adobe product type, type of app, country, delivery method and industry.

Extensions & Contributions

Adobe Experience Platform is built for extensibility. There are also opportunities across
individual products within the Adobe Experience Cloud. For example, Adobe Experience
Manager can now integrate and extend commerce services from Magento and other
commerce solutions through Adobe’s Commerce Integration Framework (CIF). CIF is built
on APIs that aid a storefront authoring experience in Adobe Experience Manager.

STRENGTHS
• Adobe Experience Cloud has a very wide set of features including a baked-in real-
time CDP, analytics, journey orchestration capabilities and personalization. Clients
get access to a broad set of sophisticated customer experience, digital marketing and
content management tools.

• The platform is mature with a very extensive partner network, providing easy access
to expertise and a wide number of integrations.

• AEP caters to the mid-enterprise market to enterprise market, with features to work
across a wide variety of business sizes, industries and applications. However it is not
always suitable for smaller organizations. The interfaces are tailored for a variety of
business and technical user personas/roles, from marketing to developer.

• The Adobe Sensei AI/ML framework gives organizations an evolving intelligence

layer that will allow functionality such as the auto-creation and rendering of single
assets to be used in multiple channels, smart tagging of assets and the smart
cropping of assets.

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• Adobe’s financial strength, high brand recognition and the strong adoption of its
technology means it is well positioned to keep on leading in the B2C customer
experience space.

• Adobe’s mature APIs, SDKs and standards such as the Experience Data Model (XDM)
make it highly extensible with strong support for integrations.

CHALLENGES
• Adobe Experience Cloud is primarily for larger to mid-sized organizations and may
well be less suited for smaller organizations.

• The Adobe Experience Cloud is a complex suite of applications, requiring multiple

products from Experience Cloud to be successful. Some organizations can be
challenged by such a complex system, which can include integrations, a higher cost
of ownership and a steep learning curve.

• Adobe Experience Cloud is based on a PaaS model, so it may not support a DXP with
composable architecture based on SaaS-based products from multiple vendors.

• Adobe has a track record of supporting B2C scenarios and may be less suited for
B2B, although it appears to be focusing more on this market with the release of an
integrated B2B content and commerce package

• Adobe is likely to continue acquiring providers to assimilate more products into the
Experience Cloud; however, integration can take time.

TRAJECTORY
Adobe has been in acquisition mode for over a decade, on a mission to construct a full
set of enterprise-grade digital experience tools and achieve market dominance. They’ve
already acquired most of the components that form a digital customer experience stack:
analytics, web content management, testing and targeting, DAM, commerce, customer
data management and marketing automation, to name a few pieces.

The acquisitions of Workfront and Frame.Io show that Adobe’s buying spree has not
slowed. The intended acquisition of Figma is an even bolder move and reflects their
market dominance but is subject to regulatory approval which may not be forthcoming.

The challenge going forward is ensuring seamless integration and flow between all
its tools. Historically, this has moved more slowly than customers and implementation
partners had hoped.

Adobe’s trajectory will be a continuation of the current pathway, with opportunities

for deep integration of the products they have already acquired. It will also include
advancement of Adobe Sensei and their AI/ML services; normalization of data types, user
interfaces and nomenclature across products; and further progress toward being a truly
modular platform as a service — the vision that Adobe has been espousing for years.

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HISTORY
Bloomreach was founded in 2009 by Raj De Datta and former Google Search engineer,
Ashutosh Garg. It currently has more than 850 employees and has offices in Mountain
View, California, London, Amsterdam, Bangalore and Bratislava. First launched as an SEO
product powered by smart algorithms, it was designed to automatically deliver landing
pages matching the searcher’s intent. Bloomreach focuses on the entire commerce
experience, but is still grounded by its roots in search and AI.

In 2016, the company joined forces with Hippo, a leading open-source Web Content
Management (WCM) company, to create a more comprehensive digital experience platform
combining content, search and merchandising.

In 2020, Bloomreach announced a major strategic partnership with Exponea, a leading

CDP and marketing automation provider.

In early 2021, Bloomreach announced an investment of $150 million by Sixth Street Growth
and signed a definitive agreement to acquire Exponea.

In February 2022, Bloomreach announced a further investment of $175 million, valuing the
company at $2.2 billion. The transaction was led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management.

Bloomreach has received investments from private equity firms Bain Capital Ventures,
Battery Ventures, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, New Enterprise Associates,
Lightspeed Venture Partners, Salesforce Ventures and Sixth Street Growth. Over its history,
the company has gone through six rounds of funding totaling $422 million; the two most
substantial rounds are the most recent.

ACQUISITIONS
• In 2013, Bloomreach acquired e-commerce vendor ShopLogic.
• In 2016, Bloomreach acquired WCM company Hippo, forming the brX Platform.
• In 2021, Bloomreach acquired leading customer data platform Exponea.

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PRODUCTS
Bloomreach Commerce Experience Cloud is specifically designed to help businesses
drive e-commerce growth, powered by a combination of product and customer data.
The platform is designed to support the entire customer journey, from initial discovery to
engagement to longer-term brand loyalty.

The Commerce Experience Cloud features a suite of products across three categories:
Discovery, offering AI-driven search and merchandising; Content, offering a headless
content management system (CMS); and Engagement, offering a marketing automation
platform. The three offerings can be used together or separately.

Previously, the solution was positioned as the Bloomreach brX Platform with five
modules: Site Search, Merchandising, Recommendations, Content and SEO. The
Commerce Experience Cloud adds new features from the Exponea acquisition.

Bloomreach Content offers a headless CMS, including a page builder and a no-code
interface to add integrations. Features allow for the scheduling of both pages and
campaigns. It also includes an Asset Manager module that covers images, files, videos
and even snippets of code (although this is not a fully functional data asset management
(DAM) solution).

Bloomreach Engagement is an omnichannel marketing platform powered by a

Customer Data Engine that combines customer data, automation, AI and analytics
into a single solution to support marketing efforts through real-time personalization.
Businesses are able to consolidate all customer, product, offline and anonymous user
data from various sources into a single view of the customer, enabling marketers to
easily orchestrate and deliver enhanced personalized experiences across multiple
channels such as email, SMS, web, mobile app, ads etc. — all from a single place.

Bloomreach Engagement can either work with the business' existing data infrastructure
or can act as a CDP with omnichannel marketing capabilities. Businesses can deploy
product recommendations, predictive analytics and other advanced AI-powered
features to personalize touch points across the customer journey in real time without
depending on IT or data teams.

Bloomreach Discovery is a search, SEO, recommendation and merchandising platform

that features an advanced product search for commerce sites powered by machine
learning. The search facility includes auto-suggestions, automatic facet optimization,
precision searching, 1:1 search personalization, advanced personalization for known
and unknown customers, the ability to integrate other content into the product search
and more. There are also a number of other intelligent features that cover semantic and
natural language understanding, customizable ranking and context-specific ranking.

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Bloomreach Discovery also comes with search management features to, for example,
influence ranking and how the search appears. There are also insight suggestions,
A/B testing and a product recommendations engine. Automated SEO features cover
keywords, link structures and thematic pages.

TECHNOLOGIES
Bloomreach is an API-first platform built specifically to drive e-commerce growth. It
leverages marketing automation, e-commerce search, advanced content management
and AI to drive business outcomes. The platform can be used in a modular fashion
to complement a headless, microservices strategy. It utilizes a Java-based modular
architecture.

DEPLOYMENT MODELS
The Commerce Experience Cloud is available on a cloud-based subscription and is
based on a SaaS model. Companies get full control deploying Bloomreach projects
through a web-based UI. Bloomreach takes care of all infrastructure tasks such as
hardware and software updates, system security, network availability, automated backup
and disaster recovery.

To allow retention of full control over the infrastructure, Bloomreach also supports
on-premise deployment. This allows companies to meet requirements regarding
hardware location and access, network security and the use of a specific software stack.

PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS

Stack Integration
Bloomreach customers and partners customize the platform through configuration,
APIs and UI extensibility (Open UI) and build their front end in whichever JavaScript
framework they prefer. Software Development Kits (SDKs) are offered to allow headless
integrations with decoupled front ends built on React, Angular and Vue.js. On-premise
and cloud solutions are built mostly on Java, using Docker and Kubernetes running on
AWS, and (to a lesser extent) GCP.

Content & Experience APIs

Bloomreach offers a wide range of APIs covering the major features of the platform.

Bloomreach offers a (hosted) GraphQL service that was released in Q3 of 2020. It covers
all Bloomreach Commerce APIs, additionally offering out-of-the-box integrations with
most commerce platforms. Bloomreach is in the process of building out this service to
also cover content scenarios, with the eventual goal of offering a fully federated GraphQL
layer across all Bloomreach APIs.

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• Administration: Bloomreach offers a Site Development API that clients can use
to manage all configuration related to setting up and managing sites, sitemaps,
pages, templates, components and menus.

• Back Office: Bloomreach doesn’t currently have REST APIs for back-office actions,
but they do have a fully functional UI for this purpose.

• Delivery — Content/Assets: Bloomreach offers a Content REST API that

developers can use to query the CMS repository for collections of content as well
as individual content items. This API isn’t suitable for working with images/assets,
but Bloomreach does offer extensibility hooks to create custom REST APIs for this
purpose, as well as other use cases that customers might have.

• Delivery — Marketing/Personalization: The Bloomreach Page Model API is

the main API that clients use for this purpose. It allows marketers and other
business users to preview their digital channels and manage the presentation
(creating pages, adding components, etc.), while allowing developers to build the
decoupled front-end in their favorite front-end framework. SDKs are offered for all
major JavaScript-based frameworks.

Additional APIs for marketing/personalization:

• SEO API: Provides the ability to enhance a page with widgets which are optimized
to drive SEO indexing by flattening the link graph or increasing synonym density.

• Analysis API: Provides access to reports that have been defined within the
marketing automation platform.

• Tracking API: Endpoint for the creation of marketing automation events.

• Email API: Provides an API to trigger emails sent via the marketing automation
platform.

• Import API: Provides an endpoint to programmatically import data into the

marketing automation platform.

• Pathways and Recommendations API: Non-linear search experiences based on

the core Bloomreach algorithms — Search, Category, Similar product, Co-bought,
Co-viewed and Personalized — with fine grained merchandising capabilities.

Bloomreach has also introduced Facebook Conversions API integration, which allows
users to send important events (such as purchases or leads) to Facebook Ads without
having to rely on browser pixel tracking.

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Additional API’s for commerce include:

• Category API — Provides the ability for organizations to make category and
faceted category e-commerce calls.

• Product Search API — Provides the ability for organizations to search a

product index.

• Content Search API — Provides the ability to search a content index.

• Relevance by Segment API — Provides the ability to perform search, category

or recommendation requests focused by customer segment.

• Bestseller API — Provides the ability to recall best-selling products.

• Autosuggest API — Provides autosuggest covering machine-learned

suggestions and machine-learned associated products.

• Data Connect API — Provides an API to ingest and index data, and to monitor
the status of ingestion and indexing processes.

• Content Rest API — Provides the ability to retrieve content from the CMS
platform.

• Page Model API — Provides a representation of a page in a data form so it can

be rendered in a framework (headless page rendering).

• Authorization API — Provides security for the marketing automation APIs.

• Customers API — Provides an endpoint to manage customer attributes within

the CDP platform.

• Catalogs API — Provides a mechanism to create, read, update or delete

arbitrary catalogs within the Marketing Automation platform.

• GDPR API — Provides a way of managing customer consent within the

Marketing automation platform.

For content migration scenarios, Bloomreach offers a Content Export Import plugin.

Support for Headless

Bloomreach supports headless, decoupled setups. The platform offers an API for this
purpose, and there are also SDKs for React, Angular and Vue.js as well as a generic
JavaScript SDK for other JS-based frameworks. Additionally, Bloomreach is building a
sample front-end application that customers can use to reduce time-to-value for their
implementations, and are looking into offering pre-built integrations with several
commerce-focused storefronts and PWAs.

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ECOSYSTEM
Clients
Leading clients include Puma, M&S, Staples, Bosch and Albertsons.

With its focus on commerce experience, Bloomreach is a strong fit for retailers and
related organizations with a large product list and robust e-commerce operations.
This means it may be a less attractive option for other clients. However, Bloomreach
does have a track record of serving other markets such as financial services,
government, media/entertainment and manufacturing.

Partners
Bloomreach has a formal partner program for digital agencies and technology
partners with platinum, gold and silver levels. This covers training and certification,
sales support and more. The partner program currently has over 100 agencies spread
across EMEA, APAC and the Americas, the vast majority of which are “Silver” level.
Platinum partner agencies include Incentro, diva-e and Gorilla.

Bloomreach lists nearly twenty technology partnerships, including partnerships with

leading commerce platforms (Adobe Commerce, BigCommerce, commercetools,
Elastic Path, SAP, Salesforce, Shopify and more) but does not have a commerce
platform of its own. It also integrates with numerous tools through the commerce
ecosystem, including Attentive, Gorgias, Klaviyo, Contentsquare and more.
Additionally, it has integrations with other providers covering areas such as DAM
(Bynder, Cloudinary). (Bloomreach does not carry these capabilities natively.)

In 2022, Bloomreach became a member of the MACH Alliance.

Marketplace
Bloomreach has a searchable list of integrations and connectors on its website,
but does not have its own dedicated marketplace. However, clients can purchase
software directly from Bloomreach or purchase apps via certain other marketplaces,
including the Google Cloud Marketplace, BigCommerce Marketplace, the Adobe
Commerce Marketplace and the Shopify App Store.

Extensions & Contributions

As noted above, Bloomreach customers and partners customize the platform
through configuration, APIs and UI extensibility (Open UI) and build their front end
in whichever Javascript framework they prefer. There is also a growing list of out-of-
the-box integrations and connectors.

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STRENGTHS
• Bloomreach is a very strong fit for retail and clients with extensive e-commerce
needs, particularly those with a large product portfolio.

• The discovery module with intelligent search, product recommendations and

machine learning, integrates tightly with leading commerce solutions and has
advanced features.

• Other integrated platform elements, including the WCMS, multi-channel templates,

CDP capabilities, A/B testing, personalization and marketing automation, provide a
strong set of features to support product and content marketers.

• Bloomreach supports headless delivery with extensive APIs (REST and GraphQL)
and integrations with major commerce platforms.

• Bloomreach recently acquired CDP platform Exponea and received another round
of funding, which will allow for further growth and investment in the platform to
broaden the functionality offered.

CHALLENGES
• Bloomreach has now completely centered its marketing on supporting commerce
use cases, and may be less interested in focusing on the needs of non-commerce
clients and scenarios.

• Bloomreach has partnerships with leading e-commerce platforms (commercetools,

Elastic Path, SAP, Salesforce and more), but does not have a commerce platform of
its own.

• Bloomreach also partners with providers of other solutions such as DAM, PIM, etc.,
and integrates well, but does not carry these capabilities natively.

• The partner network is not as extensive as other leading DXP providers.

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TRAJECTORY
Bloomreach is now a ful SaaS solution with an API-first delivery model across its
three solutions. This milestone is emphasized by its decision to join the MACH
Alliance in November 2022 and an accompanying commitment to focus on MACH-
compliant offerings. New Bloomreach customers are only offered SaaS-based
products.

Bloomreach has also been introducing more no-code/low-code elements into the
platform to enable more configuration and empower product marketers to be less
reliant on IT colleagues.

The functionality offered through the platform has also expanded via the Exponea
acquisition, which has been relaunched as Bloomreach Engagement. It is possible
that there will be further acquisitions to add capabilities.

In February 2022, Bloomreach announced an additional investment of $175

million. CEO Raj De Datta has stated that the funding will help speed up their
current platform evolution through:

• Continuing investment in the data platform and ecosystem

• Expansion into other geographies

• Supporting specific personalized e-commerce use cases

“that get past technology silos”

Bloomreach has begun to integrate new generative AI capabilities into its solutions
and will continue ramping up machine learning, automation and personalization
within the platform.

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HISTORY
Contentful was founded in 2013 in Berlin, Germany by Sascha Konietzke and Paolo Negri.
Today the company has nearly 800 employees from more than 70 nations, who work from
three main locations in Berlin, Denver and San Francisco, as well as distributed around the
world. Since 2013, Contentful has been through five rounds of funding totalling just under
$350 million. The last two rounds occurred in June 2020 and July 2021, with the latter
raising $175 million and valuing the company at over $3 billion. Tiger Global led the funding
round. So far, Contentful has not acquired any other company.

Contentful is a leading, intelligent composable content platform and is part of the MACH
Alliance. It has recently announced repositioning, which emphasizes its ability to combine
composable content with AI-powered services at scale.

PRODUCTS
Contentful positions itself around three core components – The Contentful Platform,
Contentful Studio and the Contentful Ecosystem.

The Contentful Platform enables developers to break down content silos and orchestrate
content from any source across the organization to create and deliver digital experiences
faster, consistently, and at scale. The Platform enables teams to unlock content from
systems, like DAMs and commerce platforms, as well as content within Contentful, to help
teams efficiently leverage all of their content for reuse in any digital experience.

Recently, Contentful has announced advanced features that enable multi-experience

orchestration through its interfaces. Key to this is the ability to use external references from
third-party content sources, including leading eCommerce solutions, DAMs and Product
Information Management (PIM) systems via the Contentful API, in order to build content from
multiple content sources all within Contentful. Additionally, it is now also easier to reuse
content across different spaces within Contentful, via “cross-space references.”

A new Visual Modeler feature also allows marketing teams to plan content from multiple
sources via an intuitive authoring canvas, visually building content models and facilitating a
greater understanding of an organization’s content graph across digital teams. All aspects
of building the content model (planning, building, testing, iterating) are consolidated into a
single workflow.

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Additionally, the Contentful GraphQL API and RESTful APIs allow developers to programmatically
manage and orchestrate content within the platform itself. This includes easy creation of new
project spaces, assigning user roles, managing webhooks, content import/export and content
modeling, which is scriptable from any source.

The Contentful Studio helps to automate and streamline content creation, publishing, and
governance through the Compose, Launch and Workflows apps. It also includes a brand-new
Experience Builder. Contentful Studio empowers digital teams, including marketers, designers,
and content creators, to visually assemble and manage digital experiences for any channel
without developer assistance.

The Compose App allows for content creation and management in a modern, modular editing
experience for content creators and marketers.

There is a side-by-side editing and also a live preview capability, in which a content author
can add and edit content in structured fields on the left side of the screen and see a real-time
preview of their work in an in-context preview on the right side of the screen. They can add
references to new entries and assets (e.g., from their DAM), reorder references or remove content
entries/references entirely from within this editing experience.

The Launch App provides editorial teams scheduling and publishing tools to automate both
major and routine content launches. It includes a scheduling tool with the ability to group
different content to be released together, as well as a content calendar.

The Workflows App allows teams to automate the process of monitoring the different stages of
content creation through notifications and tasks.

The Experience Builder is a brand new low-code no-code interface to enable marketing and
business teams to create and deploy new page layouts that are on-brand (including unique
one-off layouts) from design system components without having to involve IT professionals. This
is designed to provide more agility and independence for marketing teams.

Using the apps in the Studio, Contentful has a variety of collaboration features for teams to
work together on content and publish it in the context of a single release. Content teams can be
added at various levels of access and authorization, including custom role-based permissions to
read, edit or publish based on content type, locale and tags. With access to an entry, users can
then create and assign tasks (with deadlines) to colleagues, comment on content and mention a
colleague, or assign defined content workflow steps to colleagues or teams.

Contentful has also introduced a number of features based on an integration with OpenAI
services (although customers need to have their own subscription with OpenAI). Features include
an AI Content Generator that generates content, translations and SEO keywords and text as well
as an AI Image Generator and an AI Content Type Generator (part of the Contentful Platform) to
support content modeling.

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The Contentful Ecosystem (covered in more detail later in the profile) includes Contentful’s
App Development Framework, which consists of a UI SDK, open-source design system and
field editors, hosting, APIs and webhooks, permissions/security and installation tools. The
framework gives the ability to insert these apps into the sidebar, navigation and even full
pages of the Contentful SaaS app.

TECHNOLOGIES
Contentful is an API-first platform that is designed to work with major platforms and
languages. It provides a JSON and GraphQL API in which all content is served, and can
load content from any platform that supports HTTP requests and can parse JSON. Full
documentation is provided for the following platforms and languages: JavaScript, PHP,
Android, iOS, Java, Python, Ruby and .NET.

DEPLOYMENT MODELS
Contentful is a cloud-native solution.

PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS

Stack Integration
Contentful has been built to be agnostic to any stack. An app framework allows
organizations to adapt Contentful and add integrations to work with their platform. The
framework includes APIs, SDKs and CI/CD tooling. There are also open-sourced example
apps that can act as a blueprint for customization, as well as libraries with ready-to-use
functionality across common categories. The Contentful solution has thousands of off-the-
shelf and custom apps and integrations.

Additionally, Contentful has a free self-service option for developers to get them used to the
platform and to encourage experimentation.

Content & Experience APIs

Contentful provides a number of REST and GraphQL APIs:

• The Content Delivery API is used to retrieve published content to display in

applications. It is a read-only API that delivers content from the CMS. Content is
delivered as JSON data, and images, videos and other media as files. The API is
available via a globally distributed content delivery network to minimize latency.

• The Content Management API is a read-write API for managing content. This
requires authentication as a Contentful user.

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• The Content Preview API is used to retrieve content that is in draft mode. It is a
variant of the CDA for previewing content before delivery to customers. It can
be used in combination with a “preview” deployment of a website or app to
view what content will look like as if it were published.

• The Images API is used to retrieve and apply transformations to images. It

allows for the resizing and cropping of images, as well as changing background
color and converting images to a different format.

• The GraphQL Content API is used to retrieve both published and unpublished
content using GraphQL protocol. It provides each space in Contentful with a
GraphQL schema based on its content types. The schema gets regenerated
every time these content types are updated.

• The Sync API allows organizations to keep a local copy of all content in a
space up-to-date via delta updates or content that has changed. To enable
delta updates, Contentful provides a synchronization endpoint to the Content
Delivery API.

• The User Management API is used to manage users and membership within
an organization. It allows organizations to manage their organizations,
memberships, teams, spaces and more.

• The SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management) API is used to

programmatically manage organization memberships and teams. It facilitates
the management of people and groups in cloud-based applications and
services.

Since these APIs also power the platform’s web app, Contentful offers full parity
between its web app and APIs. Everything users can do manually within the web app
can also be done programmatically.

Contentful’s APIs sit on separate architectures; they are decoupled for maximum
efficiency and reduced attack surfaces. The Content delivery APIs are read-only
and sit behind a portfolio of CDNs (Content Delivery Networks). The content
management API, on the other hand, is read/write, which is where significantly more
security precautions are managed. Instead of CDNs, this part of the infrastructure
sits behind an industry-leading WAF (Web Application Firewall) to ward off malicious
vectors from bots and attackers.

Support for Headless

Contentful is a headless CMS and can work as part of a composable DXP.

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ECOSYSTEM
Recently, Contentful has overhauled its ecosystem, emphasizing new partnership and
enhanced integrations.

Clients
Nearly 30% of the Fortune 500 uses Contentful. Contentful also serves a wide range of
different clients, including start-ups, mid-market businesses and global enterprises. Leading
clients include Bang & Olufsen, Staples Canada, IKEA, Shiseido, Rapha, Electronic Arts,
Rocha GoodRx, Vodafone, DoorDash, Costa Coffee and EuroVision.

Typically, customers will use Contentful if they have a traditional CMS that is too slow to
market, have a number of siloed CMSs or have applications (websites, apps, etc.) that a
traditional CMS cannot support.

Customers either work with solution partners for implementation or handle it internally.
Contentful offers professional services to help with onboarding, training and delivery
support, but doesn’t carry out full implementations.

Partners
Contentful’s partner network consists of an ecosystem of agencies, systems integrators
and technology companies. Leading partners include SAP, Salesforce, Huge,
BigCommerce, Stackbit, Appnovation, AKQA and PublicisSapient. Some partners
participate in joint-marketing activities and even joint revenue initiatives.

Contentful also has extensive partnerships with major players in the digital customer
experience space, including AWS, Gatsby and Netlify.

Marketplace
Contentful hosts a marketplace facility. Contentful offers 71 out-of-the-box integrations
to a wide variety of providers across major categories like eCommerce, Digital Asset
Management, AI, localization and optimization. Each integration has supporting
documentation and usage guides. Most applications are also open-sourced and
available for improvements or forking. Most apps have been developed by partners
rather than Contentful.

Recent pre-built integrations include a Shopify Connector, an SAP Commerce Cloud

Connector, Google Analytics 4 app and an integration with AWS Amplify. An app from
Ninetailed offers personalization and experimentation options, including A/B testing.

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The most popular integrations are with DAM and Commerce providers, including the following:

• DAM: Bynder, Brandfolder, Cloudinary and more

• Commerce: Commercetools, SAP Commerce, Shopify, BigCommerce and more

Other notable integrations include Algolia (search and discovery), Conscia (Knowledge Graph)
and Uniform. There are also third-party marketplace integrations from Atlassian and SSO
vendors, including Ping, OneLogin and Otka.

Extensions & Contributions

Contentful features three integrated extensibility approaches: App Framework, OAth2 and
Field Editors. Alternatively, there are apps in the Marketplace as well as open API and custom
app methods for integrations.

Contentful say that both large global systems integrators and customers cite the high
extensibility of the platform as one of the main reasons they choose Contentful, leveraging the
APIs, SDK, hosting, security/permissions, open-source design system and more. This enables
not only headless publishing, but also enables integrations with systems like PIM and ERP to
build a composable architecture.

STRENGTHS
• Contentful has focused on its core strength as a headless CMS from the beginning and
is well-positioned to serve the growing composable market; this is reflected in its current
brand positioning and new features that enable more advanced orchestration.
• The combination of a cloud-native solution and a straightforward editing and
development environment creates a smooth and relatively fast learning curve for both
users and developers.
• The company has received significant levels of funding and is expected to continue to
invest in the platform.
• The company has recently launched a new low-code environment called Experience
Builder that allows marketing teams to create on-brand layouts without development
involvement.
• Contentful is on a trajectory with a confident vision that encompasses more low-code
features and AI-powered capabilities to empower marketing teams.
• There is a strong support for developers through the APIs, app framework and free
developer environment to ensure the extensibility of the platform.
• Contentful has a track record of supporting major global brands.
• There are a good number of integrations available, as well as partnerships with major
players in the customer experience and e-commerce space.

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CHALLENGES
• Compared to other DXPs (including some other headless offerings), Contentful
has fewer digital marketing or content management tools aimed at marketing
and content teams. However, the release of apps like Launch and Compose, the
LivePreview capability and the Experience Builder is addressing this.
• Contentful is very much a headless composable CMS and is not suitable for
companies not ready to embrace a headless composable content approach.
• The Contentful marketplace is not as extensive as some of the other solutions in this
report.

TRAJECTORY
Contentful is executing its strategy to open the platform up to solve problems for the
entire digital team by enabling more low-code features that can be utilized by marketing
teams without IT help, for example through the new Experience Builder tool. It is also
advancing its orchestration capabilities to position its support for composable architecture.

Contentful is also making the solution more scalable to attract larger enterprises,
establishing standards such as EU data residency and allowing more API calls.

Contentul is also committed to introducing more AI-powered automation to deliver on-

brand experiences at scale, and we can expect to see more features added over the next
18 months. “AI automation” is centered around three main areas:

• Content integrity: ensuring content accuracy and adherence to brand and

governance, including GDPR

• Intelligent automation: automating more low-level tasks related to the content

management process

• Human + AI team: having an intelligent assistant to enhance the composable

content process and related creativity

Contentful also has a personalization engine with analytics on its roadmap to create,
match and measure content targeted to defined segments.

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HISTORY
Contentstack Inc. is a privately held and funded Delaware Limited Liability Company
based in Austin, Texas. The company currently has 400+ employees and operates in
North America, EMEA and APAC with a location-neutral policy in place.

Contentstack was originally self-funded and part of digital transformation group Raw
Engineering. The Contentstack offering was first commercially available in 2014. In
January 2018, Contentstack was spun out as an independent venture.

Since then, Contentstack has received three rounds of funding:

• October 2019: $31.5 million in Series A funding led by Insight Partners with
participation from Illuminate Ventures and GingerBread Capital.
• June 2021: $57.5 million in series B financing led by Insight Partners. Existing
investors Illuminate Ventures and GingerBread Capital also participated, as
did new investor Georgian.
• November 2022: $80 million in Series C funding co-led by Georgian and
Insight Partners with participation from Illuminate Ventures.

Contentstack was built in response to the challenges experienced by the

company’s team of CMS and MACH experts when they used traditional CMS
suites. It is a headless platform that aims to deliver a modern architecture
specifically built for enterprises enabling marketers to manage content and deliver
digital experiences to their audiences across any digital channel and any digital
touchpoint. These include web, mobile, kiosk, wearable tech, voice, bot and AR/
VR.

Contentstack saw early traction among large global brands across industries as
diverse as technology, manufacturing, financial services and sports. Today it is
used by global brands across a wide number of industries.

Contentstack positions itself as a pioneer in the headless CMS space and is a

founding member of the MACH Alliance.

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ACQUISITIONS
• In October 2021, Contentstack acquired the CMS division of Raw Engineering, a
digital solutions company providing digital transformation strategy and custom
development services and the original owner of Contentstack. The more than 50
additional team members have created a new offering of “Enablement Services”
to customers and partners, providing support to keep on moving the platform
forward.

PRODUCTS
Contentstack is an API-based composable DXP that allows developers and content
managers to create and manage content simultaneously and independently, to create
websites and applications as quickly as possible. Contentstack does not provide
experience delivery. Developers can use any front-end framework to build their front-
end experience across all channels.

Contentstack has a number of flexible authoring and management features that

support digital and content teams with complex workflow needs, multi-language
translations, granular permissions and governance controls.

Contentstack was built with editors and marketers in mind, with a focus on creating an
intuitive user interface. Editor training takes only around thirty minutes, and all editorial
features are usable without any need for knowledge of code or HTML. Interfaces were
completely redesigned in 2021. Collaboration in the platform is supported by a variety
of options from the workflow engine at the document level, all the way down to the
field level where comments, tasks and suggestions can be applied.

Contentstack’s rich text editor allows additional features, fields and frameworks to
be used within the same interface, enabling integrations and custom functionality to
look and feel like it is a part of the same tool that it resides in. The editor also provides
ultra-flexible structured data with a formless look and feel. It also outputs JSON for
omnichannel-proof WYSIWYG editing.

A Live Preview feature lets content admins see what their changes will look like side-
by-side with content across channels. It’s also possible to switch previews to different
brands, regions or channels and change content, assets, logic and structure on the fly
– all while retaining the advantages of a headless CMS under the hood.

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Releases & Release Preview provides the ability to bundle content and assets —
across any language and targeting any environment — into a release to be scheduled
and deployed all at once. The content in a release can be set to publish or unpublish,
which is helpful when launching new campaigns, replacing banners, etc. Additionally,
Release Preview is a sophisticated algorithm that allows users to see the state of a
website at a particular day/time in the future — inclusive of all changes scheduled up to
that date. Users can also compare the websites side-by-side to easily and visually see
the updates.

The Modular Blocks capability addresses one of the key concerns of non-technical
users (content editors) in moving to a headless model. Modular Blocks allows a content
model to have flexibility in the number and type of the fields or sections included in a
particular content entry as well as dynamic re-ordering within the entry. For example,
if a new landing page warrants two banners, or two forms, rather than the typical one
and one, the functional user has that capability without developer involvement.

Content commenting reduces the need to collaborate on content production using

third-party tools. Instead, teams can author content and have a dialog with each other
both on a field-by-field or word-by-word basis. Commenting works inline and also
notifies the appropriate people in task lists (plus messaging platforms like email or
Slack if desired). This adds on top of Contentstack’s existing workflow features. These
features are designed to allow customers to begin their content creation process
directly in the CMS.

Global fields are collections of fields that are embedded within a content entry and
managed as a single object. What this provides, when combined with Modular Blocks,
is the ability to map reusable front-end components 1:1 with backend CMS blocks. For
example, if a certain image carousel is used on multiple page types, the developer
needs only to reference the global field, which is mapped to that component on each
page type.

Contentstack has native asset management capabilities, although not a fully featured
DAM. It includes asset storage, metadata, folders and related features. In addition,
image editing extensions and content delivery APIs also enable image manipulation
at delivery/request such as crop, trip, scale and blur. It also includes a popular “auto-
optimize” option that reduces the need for multiple versions of the same asset. Where
customers desire a full DAM, there are robust out-of-the-box integrations with Egnyte,
Cloudinary, Bynder, AWS S3, Adobe DAM, Microsoft Sharepoint DAM and Brandfolder.

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Contentstack does not have built-in e-commerce features, but instead has
connectors to top headless e-commerce platforms in the market. Contentstack
provides officially supported integrations, as well as a robust set of integration
points that were built for this sort of ecosystem connectivity in mind. These
include commercetools, BigCommerce, ReactionCommerce, Shopify and SAP,
with plans for VTEX and ElasticPath.

Contentstack Automation Hub is a visual workflow builder and integration

platform to connect the digital stack for business users, developers and
customers. Automation Hub enables the ongoing flow of data and decisions
within Contentstack and across the composable stack. Based on triggers and
actions, technologists automate processes in a low-code environment. OAuth
support ensures highest security standards and makes the usage of automations
available across the entire organization. The Contentstack Marketplace also
provides ready-to-go recipes to streamline workflows, accelerate processes and
mitigate risk of human error or digital components being out of sync.

Contentstack Launch is Contentstack’s integrated hosting service for deploying

websites, APIs and apps right within Contentstack. Contentstack Launch offers
a full-featured (yet entirely optional) hosting platform compatible with all major
frameworks and hosting methodologies.

TECHNOLOGIES
Contentstack’s core technologies are Node.js, MongoDB, React, AWS and
Microsoft Azure.

DEPLOYMENT MODELS
Contentstack is available as a SaaS cloud subscription only. Contentstack offers
multi-tenant (default) and single-tenant options.

Contentstack is cloud-native and was initially running on Amazon Cloud

Services (AWS) but has been available on Microsoft Azure since February 2022.
Contentstack Azure and AWS are both available within EU and North America
data centers for customers with strict data residency requirements. The SaaS
service provided is the same, customers simply have the option to choose their
supporting infrastructure when becoming a customer. All are delivered as turnkey
Software-as-a-Service to customers, so there is nothing about the service that
requires installation, monitoring or management.

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PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS

Stack Integration
Contentstack is headless and agnostic to the tools a partner or customer would like
to use for implementation and integration. The APIs are Restful/JSON based, and
Contentstack offers sample apps and SDKs to accelerate front-end development for
iOS, Android, Java, Javascript, React Native, Ruby, .NET, PHP and NodeJS.

Beyond API connectivity, Contentstack’s architecture includes well-defined SDKs

for integration right into the business user interface. In addition, customers use their
Content Management API (CMA) for integrations with other platforms. Contentstack also
has extensive workflow and webhooks for integration at the appropriate moment in a
content lifecycle.

Contentstack’s Automation Hub was purpose-built to act as the integration engine and
central nervous system for modern web technologies. It contains dozens of pre-built
connectors and native functionality to read/write data from any product, transform data
as needed, and orchestrate a company’s entire digital stack.

Content & Experience APIs

Contentstack provides APIs and SDKs for customers to integrate into their applications.

REST APIs include:

• Administration: 100% coverage of the platform.
• Back Office: 100% coverage of the platform.
• Delivery — Content/Assets: 100% coverage of platform, both REST and GraphQL.
• Delivery — Marketing/Personalization: N/A. Contentstack recommends using
a MACH approach to application development and integrating best-in-class
technologies for these activities.
• Delivery — Commerce: N/A. Contentstack recommends using a MACH approach
to application development and integrating best-in-class technologies for
these activities.

Contentstack offers a GraphQL API that covers 100% of delivery functionality available
through other APIs, including content, assets and over a dozen parameters for filtering
including search using regular expression. The GraphQL API was rolled out to existing
customers in batches starting in June 2020 and is today in widespread use. It is
available as a dedicated microservice with rate limits independent from the REST API.

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Contentstack also offers migration scripts that work as a part of the CLI. These allow for
the export of content from some of the most popular CMSs, which can then be imported
into Contentstack.

When considering migrations, Contentstack recommends that customers import large

buckets of structured templated content such as blog posts and press releases. But for
core portions of their applications such as a home page or top pages, customers should
consider rearchitecting these pages to take advantage of Contentstack’s native features
such as Modular Blocks.

Support for Headless

Contentstack has been a 100% headless CMS from its inception and is built to support
composable architecture. Contentstack does not offer a non-decoupled deployment
and recommends that customers select the best front-end framework for their project
so they retain full control over the head.

ECOSYSTEM

As a headless CMS that is committed to MACH architecture, Contentstack is focused

on its ecosystem with integrations, a growing marketplace and an expanding partner
network.

Contentstack Marketplace has dozens of pre-built integrations with solutions, including

Google Analytics, Marketo, Eloqua, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Salesforce Einstein, IBM Watson,
Optimizely, Google Optimize, Dynamic Yield, Monetate and more.

Clients
Clients include a number of high-profile U.S. and global brands, including Chase, Cisco,
IcelandAir, Shell, Express and Riot Games. Contentstack claims it has a significantly
higher percentage of enterprise customers than other providers of MACH-oriented digital
experience platforms. They say the reason for this is that they directly support central
customer experience programs of large-scale customers rather than their competitors who
focus on the SMB market or side projects in larger brands.

Organizations across all industries use Contentstack for a multitude of use cases,
including internal communities, public marketing sites, franchise-level micro sites, native
mobile apps, in-game content and IoT devices While Contentstack is used for intranets
and other B2E scenarios, the majority of use is targeted to external customer audiences.

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Contentstack offers a variety of plans and pricing tiers to fit a broad range of budget
considerations.

Contentstack says that the two most common poor-fit scenarios for the platform are
organizations just looking for a very low-cost or freemium solution, or those that are not
yet ready for a headless approach to power their front-end experiences.

Many customers implement Contentstack directly with their internal teams supported by
Contentstack’s Customer Success team. However, the number of integrations carried out
by agencies and system integration partners is growing.

Typically, customers license the platform from Contentstack, although selling and
marketing is a joint effort with partners. Contentstack does not currently charge
professional services fees.

Partners
Contentstack has a partner program and ecosystem based on bi-directional relationships
with industry leading services and technology partners.

The company actively maintains partnerships with market leading technology partners
across a range of categories including Commerce, Search, Digital Asset Management and
Personalization. Key technology partnerships include commercetools, Cloudinary, Algolia,
Aprimo, Salesforce.com, SAP and Amazon. Apps and integrations are also developed with
a wider range of technologies with connectors made available via the Marketplace.

Contentstack has actively grown its services partner program with a diverse range of
global strategic and regional specialist partners who advise customers on a wider range
of key areas such as migration from legacy platforms, digital and business strategy,
integrations, analytics, creative and design. Key services partners include EPAM,
Capgemini, Valtech, Grid Dynamics, Orium and Slalom.

Contentstack is also working with partners to develop and promote ‘pre-composed

solutions,’ which help to address specific customer or industry needs and make it easier
for customers to deploy composable architecture.

Marketplace
In March 2022 Contentstack launched a new marketplace, which is described as a
“one-stop destination for apps.” These include ready-made extensions and one-click
integrations with third-party tools. The marketplace also features Starter Apps to speed
up new development using pre-configured templates. In 2023 Contentstack continues to
invest in the marketplace, supporting and encouraging partners to launch and promote
their own apps within it.

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Extensions & Contributions

As already mentioned, Contentstack has an integration architecture with SDKs for
extensibility within the product and UIs as well as a complete CM API. Both parts of
the product were designed so that Contentstack can be implemented to co-exist with
existing investments in the customer’s stack to fully embrace a composable and MACH
architecture of the future.

Contentstack is designed to combine the convenience of SaaS with the power of open
source as a fully extensible platform. The marketplace provides a comprehensive set of
extensibility points, allowing customers to tailor Contentstack to their specific business
needs while ensuring compatibility with ongoing feature releases.

Contentstack's Venus Design Framework enables businesses to extend the Contentstack

app with functionality unique to their organization and across third-party tools and
services. Custom fields tailor the editorial experience and tap into repositories, like DAMs,
e-commerce, personalization and campaign management tools. Sidebar extensions,
dashboards and full-page apps allow for additional guidance in the creative. Developers
can build extensions in any frontend framework or use the prebuilt React Component
Library to further accelerate customization.

The open Contentstack Venus Component Library provides a comprehensive collection

of Contentstack’s user interface components, making it possible to build native
extensions and Contentstack-based applications faster and easier. Built with React.js,
components and patterns are designed to be “hyper-fast” and scalable. The component
library includes solutions for responsive layouts, which means there is minimal need for
third-party CSS or Grid libraries.

Contentstack’s Rich Text Editor is fully extensible, allowing developers to create new
bespoke functionality that editors can use in their creative processes. This can include
terminology checks unique to your business, interoperability with third-party tools, the use
of markets to support international rollouts or content variables and design instructions to
support multi-brand use cases.

The Developer Hub is the central place to build and manage custom apps and extensions
for your organization – or share them with the wider community. Predefined integration
and extension patterns and quality assurance by the Contentstack team ensure customer-
built apps follow best practices for optimal scalability and security.

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STRENGTHS
• User friendliness. Contentstack’s software was designed to be appealing to both
business and technical users, with a strong editor experience and no requirement to
understand code or HTML.

• Extensibility and composable support. Contentstack embraces the best-in-class,

composable DXP stack as opposed to any single vendor’s tightly coupled DXP suite
and is well positioned to meet this growing composable market. As such, integration
is at the core of Contentstack’s architecture and product roots.

• Editorial ease of use. Contentstack was made with editors and marketers in mind,
helping ensure there is less reliance on IT teams. Editor training takes 30 minutes.
Contentstack ensures editorial features are usable without understanding code or
HTML.

• Lower training and configuration costs. Because of the ease of use of the platform
and integration tools, training and configuration costs can be lower than traditional
DXP suites, although additional costs may be accrued in setting up composable
architecture.

• Commitment to customer service. Contentstack puts great emphasis on customer

support with a range of channels (including 24/7 live in-app human support) and a
care program called “Care Without Compromise” that also extends to partners.

• Enterprise client base. Contentstack has a track record of serving the needs of
large-scale enterprise customers.

• Support for app creation. The Venus Design System and Component Library
provides a useful framework and assets to accelerate the creation of custom
Contentstack apps.

• Ease of integration. With the addition of Automation Hub and the Marketplace,
building a composable stack is substantially easier than it was in the early years of
Headless CMS.

• Active roadmap. The recent investment around and acquisition of the CMS division
of Raw Engineering is helping to accelerate the future roadmap which has already
seen the launch of new features and capabilities in 2023.

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CHALLENGES
• Lack of features. Contentstack is not an integrated out-of-the box DXP so does
not have built-in e-commerce capabilities, personalization modules and other key
elements that integrated DXPs have. Organizations who want a fully integrated DXP
but do not want to use composable architecture will be better suited by another
solution.

• Headless only. Contentstack is not appropriate for organizations that are

unprepared to build their own front-end and delivery infrastructure or work with a
partner to support them.

• Not the best fit for smaller organizations. Contentstack plans and pricing may be
more suited for larger organizations and less appropriate for smaller and medium-
sized organizations.

TRAJECTORY
The financial injections in 2021 and 2022 have helped fund an active roadmap that had
already led to the launch of a new Marketplace facility, the Automation Hub and Microsoft
Azure hosting in 2022 as well as Contentstack Launch in 2023. A number of other
releases and features also occurred.

Business users’ collaboration remains a core focus. An editorial calendar feature is being
launched to help digital teams align and communicate around project milestones, tasks
and due dates. It includes a Kanban board, allowing teams to see due dates, scheduled
publish dates, and schedule deployment dates to plan content and resources more
strategically.

Contentstack already offers Content Delivery Network (CDN) capabilities at an API level,
providing a cached version of API calls to improve performance and reduce latency to
global consumption points. Contentstack will launch multi-CDN support across Fastly and
Cloudflare to ensure that no single CDN provider acts as a single point of failure.

A new multi-region cloud fallback solution will take over in the unlikely event of a
prolonged outage of a cloud infrastructure provider. This additional offering will ensure
that content delivery operations automatically switch to a fallback data center, resulting
in minimal impact for the customers’ digital experience delivery.

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HISTORY
CoreMedia GmbH is headquartered in Hamburg, Germany with additional offices in London,
Singapore and Arlington, Virginia. It currently employs 160 people worldwide. It is privately
held with a majority holding by private equity firm Open Gate Capital, which acquired the
company in 2019.

To date, the company has received two funding rounds. The first took place in 2001, while
the second took place in late 2019 with the investment from Open Gate Capital. CoreMedia
says that it has been profitable for many years.

CoreMedia was founded in 1996 by Prof. Joachim W. Schmidt, Prof. Florian Matthes,
Andreas Gawecki and Sören Stamer as a spin-off from the Hamburg University of Science
and Technology. The company was renamed CoreMedia AG in 2000 and CoreMedia GmbH
in 2020.

CoreMedia’s first two customers were two major players in the German media industry: the
German Press Agency (DPA) and the Axel Springer publishing house. From early strengths
in the media and telecommunications sector, CoreMedia’s customer base shifted toward
global B2B and B2C brands and retail customers.

CoreMedia says that in evolving its offering over two decades, it has followed “an object-
oriented content model that separates content from layout and enables content reuse and
delivery across multiple channels.” It suggests that the platform was never designed to be
a monolithic system but instead a MACH-like orchestrated architecture of services. Having
embraced headless delivery based on GraphQL several years ago, today CoreMedia
positions itself as a DXP as well as a hybrid-headless CMS. The company has also recently
moved into a new HQ and announced a refreshed brand identity.

ACQUISITIONS
• In August 2023, CoreMedia acquired Byside, a company producing customer
journey, engagement, and personalization technology.
• In August 2023, CoreMedia acquired Smarkio, a company producing chatbot and
contact management software.

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PRODUCTS
The CoreMedia Digital Experience Platform (DXP) includes various different elements.

At its center is CoreMedia Content Cloud, a scalable digital content and asset management
solution supporting head-based, headless or hybrid headless options. This platform
is architected around a series of functional Hubs that offer an API and out-of-the-box
connectors to third-party systems. The four main Hubs are dedicated for Commerce,
Content, Personalization and Experience Feedback, with additional hubs for Social Media
and Events. Hubs allow customers to connect to third-party applications either by means
of a ready-to-use connector or by developing on top of the API of the Hub. There is an
additional API for translation.

The CoreMedia Studio is the orchestration and editing interface that unifies all third-party
systems and content into one UI and provides real-time preview capabilities. Integrations
driven through the Hub’s architecture means that third-party services and data can be
accessed directly through the Studio, enabling content creators to preview, review and
optimize content directly within the Studio UI. For example, users can access responsive
real-time previews that can simulate mobile, tablet and desktop devices. Headless use
cases can benefit from the Preview API. With this API, a custom rendering application
(which could be an SPA, PWA or others) can easily be integrated into CoreMedia Studio to
handle and present to editors previews of individual content items, entire experiences and
customer journeys.

CoreMedia also comes with publication and localization workflow support, including a
simple annotation-based collaboration feature and a built-in project management tool to
help marketing teams coordinate their efforts.

CoreMedia offers support for multi-site and multi-language web sites. Each content item
is localized via the integration of a translation memory system or via internal side-by-side
translation to different markets and languages. The editing team is supported by integrated
translation and synchronization workflows within the CoreMedia Studios, both for in-house
translations or to review automatic translations coming from a translation memory system
or a translation agency. As CoreMedia Content Cloud supports the XLIFF standard, the
translation process can be fully automated.

A Digital Asset Management (DAM) system is also included in the standard offering and
is integrated into the core platform. This supports the creation, organization, optimization,
preview and publication of assets, again through the Studio UI. The DAM supports AI-driven
tagging via third-party integrations, advanced editing options, cropping, indexing of textual
content within assets, and additional interactive elements such as maps and timeline
formats. External third-party DAMs accessed through connectors can also be used in
conjunction with the native DAM.

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CoreMedia does not have built-in analytics capabilities but includes connectors to industry-
leading analytics tools. The Experience Feedback Hub offers ready-to-use connectors to
various content quality and analysis tools covering SEO, accessibility, spelling and tagging.
More recent additions include A/B testing support and integration with optimization
platforms via the Personalization Hub. Basic testing can also be done using a built-in
multivariate testing feature, which leverages data from integrated third-party analytic tools.
CoreMedia provides pre-built integrations with Kibo Personalisation, Dynamic Yield and
Salesforce Interaction Studio for more advanced use cases. These integrations are available
on the delivery side and in the CoreMedia Studio UI.

CoreMedia Campaigns is a campaign management module that helps digital marketing

teams plan, create and manage marketing campaigns. It was released in 2022.

In 2023 an integration with ChatGPT was released, enabling AI-powered content generation
from within the CoreMedia editing experience.

CoreMedia does not have any native commerce capabilities but integrates with leading
platforms through a catalog of connectors including Salesforce Commerce Cloud B2C,
Salesforce Commerce Cloud B2B, commercetools and SAP Commerce Cloud. There
are several approaches to integrate CoreMedia and a commerce system, such as where
CoreMedia acts as the front-end application and pulls data in and out of a commerce
system (orders, product, catalog, inventory or customers) or where the application is
delivered by the commerce system, and CoreMedia manages a portion of the content and
experience provided in parts of that application. Integration with headless front-ends is also
supported.

Content Cloud Blueprints offer an acceleration path for clients via themed ready-to-run
workspaces that include source code, tooling, themes and deployment. The Blueprints
front-end framework follows atomic design principles to define building blocks on various
layers that compose the whole experience. All Blueprints support a responsive mobile-first
design as well as headless experiences and are designed to be extended and adapted by
clients for their individual needs.

TECHNOLOGIES
CoreMedia Content Cloud is based on Java and open standards such as HTML, JS, CSS,
JSON, XML, Unicode, GraphQL and REST, HTTP(S) and Spring frameworks. All components
feature mature and documented APIs to ease customisation and integration with third-
party tools if needed. CoreMedia Studio, the editorial client interface for business users, is
JavaScript-based and runs on any browser.

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In a self-managed deployment scenario, a relational database such as Oracle, DB2, MySQL

or Postgres is required to operate CoreMedia’s services. All components are shipped ready
to run in a containerized environment like Docker with support for Kubernetes, Steps, and
Helm, among others. All major cloud service providers are supported, such as Amazon AWS
and Microsoft Azure.

The front end is built on Node.js, using Freemarker templates to render the experience
(including SCSS, JS and assets). It can be changed as needed using a front-end
development workflow without the need for any deployment.

Over the years, the platform has followed the idea of a service-oriented architecture, but
CoreMedia is now in the process of moving rapidly toward a completely cloud-native,
MACH-compliant architecture. Headless, microservices-leveraging cloud technologies like
Lambda are becoming the platform’s standard architecture.

DEPLOYMENT MODELS
CoreMedia offers the core CMS as a service (“CoreMedia Content Cloud Service") hosted
in the cloud. This comprises multiple environments (dev, test, production) and also includes
a CDN. There is also a “CoreMedia Content Could Self-Managed” option. This can be
deployed into a customer’s or partner’s public cloud account or into their private cloud or
virtualized environment.

In all cases, CoreMedia uses a recurring licensing for all customers, both for the Content
Cloud Service and those who operate a self-managed cloud environment. There is a
clear trend of new customers preferring the Content Could Service, and some existing
self-managed customers are transitioning to this. The Service offering mainly follows a
multi-instance model, but it will be fully multi-tenant capable soon.

PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS

Stack Integration
Content Cloud is a microservices and Java-based platform. It relies on open standards
such as XML, UML, Unicode, WebDAV, GraphQL and REST and HTTP(S), and leverages
the Spring framework. No Java is required on the client side. CoreMedia services run in
standardized Docker-Containers and come with a ready-to-run deployment configuration.
Additionally, a Kubernetes Starter Pack (Wiki, Steps, Helm Charts) is available.

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The front end is based on a modern, lightweight Node.js-based tech stack using Freemarker
templates to render the experience (including SCSS, JS and assets) and is supported by
mature and extensive tag and macro libraries to ease templating. The included front-end
development workspace is based on a modern tool stack using Node.js, webpack, yarn and
more. Predefined themes (“Blueprints”) can act as templates for the look and feel of a site.

For headless scenarios, Content Cloud ships with a ready-to-run example app called Spark,
which is based on REACT. Customers can use Spark as a foundation to build their SPA or
PWA or use it as an example to build an app with a framework of their choice.

All components feature mature and well-documented APIs. This makes it easy for clients to
develop customizations on their own or use system integration partners. The platform also
comes with a catalog of connectors to third-party platforms that are also integrated with the
CoreMedia Studio orchestration tool.

Content & Experience APIs

Content Cloud supports two delivery concepts: classic template-based server-side
rendering and a headless delivery component based on GraphQL with an additional REST
layer. Customers can choose which to use depending on their requirements. Since both
components share a common business rule layer, all functionality available in the delivery
engine is also available in the headless service.

Content Cloud is architected around Hubs, each of which has a stable API for a specific set
of functionalities, combined with UI components and business logic that covers basic use
cases. Overall APIs include:

• Commerce Hub API: for integrating third-party commerce systems

• Content Hub API: for importing content from third-party systems
• Feedback Hub API: integrating third-party feedback and analytics solutions
• Delivery API: delivering content using the headless server
• Client-side personalization API: integrating client-side personalization
• Server-side personalization API: integrating server-side information sources
• Unified API: The preferred API for interfacing with the CoreMedia CMS when writing
custom tools and agents and when writing content delivery applications

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Additionally there are a number of services that can be used to get and push information to
and from CoreMedia, including:

• Image Transformation
• Campaigns: Using the Campaigns module
• Event Hub Service: Subscribing to events within CoreMedia using webhooks
• Ingest Service API: Importing and modifying content in bulk

Maturity of APIs:
• Administration: Mature, REST API
• Back Office/Content Management: Mature, REST API, JavaScript API
• Delivery — Content / Assets: Mature, GraphQL, REST API
• Delivery — Marketing/Personalization: Mature, GraphQL, REST API
• Delivery — Commerce: Mature, GRPC API, GraphQL, REST API

The Platform also comes with the CoreMedia Importer component, a toolset and framework
used to import content from XML sources into the CoreMedia Repository. XSL stylesheets
can be used to process the source files during import (both during the migration to
CoreMedia and also on an ongoing basis). The Ingest Service has been launched to make it
easier to transfer content between UAT, staging and production environments.

Support for Headless

CoreMedia supports both headless and head-based delivery. Hybrid approaches are also
fully supported, to allow clients to gradually transition parts of their user experience to
headless or integrate native apps, PWAs, or SPAs into their delivery landscape.
Content Cloud offers a headless service that can be accessed via REST and queried using a
GraphQL endpoint on top of a REST layer. Persistent queries can support advanced security
and CDN requirements. CoreMedia’s headless service was first released mid-2019.
Content Cloud is designed to support composable architecture, although the platform is still
evolving toward a completely cloud-native MACH-compliant architecture.

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ECOSYSTEM
Partners
CoreMedia considers Salesforce and SAP as its “top tier” for Commerce and marketing
platforms, and TransPerfect for GlobalLink translation management solution.

Content Cloud is only available via direct sale from CoreMedia. CoreMedia say customers
are often able to implement the product themselves using the CoreMedia Blueprint
templates and pre-built connectors, but may get some support from CoreMedia’s Customer
Success team in the set-up or through training. Typically, most customers build their
front-end in-house or with freelance contractors. Customers who want to apply additional
customization to integrate Content Cloud with their existing enterprise architecture and
numerous third-party platforms usually involve systems integrators or agencies from
CoreMedia’s partner network.

CoreMedia has an established certified partner program involving sales and delivery
support, as well as training and certification. Technology Partners provide services
that integrate with CoreMedia while Solution Partners help customers deliver projects.
CoreMedia’s top five system integration partners globally are Arvato, Accenture, Capgemini,
INIT and KPS.

Clients
CoreMedia has several large global brands as customers, with particular strength in the
retail and fashion sectors. Clients from telecommunications, media, manufacturing and
the public sector are also well represented. Leading customers include Yoox-Net-A-Porter
Group, Luxottica, Claas, DMG Mori, Under Armor, Pandora, John Deere, Deckers Brands,
Deutsche Telekom and Finnair.

CoreMedia customers tend to be top to upper mid-market organizations, whose content and
branding plays a critical role in their business strategy. The platform tends to be a good fit
for organizations with omnichannel, multi-site needs that want to deliver hyper-personalized
consumer experiences. Entry-level to mid-market customers looking for a basic content
management solution might find more affordable options available in the market.

Content Cloud can support intranet and B2E use cases, although this only accounts for
around 5% of total sales.

Marketplace
CoreMedia has a marketplace featuring over 100 add-ons and connectors.

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Extensions & Contributions

The CoreMedia platform is designed to be highly extensible. The growing catalog of
pre-built integrations includes:

• Content Hub: YouTube, Vimeo, Dropbox, OneDrive, Bynder, etc.

• Commerce: Salesforce Commerce B2B and B2C, SAP Commerce, HCL
Commerce, commercetools, ElasticPath, Shopify, SAP Commerce and Spryker
Commerce OS
• Marketing Automation: Salesforce Marketing Cloud
• Experience Feedback: Searchmetrics, Siteimprove, Acrolinx, Imagga
• Translation: TransPerfect, Transline or Global Connect
• Personalization: Salesforce Interaction Studio, Kibo Personalization or
Dynamic Yield.
• Social Media: YouTube, Twitter and more

STRENGTHS
• CoreMedia has a good track record in supporting global B2C retail and fashion
brands, providing a consistent, multi-channel and multi-site presence.
• Content Cloud offers strong support for multi-language sites with its translation
hub offering integrations with external translation agencies via XLIFF, pre-built
connectors and in-built translation workflow.
• CoreMedia offers a native DAM system, which is included in licenses.
• The REACT-based Spark example app and Blueprint templates offer starting
points for development to speed time-to-market.
• The CoreMedia Studio orchestration and editing facility is aimed at business
users to help limit the involvement of IT development resources.
• The platform offers head-based, headless or hybrid options with a growing library
of connectors, APIs and frameworks to support custom integrations.
• The new acquisitions of Byside and Smarkio will result in an expanded set of
native features.

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CHALLENGES
• CoreMedia is not a fully featured digital experience platform. By design, some of
the components of the digital platform will have to be purchased additionally (e.g.
e-commerce or personalization). However, some of the new acquisitions will fill
some gaps in functionality.
• CoreMedia’s offering is not a native cloud solution provided as a service, although
the company is investing in transitioning in that direction to provide its different
parts as MACH-compliant services. Nevertheless, the solution can be purchased,
managed and delivered on the cloud by CoreMedia.
• The platform will be less suited to smaller organizations with more basic needs.
• CoreMedia’s partner ecosystem is not as wide as some other providers in
the space.
• Integrating the new acquisitions may involve time and effort that could divert
resources from other improvements.

TRAJECTORY
In late 2021 it launched a dedicated Workflow app to support editors with workflow-
related tasks. The cloud-naive Campaigns campaign management launched in late 2022.

CoreMedia continues to invest in its Hub architecture, most recently launching the
Personalization Hub and the Event Hub. It is also adding more native features through
a series of apps that are integrated into the Studio experience using a new design
framework. CoreMedia has also established a new marketplace to allow customers
to search through partner extensions. The new acquisitions represent a potential
acceleration of new native features, and it is possible that more acquisitions will follow.

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HISTORY
Crownpeak has 360 employees with over $80M in revenue. Currently headquartered in
Denver, Colorado, Crownpeak has offices in London, Newcastle and Chertsey, UK, Paris,
Amsterdam, Dortmund, Germany, Sofia, Bulgaria and Sydney, Australia. Crownpeak is fully
owned by private equity firm K1.

Founded in January 2001, Crownpeak was an early pioneer in offering digital content
management through a SaaS solution. In December 2022, Crownpeak acquired Attraqt,
an AI product discovery platform with capabilities for search, merchandising and
recommendations. This has allowed Crownpeak to gain a stronger e-commerce presence
in Europe, and increased automation and personalization as part of the overall DXP
proposition.

Crownpeak reported 55.8% growth in 2022, with increased profitability and sustainability in
the market, positive net retention and favorable customer reviews.

ACQUISITIONS
• In 2016, Crownpeak acquired ActiveStandards for optimization, governance,
accessibility and compliance capabilities.
• In 2017, Crownpeak acquired Evidon, a privacy and consent management platform.
• In 2021, Crownpeak acquired e-Spirit, a DXP provider, with the FirstSpirit product.
• In 2022, Crownpeak acquired Ilumino, an accessibility & quality testing company to
add manual testing & remediation services to the portfolio.
• In 2022, Crownpeak acquired Attraqt, a product discovery platform (AI search,
merchandising and recommendations. Crownpeak also acquired Attraqt’s data
science and AI practice which will develop AI capabilities across the wider
Crownpeak portfolio going forward.

PRODUCTS
Today, Crownpeak offers a full Digital Experience Platform (DXP) that covers a range
of capabilities across four core pillars:

• CMS (hybrid headless)

• Product Discovery (AI-powered personalized search, merchandising
and recommendations)

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• Digital Accessibility & Quality (incorporating accessibility compliance, brand

standards, regulatory compliance, and SEO)
• Digital Governance (incorporating privacy, consent, and governance)

The platform is positioned as composable with each capability able to be deployed

independently.

The center of the DXP is a hybrid headless CMS that supports headless publishing
but also an optional built-in front-end experience layer. This latter option includes a
Touchpoint Editing environment that enables the front-end delivery channel to be viewed
directly inside Crownpeak while editing. Crownpeak also boasts a hybrid-headless
publishing model that allows the delivery of content using any technology or framework
to any location worldwide – this empowers organizations to easily deliver content to any
customer touchpoint.

The CMS includes several AI-driven features, including automated translation of content
into multiple languages, automated tagging of images for SEO, and automated cropping
of images for mobile-first responsive websites.

Crownpeak’s Experience Optimization Engine supports AI-powered personalization

and optimization in a multi-channel environment. It is powered by Dynamic Yield. It
is designed to allow marketers to test any element or experience across any channel
and touchpoint along the user journey, continuously optimizing personalized customer
experiences. This includes front-end content, visuals and interactive experiences, as
well as background algorithms that can be used for recommendation strategies and
merchandising rules, triggers and timing, email cadences and subject lines. Testing and
optimization can be applied to all traffic on any channel or customized to fit the needs of
the client, allowing them to define circumstances, conditions and timeframes.

Crownpeak’s Product Discovery solution is an AI-powered search, merchandising and

recommendation platform for transactional channels. It enables consumers to search
with high degrees of relevance and assortment guided by business user KPIs and
objectives. AI-powered recommendations ensure personalized merchandising of product
listing pages and core product recommendations — both online and across multiple
channels such as email. A core principle of the platform is to leverage AI to automate
and drive optimization of trading strategies, but with controls applied by business users
in the e-commerce team to direct the AI to generate the right output based on business
objectives or trading best practices.

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Crownpeak’s Digital Accessibility and Quality Management (DQM) solution supports

compliance around the global accessibility & quality regulations (i.e., WCAG, ADA
(Section 508), EAA, etc.). The platform combines scanning, reporting and manual testing
and is integrated directly within the Crownpeak DXP publication workflow. It identifies
web accessibility issues, SEO and digital quality issues in content in both pre- and post-
publication environments. DQM is also available as a separate offering that can integrate
with any DXP/CMS to drive efficiencies through the content product lifecycle.

Crownpeak’s Digital Governance (DG) offering provides a privacy and consent

management platform that helps manage consent processes across different use cases,
vendors and geographies. A tag monitoring and management product is also available.
Crownpeak does not have its own native e-commerce capability (e.g. catalog or
checkout) but instead integrates with a variety of major e-commerce providers.

TECHNOLOGIES
Crownpeak’s Digital Experience Platform is an enterprise-level, cloud-native content
management system built on a decoupled architecture. The platform is built on several
technologies, including Java, .NET, JavaScript and various remote APIs. It supports
publishing content using any technology or framework or via RESTful or GraphQL APIs.

DEPLOYMENT MODELS
The Crownpeak platform is available on a cloud-based SaaS basis with logical and
physical separation between customers

PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS

Stack Integration
Crownpeak says interoperability and integration are “core Crownpeak strengths” and
that interoperability is available at all levels of the platform architecture.

Crownpeak’s cloud-native technology stack is based on hyper-scaling microservices and

container technology. Crownpeak can publish any server-side code (e.g., .NET, JSP, PHP)
to any location worldwide. Client-side code supports JavaScript and any web-framework
like Vue.js, React or Angular. Customers can choose between headless, pre-rendered
static files or a hybrid approach.

Crownpeak also has a set of software development kits (SDKs) aimed at greatly
accelerating the delivery of experiences.

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Content & Experience APIs

Crownpeak DXP supports a number of enterprise-focused deployment topologies,
including standard publishing, API-invoked content, content injection and experience
ingestion, as well as headless content delivery via the Crownpeak Content-as-a-
Service API.

The CMS Dynamic Content API is used to return content in several formats (e.g.,
JSON, XML, CSV) for consumption in a headless manner; it can also be used to
persist structured data in a RESTful or GraphQL grammar. The Crownpeak DXP can
also invoke any web-based API from within the platform, at multiple areas within
the content lifecycle. Configuration is achieved in a no-code (component building),
low-code (template configuration) or full API interaction method. Additionally, the
platform's SDKs for single-page application frameworks support a complete SDLC
approach, including external Git/Mercurial source control management, as well as
continuous build/integration paradigms.

Maturity of APIs:
• Back Office: Very mature Java API
• Delivery – Content / Assets: Very mature RESTful and GraphQL API
• Delivery – Marketing/Personalization: Mature JavaScript-API
• Delivery – Commerce: Not offered

Support for Headless

Crownpeak can be used for headless publishing. In this scenario, all content is
provided by a Content-as-a-Service (CaaS) API in a JSON formal. Crownpeak
supports REST API and GraphQL Crownpeak also offers a hybrid headless solution,
with the front end defined through the platform. In this scenario, Crownpeak offers a
headless CaaS-API in conjunction with a decoupled JavaScript-based front-end-as-a-
service (FaaS) option. This is still a decoupled end-to-end solution including backend
and front end, so customers can switch to a different front-end experience further
down the line if they wish.

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ECOSYSTEM
Crownpeak's decoupled architecture allows the platform to consume content, data and
capabilities from multiple sources, while allowing content, data and experiences to be
published in any technology. This flexibility coupled with a fully RESTful API have allowed
customers to configure custom connectors and integrations with platforms such as
Brafton, EC Innovations, Brightcove, Clicky Analytics, Disqus, Facebook, Feedburner and
Google Analytics.

Crownpeak provides built-in integrations with various third-party platforms and

systems covering e-commerce, DAM, video streaming and other complementary
technologies. These include: Salesforce CRM, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, BigCommerce,
commercetools, Magento, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, IBM WebSphere Commerce, SAP
Commerce Cloud, Shopify, Spryker, Curalate, Hootsuite, Cloudinary, Campaign Manager,
AppNexus, Mobify, Scene7, Canto Cumulus, MovingImage, Celum, Google Analytics,
Translation-Memory-Systems and others.

Clients
Crownpeak’s three main verticals are transactional e-commerce, manufacturing and
financial services. Clients tend to be medium to large enterprise B2B and B2C companies.
As well as supporting B2B and B2C customer experiences, Crownpeak can also support
B2E use cases such as intranets, customer extranets and partner portals.

Clients buy directly from Crownpeak or through a technical partner, agency or reseller.
Clients cross a broad number of B2B and B2C verticals and are spread globally, with 40%
of clients residing in North America and the remainder in Europe. Notable clients include:
Freddie Mac, Unilever, Associated Press, American Express, Toyota, Credit Suisse, ASICS,
Commerzbank, Mercedes-Benz Group AG, BASF, Bosch, ASOS, JD Sports, Tommy
Hilfiger, Forever New, Screwfix and Bosch.

Crownpeak is not the best fit for smaller companies looking for basic web publishing
capabilities. The platform is a better fit for medium-sized and larger organizations with
more complex needs, such as those operating across multiple regions and languages,
or those experiencing high growth with scalability challenges or running multi-channel
campaigns. Organizations operating in regulated industries are likely to benefit from the
native accessibility, governance and compliance capabilities of the CMS.

Partners
Crownpeak’s formal partner program covers both service partners and technology
partners. Of the former, there are currently around 80, some of which provide global
coverage.

The large majority of projects (80%) are implemented through partners, although
Crownpeak has its own professional service team to support clients directly.

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Extensions and contributions

Crownpeak supports two major customization hooks:
• Editorial backend customization: Plugins for third-party system integrations can be
implemented by the client or partner
• Front-end customization: Plugins for front-end customization.

STRENGTHS
• Crownpeak has been operating as a cloud-based SaaS provider for many years,
while some DXP vendors are still in the process of transitioning to a cloud-first
delivery approach.
• Crownpeak has native features dedicated to accessibility compliance as well as
privacy and consent management, supporting governance.
• The inclusion of product discovery enables Crownpeak to deliver both content and
product recommendations into personalized experiences across multiple channels.
• The Crownpeak DXP has both an integrated headless CMS and a CMS for pre-
generated static content, allowing both to be leveraged for different use cases and
delivery needs.
• The platform is targeted for customer-centric use cases for larger enterprises and
has a range of global brands as clients.
• Crownpeak’s Experience Optimization Engine delivers advanced personalization
and AI-driven optimization.
• The Crownpeak platform is built on a no-code and low-code basis and is attractive
for marketing teams who want to manage global omnichannel experiences without
the need to rely on colleagues in IT.
• Marketers also have options for a front-end delivery layer using the platform.

CHALLENGES
• Crownpeak’s range of DXP capabilities are not as extensive as some of the other
DXPs in this guide; however, its portfolio is growing.
• Crownpeak’s partner network of service agencies and marketplace integrations is
not as extensive as some other DXPs in this guide.
• It may take some time to fully integrate Crownpeak’s recent acquisitions into the
wider platform, which could possibly divert attention from other improvements
across the DXP.

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TRAJECTORY
Crownpeak has completed the integration of e-spirit. As of August of 2022, the FirstSpirit
CMS is being offered by Crownpeak globally as the primary GTM CMS solution, branded
as Crownpeak Content Management. It is a key capability of the broader DXP platform.

Crownpeak acquired Attraqt in 2022 to bolster their retail and commerce capabilities.
This includes product discovery which will be an integrated option into Crownpeak’s
CMS solution and the wider DXP portfolio developing core e-commerce functionality
suited to transactional channels in both B2C and B2B scenarios. The acquisition also
brings a mature AI-practice and data science capability into the Crownpeak organization,
meaning that customers can expect further AI developments across the whole DXP
portfolio.

Further M&A activity is also expected as Crownpeak innovates through acquisition and
seeks to further strengthen its DXP portfolio.

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HISTORY
HCL Technologies (Hindustan Computers Limited) is an Indian multinational
information technology services and consulting company. It has offices in 50
countries and employs just under 200,000 people around the world. Originally a
research and development organization, it entered the software services business
in 1991. HCL Tech is a publicly traded company (NSE), currently valued at more than
$11.18 billion.

HCL Software is a division of HCL Technologies and operates its primary software
business. It develops, markets, sells and supports over 20 product families in the
areas of DevSecOps, Automation, Digital Solutions, Data Management, Digital
Experience, Marketing and Commerce and Mainframes.

The HCL Software division was founded in 2019 following an acquisition from IBM
and has its main headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., with several other locations in
the U.S. and around the world. HCL Software has about 5,000 employees, with the
specific HCL Digital Experience business unit employing 400.

In June 2019, HCL acquired IBM’s DXP business unit and its legacy on-premise DXP
products – WebSphere Portal and Web Content Manager. These products made
up the IBM DXP without the Watson Content Hub, which was sold to Centerbridge
Partners. In June 2020 HCL acquired Temenos’ development platform for low-code
application development.

ACQUISITIONS
• In 2017 HLC acquired IBM’s Forms Experience Builder.
• In 2019 HLC acquired a USD $1.8 billion software business from IBM, covering
digital experience, marketing, commerce and security products, to establish
the HCL Software business unit.
• In 2020, HCL acquired Temenos' Multi-Experience Development Platform for
low-code application development.

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PRODUCTS
HCL Digital Experience (DX) is a digital experience and customer experience platform
that natively supports personalization based on rules and analytics, with a built-in content
targeting editor to define user segments that automate display results according to user
attributes, interaction history, actions and preferences.

This same personalization editor supports device and browser adaptations and targeting,
visibility rules and recommendation actions – allowing for very granular targeting and
personalization, including A/B testing.

A highly customizable set of authoring tools allowing for inline/in-context authoring and
editing, as well as offering a form-based and rich-text enabled authoring experience with
previews. Content management capabilities include various content types, including text,
graphics and other rich media, web content, mobile apps, chatbot and voice.

Within the HCL DX platform, Content Composer and Web Content Manager (WCM) provide
pre-built content templates including articles, blogs, blog lists, social rendering and wiki
templates that facilitate collaborative document authoring and social information exchange in
the context of business services. Drag-and-drop and no-code capabilities further speed the
creation and publishing process.

HCL Digital Asset Management (DAM) provides an extensible, DAM system included with
HCL DX at no additional fee. Fully integrated into the DX content authoring experience, the
new HCL DX Digital Asset Manager simplifies placing rich assets in DX pages – and keeps all
those assets organized and consistently branded.

In the HCL DAM, assets are organized into collections and renditions. When assets are
added, metadata can be auto-generated via the Google Vision API, while the user can also
provide custom descriptions and tags. Multiple APIs for third-party media integrations further
simplify building out asset libraries.

Images can be extensively edited and saved as versions. The system also automatically
creates appropriate versions of content for desktop browser, tablet and phone. The HCL
DAM can also store and preview videos and include videos as part of the content authoring
process. An integration with Kaltura is available for streaming needs.

HCL DX also provides a tool called Web Content Integrator that can be leveraged to import
content into a new deployment from any source that can generate a feed.

An additional Digital Data Connector (DDC) can be used to integrate additional content
and data for interactive presentation through DX site pages. This integrates with backend
systems exposing data via XML or JSON enabling front-end developers to modify
experiences via drag and drop.

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HCL software suite includes other solutions that integrate with HCL DX.

HCL Unica is a marketing automation and analytics platform available at an additional

cost. While HCL DX provides built-in tools for profiles and profile management,
segmentation, campaign management and data capture, HCL Unica delivers more
advanced marketing automation, customer segmentation and behavior insights.

HCL Unica includes a native dashboard and reports for extensive insights into marketing
performance. Users have access to detailed reports on all aspects of multi-channel
marketing – including audiences, campaigns, channels and offer segments/cells. Key
insights such as number of offers, number of response transactions, response rate,
number of unique responders and responder rate are included in the analysis.

HCL Unica Discover is an additional module that includes comprehensive analytic and
performance dashboards to measure website performance from the campaign down to
detail page and field level. This provides the ability to perform campaign attribution (first
or last touch), real-time analysis of site performance using heat and attention maps, and
overall site/business impact analysis with advanced search and session visualization.

HCL Unica Campaign & Plan can be installed to support advanced strategies such as
“Champion-Challenger” content and message delivery across all channels, including DX.

HCL Commerce is a mature and extensive e-commerce platform providing an

enterprise-grade solution for B2B and B2C business models while supporting a purely
API-based headless experience. HCL DX provides out-of-the-box integration with HCL
Commerce and easy integration with popular third-party shopping cart engines such as
Adobe Commerce.

Volt MX: HCL Volt MX is a multi-experience low-code platform that provides a unified
development experience for professional and citizen developers to collaborate and build
engaging experiences – all with IT oversight. From app modernization to transforming
customer experiences, Volt MX aims to maximize resources, reduce complexity and cost,
and deliver fast value.

TECHNOLOGIES
HCL DX is Java-based and runs on a J2EE stack. Additionally, HCL DX is offered as a
fully cloud-native platform with native support for containerization and Kubernetes as
well as public, private and hybrid enterprise container platforms.

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DEPLOYMENT MODELS
HCL DX can be deployed on public, private and hybrid clouds as well as traditional
on-premises. A managed hosted environment (HCL Now) is also available.

The large majority (80%) of HCL’s customers are on-premise, often because they are in
relevant sectors such as financial services or government. Currently only 8% of customers
have a cloud deployment, and 12% have a hybrid deployment – although as cloud
becomes more secure and proven in the market, more customers intend to move to cloud
deployments.

HCL DX 9.5 offers customers and partners a full array of options to deploy to public,
private and hybrid clouds. It packages cloud-native software releases and a regular
cadence of updates that can be deployed to Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift platforms
including Amazon EKS, Azure AKS, Google GKE and Red Hat OpenShift. Options include
Operator and Helm chart deployment patterns, with support for container platform
orchestration, autoscaling, monitoring and logging.

• Public cloud: HCL DX 9.5 supports deployment to Red Hat OpenShift and
Kubernetes platforms: Amazon EKS, Azure AKS and Google GKE.
• Private: HCL DX 9.5 supports deployment to Red Hat OpenShift private cloud
platform. It also supports a customer's private cloud deployment
using Kubernetes.

HCL DX 9.5 also supports a hybrid deployment pattern for customers choosing to
maintain a portion of their DX solutions on-premises. In addition, it can be deployed using
Docker Compose scripts, provided for developer use. Provided on a container-hosted
platform, HCL Solution Factory (SoFy) offers single-click DX 9.5 trial deployments, while
HCL Now offers DX managed hosted deployments across a range of deployment size
tiers. The HCL DX 9.5 container strategy is designed to support platform extensions by
customers and third-party solutions. The HCL Now Cloud hosts a HCL DX PaaS that is a
managed service offering. Each customer is a single-tenant instance.

HCL DX 9.5 can be deployed to the main Kubernetes container orchestration platforms.
In this model, HCL DX 9.5 can meet all Disaster Recovery (DR), High Availability (HA) and
backup needs supporting self-healing and geographic mirroring. It provides customizable
operator/ambassador and HA routing support, which allows for automated provisioning of
additional services as needed for core services, API, DAM and authoring. This set of tools
allows for environments to be replicated across datacenters for HA/DR scenarios. For
CDN support, the solution enables the setting of cache headers, which can be used by
customers as part of their CDN service.

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PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS

Stack Integration
HCL DX provides multiple APIs offering native extension points to integrate with
middleware, SaaS applications, and other external systems. In addition to integrating
with other CX solutions from HCL mentioned above, it also integrates with HCL Link,
a data integration platform with 30+ connectors to enterprise and mainframe data
and applications, plus industry protocols.

HCL Volt MX’s Foundry middleware provides mature data integration, workflows and
business rules capabilities that can be integrated with HCL DX for application and
workflow development. The product’s 200+ out-of-the-box adapters include social
identity and technology adapters such as IBM MQ and Open API. They also include
business adapters like SAP, MuleSoft, Salesforce, Red Hat PAM for Business Rules
and Twilio for messaging. Volt MX integrates with any external microservices written
in Java or JavaScript.

HCL DX offers a range of remote and local APIs to cover most functionality of the
product. It offers extension points for features such as authentication, personalization,
security, UI, URL handling, content management, CRUD operations, workflow and
more. Remote APIs are mostly provided as REST interfaces and have embraced the
OpenAPI standard to facilitate its use by developers. Core extensions are provided as
Java APIs. HCL also mentions a GraphQL API that has been released and offers some
preview access to content; the feature seems to still be at an early stage but HCL
plans to expand on it.

APIs are published in accordance with a strict versioning policy to ensure backward
compatibility. Event integration is possible via extensions. HCL says it operates in an
API-first approach and has been “aggressively adding new and modernizing existing
APIs at a high rate of speed.” In the last release, over 300 new APIs were published,
and since then approximately another 50 more have been added.

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Content & Experience APIs

• Administration: Scripting, REST, Java – very mature and granular APIs and
scripting interfaces. HCL DX provides a number of APIs for administering the
platform including provisioning the solution, Kubernetes, managing users and
access control, and stopping/starting the platform. This also includes an API
that automates and manages deployment of customer developed artifacts (I.e.
JavaScript or Portlet applications) as part of a CICD pipeline.

• Back Office. Integration with back-end systems is accomplished using custom

applications that leverage existing services or in conjunction with HCL Link.
These applications leverage connector and transformation capabilities to expose
services from packaged applications or use generic integration capabilities such
as the Digital Data Connector or Web Application Bridge.

• Content Management: REST, Java – very mature and comprehensive.

• Delivery — Content/Assets: REST, GraphQL and some Java – very mature and
comprehensive REST and Java interface but, GraphQL is new and read-only:
The scope of content and asset delivery is wide with support for authentication,
authorization, content CRUD and lifecycle management.

• Delivery — Marketing/Personalization: REST, Java – very mature and

comprehensive. HCL Unica includes over 750 open REST APIs, covering a broad
coverage of marketing capabilities such as planning & operations, campaign
management, centralized offer management, contact strategy optimization,
real-time personalization, digital messaging, deep behavioral insights, localized
last-mile personalization and third-party integrations to Ad-Tech, CRM and social
channels. Additionally, the native personalization engine included with HCL DX is
extensible and has APIs that enable personalization to leverage data contained in
third-party repositories including CDP and CRM solutions.

• Delivery — Commerce: REST, Java, GraphQL – very mature and comprehensive

with REST and Java. GraphQL is also very comprehensive. HCL Commerce is a
fully headless architecture. All API endpoints developed or modified since version
9.0 have been upgraded to level 3 according to the Richardson maturity model.
(Note this API is part of HCL Commerce rather than HCL DX).

• HCL DX solution includes a GraphQL interface that front ends the OpenAPI
compliant set of REST APIs. GraphQL functionality was made available as a
preview in fall of 2019 and generally released in May of 2020. The GraphQL
interface is mature and HCL DX takes an API-first approach where every new
feature is exposed as a REST API.

• GraphQL support is content- and asset-focused both for web content and rich
media assets stored in the DAM.

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Support for Headless

HCL DX is a hybrid solution that supports headless content creation via REST APIs.
The content models created using the platform visual tools are exposed via OpenAPI-
compliant REST APIs for delivery to any digital touchpoint using any front-end framework.

Content – regardless of whether it is headed or headless – is organized logically in the

repository using site areas, which are equivalent to a file system and further categorized
using taxonomies and keywords. Workflows can be customized for review and
approval, with options to automate lifecycle management, and they can be applied to
headless content.

HCL is in the process of decomposing the core DX platform and re-architecting it

into smaller, more focused packages — deployed independently of each other but
configured to function natively as a single unified platform. To date, several packages
have been shipped using this model, including the DAM, an authoring tool called Content
Composer, the Experience API, search, Design Studio, Personalization Engine (PZN),
Authentication, Profile Management and Web Content Management. Each component
is now containerized and deployed on a cloud-native Kubernetes footprint, and APIs will
be modernized — allowing for management and usage of each service in headless and
composable scenarios. With this approach, each aspect of the platform will be capable of
scaling independently, and deployments can be tuned to meet the specific requirements
of each project.

ECOSYSTEM

Clients
HCL DX is heavily used by large enterprise clients in the banking, insurance and financial
services sectors as well as government and public sector organizations. Clients from other
verticals include healthcare, wholesale distribution, energy, high tech and manufacturing.

HCL says that it excels at building digital experiences for secure use cases for
government and regulated industries – for example: government portals, social benefits
sites, tax authorities, and banking.

HCL DX supports a wide range of B2B, B2C, and B2E scenarios. The distribution of these
scenarios is approximately 40% B2C, 30% B2B, 30% B2E. At least a quarter of customers
use HCL DX for two or more of these use cases.

Although clients tend to be medium-sized or larger enterprises, HCL DX says it can

support all organizational sizes. Its client base includes smaller clients with as few
as 200 employees.

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Partners
For its partner implementation ecosystem, HCL provides a certification program as part
of the HCL Partner Connect program. Partners get access to sales support, technical
training, demos, training environments and more.

Leading partners include Asponte, Base 22, Streeboo, Deloitte and FAHM.

Marketplace
HCL SoFy also hosts the HCL Marketplace, wherein businesses can access a number
of functionality- and productivity-enhancing offerings. Extensions, scripts, toolkits,
modules and complete applications are available for immediate download, complete with
supporting documentation.

As previously mentioned, HLC DX integrates with HCL Link, a data integration platform
with over 30 connectors to enterprise applications such as Salesforce and ServiceNow.
HCL Volt MX’s Foundry middleware also provides mature data integration, workflow
and business rules capabilities that can be integrated with HCL DX for application and
workflow development – again involving a range of out-of-the-box adaptors.

HCL DX partners (and has embedded integration) with TinyMCE for rich text editing
capabilities. It also has a connector that syndicates videos stored in the HCL DAM with
Kaltura’s online video platform to help deliver the best video playback experience.

To secure experiences, DX integrates with leading identity providers such as IBM

Security Directory Suite, CA Siteminder, IBM Security Access Manager and Tivoli
Directory integrator.

To provide insight into digital property performance, HCL DX integrates with Google
Analytics to provide web analytics. DX also integrates with HLC Unica Discover to
provide deep behavioral analytics.

Extensions & Contributions

HCL provides integration with both third-party software vendors and the HCL Software
family in multiple ways.

HCL DX customers use a mix of development frameworks and on average integrate

with 15 different back-end systems. As a result, HCL DX provides an open platform
for creating bespoke applications and integrating systems of record. For custom
applications, the platform supports use of market-leading front-end development
frameworks (i.e. Vue, React and Angular), portlet development (i.e., JSR 168/286), Struts,
JSF and Spring. In addition to these development frameworks, HCL DX also supports
Java-based frameworks such as Hibernate, Tapestry, EJBs and JMS.

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HCL DX is highly extensible and flexible. It provides many customization points in creating,
authoring and composing environments – allowing external systems or processes to
extend the authoring environment. Custom workflow and project actions can help
augment the lifecycle management of content and assets. The Site Manager (which is
customizable) allows the creation and reuse of custom page components which can be
pre-integrated with external processes or data. The large set of APIs allow customers to
extend the product.

STRENGTHS
• HCL DX is highly flexible. This allows a deployment in whatever modality makes sense
for an individual organization based on security requirements, regulatory mandates,
geographic presence and cloud strategy.

• HCL DX has a wide variety of hosting options, including on premise or in a public,

private or hybrid cloud environment. It has a high number of on-premise clients and is
a good choice for sectors such as financial services and the public sector (where not
all DXPs serve the on-premise market).

• The platform is suitable for B2B, B2C and B2E scenarios, with a good spread of these
use cases actively deployed by customers and the wide set of features able to deliver
complex environments.

• The platform is highly extensible and is built for integrations, with a very high number
of APIs and a variety of different options to help customers deliver their integrations
of choice – sometimes through a low-code interface.

• Production Docker & Kubernetes support. HCL DX support provides an open

standard for packaging and distributing containerized applications on most platforms.

• The platform can deliver customer-centric experiences by integrating and blending

complex, varied data, processes and workflows via experience APIs.

• There is a wide set of features available by integrating different products across the
HCL suite of products, such as HCL Unica.

• HCL DX can be deployed for large global deployments involving multilingual content.

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CHALLENGES
• Some analysts have observed that HCL DX is a powerful yet complex
platform and likely requires assistance from HCL partners who have
knowledge of the overall platform.
• HCL DX is less suited for less recognized brands and small businesses,
who can be better served with less sophisticated CMS tools. HCL DX is
much more suited for medium to enterprise businesses that need to deliver
experiences to customers, employees and partners that intersect processes,
applications and content.
• HCL has opened up more cloud options but has a less mature cloud strategy
than other DXP providers. Most clients are still on premise, although more are
moving to the cloud.
• Although HCL DX is evolving to facilitate headless architectures, it is not yet
providing DX composable components as pure headless SaaS services.
• To get the best out of HCL DX, additional investment in complementary tools
in the HCL suite (such as HCL Unica) or equivalent third-party tools may be
required.

TRAJECTORY
HCL has been in the process of decomposing the core DXP platform into
separately available packages that can be deployed independently but can be
configured to work as an integrated DXP. This process is expected to continue.
A new HCL DX marketplace is also due to launch in 2022.
At a higher level, HCL says that it aims to enable customers to do the following
in the future:
• Connect to any data or app, automate image tagging and enrichment, and
enable DAM capabilities.

More specifically, future capabilities on HCL’s roadmap include:

• The ability to allow users to add and format any data or app without IT
intervention.
• Full site support, JavaScript widgets and an approvals workflow for
practitioners.
• Even more extensible personalization available via new REST APIs.
• A major app design update and new visual workflow UX, making no-code
citizen development more achievable.

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HISTORY
Ibexa (formerly known as eZ Systems) is a private software company founded in 1999
in Norway. Headquartered in Oslo with additional offices in France, Germany, Poland,
the Netherlands, Spain, UK, U.S. and Japan, the company employs approximately 100
people. The company’s current geographical focus is largely on the European market,
but they have some partners and clients in North America.

Ibexa’s first-generation Web CMS product, eZ Publish, was focused on the digital
publishing space. The product evolved into eZ Platform at the end of 2015 (when
it dropped all legacy code from the software and transitioned to a completely new
code base built on the Symfony Full Stack Framework). In recent years the company
has been focused on modularizing its solution to offer an incremental set of products
serving a range of content, workflow, integration, personalization, product information
management and ecommerce use cases, primarily for B2B customers.

In April 2020 the company rebranded to Ibexa, with its flagship product similarly
renamed the following October, evolving from eZ Platform 3.1 to Ibexa DXP 3.2.

In November 2021, Ibexa was wholly acquired by QNTM Group, a growth capital
company based in the Nordics that specializes in investing in digital companies. Since
the acquisition, there has been rapid growth, with Ibexa reporting a 49% growth in
sales and 30% increase in revenue during 2022.

ACQUISITIONS
• In 2016, Ibexa acquired German startup Yoochoose, a cloud-based behavioral
personalization engine that has become the foundation for the Ibexa
Personalization service.
• In January 2020, Ibexa acquired the B2B e-commerce software assets of
silver.solutions, which became the core of the commerce features of Ibexa
Commerce. Ibexa integration partner silver.solutions, had originally built their
commerce features on top of the Ibexa stack.

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PRODUCTS
Ibexa DXP consists of three core products; Ibexa Content, Ibexa Experience and Ibexa
Commerce, each of which are available separately. There are also four “add-ons”:
Ibexa Connect, Ibexa CDP, Ibexa Personalization and Ibexa Cloud. This modular
approach is intended to provide a way to introduce further features to strengthen
Ibexa’s position as a comprehensive DXP.

The offerings are positioned to appeal to customers at different stages of digital

maturity. For example, some offerings give customers the ability to successfully convey
their brand by developing integrated portals (e.g. B2B customer portals or employee
self-service portals). Ibexa products share the same code base, making it easy to
upgrade from Ibexa Content to Ibexa Experience to Ibexa Commerce.

Ibexa Content is a headless content management system (CMS) that is intended to

serve as the back-office component of a decoupled digital experience stack. (It does
not include tools such as Site Factory, which come with Ibexa Experience.) Structured
content is accessed remotely, via either REST or GraphQL APIs to be used (or re-used)
by any front-end environment, from REACT and JamStack applications to IoT devices
and more. Note that it’s possible to use Ibexa Content in a non-headless manner via
the PHP API and have a single server WCM deployment model.

Ibexa Content supports various solution architectures, including content reuse,

translations, omni- and multi-channel delivery. Ibexa Content also includes a PIM
component to manage large and complex product catalogs. There is also the ability to
establish simple and more complex publication approval workflows, as well as content
scheduling.

Ibexa Experience is the non-CMS core of Ibexa’s DXP. Noteworthy features include:
• Site Factory, allowing you to create campaigns quickly, build and manage
microsites, sub-domains and multiple brand sites, including Single Page
Applications (SPA).

• Page Builder, allowing content authors to create portals and landing pages
using drag and drop with a library of default blocks to deploy.

• Form Builder, allowing for the creation of simple or advanced forms.

• Segments, enabling you to personalize user experience by displaying relevant

content or products to targeted segments.

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Ibexa Commerce is a commerce-ready B2B DXP designed to digitalize, automate

and streamline B2B business transactions. It includes the Experience and Content
parts and can address most requirements through extensibility and customization
without code hacking. This makes it usually a strong fit with project cases showing
advanced or complex requirements. This makes the platform a particularly good
fit for complex applications like B2B e-Commerce use cases, which typically have
custom pricing and can be connected to ERP/CRM systems and asynchronous
connectivity in real time.

The overall Ibexa DXP comes bundled with additional capabilities and features such
as granular user permissioning, a calendar view of scheduled events, an image
editor with cropping and resizing and a media library (although external DAM tools
can be integrated into the Ibexa platform). There is also a Product Information
Management (PIM) capability added, enabling content owners to maintain and
personalize product catalogs with attractive product pages. This is a potential good
fit with other capabilities around B2B portals.

Ibexa Personalization is an AI-based personalization engine that can be used with

any of the Ibexa products and comes bundled with the main DXP platform. The
engine collects event data in a dedicated repository, provides a back office for
rule management and scenario modeling, and provides APIs for event input and
personalization decision outputs.

Ibexa Connect is a low-code environment that helps marketing teams and business
users to integrate different business applications and automate processes using a
drag-and-drop interface. It leverages an extensive library of existing integrations.
Businesses can create integration templates that can be shared across the
organization; Ibexa Connect also allows central teams to have oversight over their
overall integration landscape.

Ibexa CDP is a Customer Data Platform (CDP) that helps centralize customer data to
drive personalization, content tailoring and more effective marketing campaigns. It
unifies customer data from multiple customer touchpoints to provide a single view
for each customer. It includes an “Audience Builder'' tool to support personalization
and segmentation. Ibexa CDP is a result of a collaboration with Raptor Services, a
sister company within the QNTM Group.

Ibexa Cloud offers a scalable Platform as a Service (PaaS) that can host different
Ibexa modules.

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TECHNOLOGIES
Ibexa is based on an Open-Source stack using the Symfony Framework running on
PHP 7.4/8+ for the backend as well as React.js components in the user interface.
The re-platforming to Symfony in 2015 was a strategic decision that allowed Ibexa
to shift to an integrated DXP platform with expanded e-commerce abilities and
improved business functionality. The open-source framework allows integrators to
build, run and maintain applications faster with less custom coding. It also enables
them to test, learn and experiment quickly. At the moment, there are no plans for a
major technical platform change.

DEPLOYMENT MODELS
On-premise: Ibexa has a history of on-premise support; currently, some new
customers still choose this licensing option. Ibexa say they are committed to
offering this option for years to come.

Managed Cloud/PaaS: Ibexa Cloud, Ibexa’s PaaS offering is built upon Platform.
sh. You own the code base by license and deploy it using Platform.sh tooling. The
majority of new clients chose this licensing model.

Multi-Tenant SaaS: Ibexa DXP is not offered as a SaaS version. There are currently
no plans for a true multi-tenant SaaS deployment option.

PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS

Stack Integration
Ibexa and Symfony are both designed for integration and are considered connector
and extension friendly. The Ibexa community has a library of extensions.

Ibexa Commerce provides a connectivity framework supporting flexible integrations

with ERP, CRM and PIM systems.

Connectivity Framework for DAM: Content items and products have the ability to
connect with a range of third-party Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems.

Segmentation: Assumes a discreet, internal system (such as a CDP) where

customers are segmented. The Ibexa decision engine can pull in customer segment
data to support its decisioning.

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Additional Connectors: Automated translation (with Google Translate and other

translation services) is available. The Ibexa community also contains a number of
connectors and integrations created by the community.

Many of the integrations are available through the Ibexa Connect low-code
environment.

Content & Experience APIs

Overview:
• Administration: REST
• Back Office/Content Management: REST, GraphQL
• Delivery — Content/ Assets/ Products: REST, GraphQL
• Delivery — Marketing/ Personalization: REST
• Delivery — Commerce: REST, GraphQL

In more detail:
• REST API: Well-established API, deep in the core. Heavily used “internally”
to the product.
• Content GraphQL API: This was released in 2019. This is the preferred (and now
primary) way to access content and data in a decoupled (headless) deployment
model. This API is focused on retrieving content and data from the content
repository and, if configured as such, leverages the Elastic Search capabilities.
Customers use it for articles, images, videos and product items, as well as
search. The GraphQL API also offers mutations, allowing content creation in the
content repository.
• Personalization REST API: This is used to retrieve personalized
recommendations and requires that a user ID is included in any request.
• Segmentation API: Released as part of v3.3, this is a REST-based Segmentation
API that enables integration of remote segments in the Ibexa Experience
rendering and decisioning engine.
• PHP API/Template Tags: Accessed from the Symfony layer or the Twig
templating engine. This is used in a legacy WCM deployment mode, typically
with the Ibexa Experience product, which is self-contained back office, Site
Factory, Page Builder and presentation.
• Content migration API: This consumes standardized YAML files for CRUD
operations to the repository. However, for more complex content migrations, the
PHP API tends to be used.

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Support for Headless

The core Ibexa Content platform and mixture of APIs provides support for a “headless
architecture” or “composable DXP.” This includes the ability to deliver digital
experiences across other frontend touchpoints that are independent of the Ibexa
platform. Ibexa says “We support both fully server rendered implementations as well as
headless use cases. Our customers are free to use the front-end technology they want.
We have very detailed documentation and tutorials for headless implementations.”
In early 2023 Ibexa announced the eventual launch of Ibexa Headless, as the new
center of a fully composable Ibexa DXP, although this appears to build on existing
headless and composable capabilities within the platform.

ECOSYSTEM

Partners
Current stack partners and key technologies include PHP, Symfony, React, Javascript
and Platform.sh. Ibexa recently partnered with Raptor Services, a sister company within
the QNTM group, to release Ibexa CDP.
The company’s agency partner model and network is fairly typical in the space.
Ibexa sells its software directly to its customers, apart from in some very limited
circumstances. Project implementation is done by a certified partner or, occasionally, by
the customers themselves, never by Ibexa. With the latter scenario, Ibexa will train the
in-house team.
Geographically, Ibexa’s partner network is focused in Europe with the most robust
presence in Germany, France and Spain. The company also has a handful of smaller
partners in North America. Ibexa partners get access to training, certification and
Ibexa’s annual partner conference and portal. Tiers include Platinum, Gold and Silver.
The implementation partner is considered a significant factor in project success.

Clients
Ibexa is focused on serving the B2B market. Ibexa describes their “ideal customer” as a
medium or large B2B company with over €100M in revenue who might have a complex
sales process or product portfolio (although it also has customers who fall outside
this). Ibexa says that companies with less than €50M in revenue and with simple sales
processes or limited product portfolios might not necessarily be a good fit.
Notable current clients include Essilor, Swissport, Groupe Atlantic and Dymax.

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Extensions & Contributions

The core of the product is open-source software. Contributions to the core generally
come from partners, not customers. The release of Ibexa Connect is helping to
support integrations and automation, making extensions and contributions more
easily available.
Ibexa says they are committed to extensibility, describing it as a priority for Ibexa
products as well as a core capability. Ibexa relies upon Symfony’s extensibility
architecture. Integrators can build frontend experiences from scratch via the
integrated rendering stack or using Ibexa’s APIs.
The backoffice is built using the same stack and it is possible to override it to
accommodate special requirements. Additionally, the data model is extensible and
for unique needs it is possible to create additional field types — even though for most
scenarios the existing core field types cover most needs.

STRENGTHS
• Ibexa is a compact solution with a single Symfony application stack and runtime,
as opposed to combining different sets of tech from multiple acquisitions. This
allows for more agility for developers, a gentler learning curve and a reduced
number of moving parts for operations teams to manage.
• Customers cite Ibexa as being reliable, well-engineered and highly customizable.
• The platform’s future looks stable and secure with the November 2021
acquisition by QNTM Group.
• Ibexa continues to add more marketing features and capabilities to make it
attractive in the DXP space. It is particularly focused on B2B scenarios with
complex product portfolios and accompanying sales processes. Relatively recent
additions include a PIM feature, a CDP and Connect, the low-code integration
and automation add-on.
• As the core of the platform is open source and hosted on Github, prospective
clients can download, inspect and play with the software before purchasing.
• The underlying content workflow engine is flexible and extensible, even if the
out-of-the-box user interfaces for workflow are unlikely to be feature-rich enough
for sophisticated content teams. Customization of workflow UIs is possible and is
fairly common as part of an implementation.

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• Like many enterprise-grade DXP offerings, Ibexa is designed with

extensibility in mind. The platform can address most requirements through
extensibility and customization without unpleasant or difficult-to-maintain
code hacking.

• The Ibexa core has been around for many years, and has been hardened
across clients in a range of geographies and industries. This translates into a
product that has fairly mature architecture, supports content reuse well and
supports both multi-cultural experiences and multi-channel delivery.

• A flexible deployment architecture along with a maturing set of APIs allows

customers to use Ibexa in traditional, headless or hybrid deployment models,
and support a composable DXP.

• The Ibexa cloud solution is built upon the robust Platform.sh PaaS,
leveraging the same enterprise-grade infrastructure as some of the largest
household brands.

CHALLENGES
• Ibexa has a smaller partner ecosystem than some of the other providers
highlighted in this guide, so it may be more challenging to find the right
agency or developer resources to support your project. To offset that, being
a pure Symfony-based platform allows customers to tap into resources used
to working within that broader ecosystem.

• Larger enterprises will likely find that while there are no technical limitations
with the Ibexa technology, depending on your geography, the partner
ecosystem may not have the bandwidth or the experience to service very
large projects. If prospective clients are based in North America, then the
company’s relatively thin direct and partner presence in that market may be a
challenge for them.

• Ibexa are firmly focusing on the B2B market, particularly medium and larger
companies with more complex sales processes and product catalogs.
Smaller organizations that fall outside this brief may be less of an ideal fit
for Ibexa.

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TRAJECTORY
In the past two years, the company has created and expanded upon its new brand
identity, and sought to open a new phase of the company after 20 years as a successful
WCM vendor.

A combination of the new identity and consistent profitability led to the November 2021
acquisition by QNTM Group, a growth capital firm backed by one the largest private
equity firms in the Nordics. This acquisition has the potential to secure long-term
funding to continue investment in the product and partner network, providing stability
and opportunities for growth. Early signs are that the acquisition has supported very
rapid growth, with impressive sales numbers during 2022.

Product-wise, the release of v3, v4 and now v5 of Ibexa DXP has also sped up its
evolution in the DXP space, bringing tighter integration with its personalization
engine and evolving its integration APIs. Like its competitors, Ibexa continues to add
specialized digital marketing capabilities as well as improvements to the user interface,
the introduction of a new online editor and more. In 2023 both Ibexa CDP and Ibexa
Connect were launched.

There is an active product roadmap, with enhancements planned for Ibexa Commerce,
a campaign management module and a workspace for content authoring just some of
the scheduled items.

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HISTORY
Liferay is a privately-owned open-source software company headquartered in Diamond
Bar, California. The company currently has 1,200 employees and has offices in the U.S.,
Brazil, UK, Germany, Japan, Spain, Italy, Hungary, Ireland, India, Singapore, Australia,
the UAE and Morocco.

Liferay Inc. was founded in 2004 to provide support and consulting services around
the open-source Liferay Portal. Two of their earliest clients were Cisco and Symantec.
Liferay Portal was designed for customers that couldn’t (or didn’t want to) pay the
higher costs associated with portal vendors like Microsoft, SAP and Oracle, but needed
the same levels of functionality. Since then, it has evolved into a leading enterprise
DXP with a comprehensive set of capabilities.

Liferay says it believes in developing software internally so that it’s as cohesive and
well-integrated as possible.

The company has never received outside funding and states that it has been profitable
from day one.

ACQUISITIONS
• In 2018, Liferay acquired account-based marketing (ABM) platform Triblio,
which was later fully divested in a private party transaction.

PRODUCTS
Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is the flagship DXP offering. Users can
publish and target web content, forms, documents, knowledge base articles, blogs and
more using Liferay DXP. Native personalization, segmentation, A/B testing, integration
and headless capabilities round out the feature set.

Liferay Commerce, a previously standalone offering, is now fully incorporated into

Liferay DXP, and adds product catalog, PIM, price books, tax calculations, order
management, checkout and payment processing capabilities to their DXP. Liferay
Analytics Cloud, launched in 2019 as an in-house analytics solution, is also now
incorporated into Liferay DXP, though pricing is based in part on usage.

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As of 2022, the all-inclusive DXP is available in three main offers:

• Liferay DXP Self-Hosted, which can be deployed on-premise or to the
customer’s cloud of choice.
• Liferay Experience Cloud Self-Managed, a PaaS offering where Liferay
manages the infrastructure and the client manages Liferay DXP and their DXP-
based application.
• Liferay Experience Cloud, a new cloud-based SaaS offering that is fully
managed by Liferay.

Within the DXP, content creation is designed to be simple for authors to create and
update while also offering options to promote content discovery and reuse. Content
is created through a drag-and-drop interface that allows business users to leverage
basic components and developer-created page fragments and deploy applications
via widgets without developer intervention.
Presentation can leverage templates, master pages and style books to reduce the
work required for creation and ensure brand consistency. Master pages deliver
visual consistency and help ensure branding guidelines are respected across
all pages in a site. Style books deliver a set of visual rules that apply to a site
to provide a consistent experience across its pages, determining various visual
settings on the site, including spacing between elements, colors and fonts. Style
books are intended to support corporate identity and brand guidelines defined by
marketing or design teams.
Business users are able to create master pages to specify common elements,
such as headers, footers and company logos across pages and to modify or create
variations of the style books to be applied to master pages or specific pages.
Personalization tools provide the opportunity to deliver personalized digital
experiences at scale across the platform.
Authors can also preview and stage their content so they can see how it looks
prior to publishing. Approval workflow can also be enabled. In-context content
performance analytics capabilities make it easy to understand how content is
resonating with audiences. Users can also get a high-level view of what kinds of
content they have and where there may be gaps via the content dashboard.
Content testing and optimization is possible with Liferay DXP’s A/B testing
capabilities, which are integrated directly into the experience manager. Variants
can be created with production content, components and fragments through
the experience management user interface and then targeted using the same
segments made through the behavior, interest and profile data (see below for more
on analytics capabilities).

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Liferay DXP offers DAM capabilities. Users are able to manage documents, video,
audio, images and other media types in a unified repository. All content is stored in
Liferay DXP and can be individually permissioned, categorized and displayed (or done
so on a group basis). It also offers transcoding and streaming of rich content (video
and audio). Adaptive media automatically resizes images to be appropriate to the
device/channel that displays them. Liferay also supports auto-tagging for documents
and images and structured web content.

Liferay DXP also enables the creation of asset libraries, dedicated repositories for
assets that can be connected with a specified site or sites for deployment and reuse.
Connectors to external DAM offerings, such as Microsoft SharePoint, are available
from Liferay and third-party vendors via Liferay Marketplace. Liferay offers a robust
library of APIs built to the OpenAPI specification. REST and GraphQL options also
make it easy for developers to build their own connectors.

As a portal-heritage vendor, Liferay supports the kinds of authenticated experiences

critical to B2B, B2E and long-term B2C use cases. These capabilities include
extensibility and integration, security and access control and account services.

As mentioned, the DXP also includes Liferay Commerce, a digital commerce platform
that has been built entirely in-house to work with the rest of Liferay DXP and is
included with a Liferay DXP enterprise subscription. Liferay says that it can support
a broad range of B2C and B2B commerce scenarios, although its differentiation lies
more with B2B-specific capabilities. On the B2C side, some specific capabilities
required by retail scenarios such as real-time personalization are lacking, so it may not
meet all B2C commerce needs.

The analytics capabilities built into Liferay DXP support high-touch, authenticated
B2B, B2C and B2E experiences, although they can also support more common
anonymous visitor activities. This means the platform has more intelligence regarding
users than would be true of an analytics tool designed for use with a marketing site.
Businesses can start collecting behavior, usage and audience information without
having to tag content, assets or pages. They can also track specific content,
documents and form information with tailored reports for each. (Examples of tailored
reports include: form submissions and abandonment, document downloads and
content engagement.)

Interest modeling leverages Liferay DXP's content, asset and page categorization and
tagging framework. It uses keywords to measure interest for individuals, accounts
and segments, modeling factors such as interest decay over time and TF-IDF (term
frequency-inverse document frequency). (This is supported by machine learning.) The
information can be leveraged for optimization through behavior, interest and profile-
driven experience targeting as well as interest-based content recommendation.

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Liferay Objects provides a low-code approach to customize the DXP by allowing

customers to create data definition and data layouts through the UI fully integrated with
the platform’s out-of-the-box capabilities. The release of Liferay Objects means that most
custom solution UIs can now be achieved through a low-code approach.

TECHNOLOGIES
Liferay DXP is a Java-based platform. It leverages the React framework for UI development
along with the Bootstrap framework and Clay — a web implementation of Liferay’s Lexicon
Experience Language.

DEPLOYMENT MODELS
Liferay currently offers a PaaS offering, a new (as of 2022) cloud-based SaaS offering is
available on-premise. Liferay also offers an open-source version, which is branded as the
Community Edition (CE).

In 2018, Liferay launched an enterprise PaaS offering tailored for Liferay DXP, currently
branded Liferay Experience Cloud Self-Managed, to help customers migrate their
workloads to the cloud. Liferay Experience Cloud Self-Managed incorporates best
practices from thousands of Liferay deployments. Customers also have the option to host
Liferay directly on public cloud infrastructure e.g. GCP, AWS, Azure, etc., either themselves
or through third-party managed hosting providers.

PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS

Stack Integration
Liferay DXP is a portal-heritage offering with extensibility, integration and interoperability
at the core of its design and implementation. Liferay says “Every feature we create revolves
around providing greater integration and interoperability with other systems.” Liferay DXP
allows their web services to be exposed in a number of formats, including SOAP, JSON,
XML, REST and GraphQL.

Liferay DXP can inter-operate with various DMS/ECM solutions, such as Google Drive,
Alfresco, Nuxeo and Oracle Content Management. Liferay DXP also supports popular
CMS standards such as JSR-170 (JCR) and CMIS. Some vendors, such as Alfresco, provide
ready-made Liferay DXP integration portlets as well.

Liferay Marketplace provides access to connectors for Salesforce.com, SAP, SharePoint

(Doc Management), Docusign, Google Drive, Office 365, Activiti (workflow), MS Exchange
and Evernote. In addition, available Talend and Mulesoft connectors enable customers to
connect the DXP to both enterprise service bus/integration hubs.

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Content & Experience APIs

Liferay DXP provides headless APIs for both real-time digital experience delivery and
batch system integrations. The latter are optimized for larger batch sizes, improved
performance and scalability when operating on large data sets (e.g., 100k+ batch sizes).

Using Liferay DXP’s OpenAPI compliant APIs, customers can use integration hubs
and ETL tools like Talend and ESBs like MuleSoft, Boomi and Informatica to integrate
with ERPs (SAP, Infor, Oracle, Dynamics), CRMs (Salesforce, Dynamics, etc.), and other
systems of record (e.g. Workday, PeopleSoft).

• Administration: Liferay DXP provides APIs for the full administration of users,
roles, groups and organizations.
• Back Office: User-created workflows, custom forms and low-code applications
all expose APIs for headless management. APIs are available to manage
documents (including images and videos), blogs, wikis, knowledge base
articles and web content.
• Delivery — Content/Assets: Liferay DXP allows you to access and manage all
content through REST APIs.
• Delivery — Marketing/Personalization: Liferay DXP provides APIs to retrieve
information related to segmentation (e.g. location). Content APIs also take this
information into account, returning content collection(s) meant for the user’s
segment.
• Delivery — Commerce: Liferay Commerce has APIs for displaying catalogs,
managing carts and facilitating checkout.
• Delivery — Liferay added a GraphQL API to Liferay DXP in Q3 of 2019,
providing the same capabilities they were already offering through REST APIs.
Their GraphQL API is used both internally to develop new features as well as
by many customers. Any new capabilities added to their REST APIs are also
made available for GraphQL. The API has a broad scope, including search
capabilities, filtering and sorting, personalization, functionality for management
tasks and allows for the creation or modification of content, users and
other entities.

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Support for Headless

Support for headless publishing was not originally part of the original product
architecture, but was developed to facilitate mobile development. Liferay has
continued to advance the platform to support headless, for example moving from
OAuth1 to OAuth2 and providing a GraphQL API.

Liferay’s APIs support headless publishing; customers can develop their own
presentation layer in Vue.js, React or similar Javascript framework.

The platform enables third-party services to be composed together through Liferay

Client Extensions where they can optionally leverage the SDK to provide styling, look
and feel and state and session data. Liferay DXP can also be leveraged headlessly in
other applications through REST APIs or even display a specific view via an i-frame.

ECOSYSTEM
Clients
Liferay is focused on the financial services, manufacturing, insurance, healthcare,
government and energy & utilities sectors. Common use cases include customer and
partner portals and corporate intranets.

Liferay says that the experience platform is typically best fit for enterprises with
revenues of $250M or greater, although smaller organizations may find that the
open-source Community Edition will meet their needs.

Liferay may not be the best fit for customers who are simply looking to create a simple
corporate website as there are many less expensive alternatives. However, Liferay’s
new SaaS offering has a new pricing model and streamlined architecture that can work
better for simpler website requirements.

Clients include Airbus Helicopters SAS, KBC Bank Ireland, Hewlett Packard Enterprise,
Tag and Vodafone.

Partners
Specific partners include Dynatrace (for application performance monitoring); Elastic
(for enterprise search); MuleSoft (for ESB/application integration); PunchOut2Go
(for PunchOut catalog) and Talend (for ETL). Connectors or built-in integrations are
offered for each. Additional connectors (e.g., Salesforce, SharePoint, etc.) are available
through Liferay Marketplace. Finally, they leverage infrastructure from GCP to deliver
Liferay Experience Cloud.

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Liferay's Partner Program incorporates a global network of agencies, SI partners,

technology (ISV) partners and OMEs that are regarded as critical to the success of
the business. The program is designed to create mutually beneficial relationships
that increase the overall success and capability of the Liferay ecosystem. Partners
enjoy benefits typical of similar programs including a partner portal, training and
certification.

The program helps differentiate system integrators, assists Liferay in providing local
support and expertise to worldwide customers and ultimately helps customers
choose the right partners to deliver Liferay-based solutions. Some of their leading
partners in North America include American Eagle, Accenture, Dunn Solutions, Xtivia,
Rivet Logic and Veriday.

Liferay’s offerings can either be purchased directly from Liferay or from partners.

Marketplace
Liferay App Marketplace and the accompanying Liferay Solutions Marketplace
provides access to a broad catalog of apps and connectors, including major
enterprise systems and platforms such as Salesforce.com, SAP and Office 365.
Solutions include partner offerings for decreasing the amount of time needed to
create specific business solutions such as Intranets, Insurance Agent Portals, etc.

Extensions & Contributions

The headless layer of Liferay DXP, based on standards such as OpenAPI (REST) and
GraphQL, makes it easier to expose data to other channels like mobile applications,
chatbots, etc., together with enterprise service bus & integration hubs when there’s
a need to transform data. This, combined with the OAuth2 implementation for
authorization, makes Liferay DXP powerful when it comes to consuming external data
from or exposing data to third parties.

STRENGTHS
• Liferay has a wide set of connectors with additional support for extensibility
and integrating with third-party applications.
• Liferay’s product portfolio has been developed entirely in-house, not grown
via acquisition. This means its products are tightly integrated and built from
the ground up to work together seamlessly.

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• Liferay DXP is one of the only open-source offerings on the market, offering ease
of customization and extendabilty for developers. As a result, Liferay customers are
given access to their codebase and typically enjoy lower TCO .
• Liferay’s technology is tailored to supporting complex B2B, B2C and B2E scenarios
like digital workplace solutions, intranets and customer and partner portals and has
a good track record in this area. Liferay’s product portfolio supports ecosystems
that include franchises, partners, local agents and international subsidiaries, with
support for managing accounts with multiple named users.
• Liferay is one of the few DXPs that offers and maintains the three main types of
deployment: self-hosted, PaaS and SaaS.
• Liferay’s investment in low-code, no code capabilities has significantly increased
with the latest version of the DXP.

CHALLENGES
• Liferay’s DXP is aimed at midsize and large enterprises with more complex needs.
SMBs or organizations with simple website requirements may find that Liferay
is outside of their price point or that Liferay’s functionality outstrips their needs.
However, Liferay’s new SaaS offering has a new pricing model and streamlined
architecture that can work better for simpler website requirements. Smaller
organizations may also find that the Liferay Portal Community Edition is a better fit.
• Liferay has a longstanding legacy in supporting on-premise solutions. While its
cloud offering is mature, the customer base is still primarily on its on-premise
offering, which divides the company’s attention.
• The features across the platform for some areas such as digital asset management,
personalization and some aspects of digital marketing may not be as mature or
widespread as some other vendors.
• While Liferay Commerce can and does support B2C commerce use cases, support
for B2C commerce may not be as advanced as some other vendors.

TRAJECTORY
On a general level, Liferay says they intend to keep on investing in the platform to
simplify technology and deployment options in order to launch digital experiences
quicker, as well as introduce technology capabilities to reduce the total cost of
ownership to “make sure that it is easier, faster and cheaper to always keep the platform
up to date.”
They also say they want to invest in providing extension points and modular components
that ensure customers can keep upgrading the core of the platform, rather than locking
them into older versions of the platform.

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More specifically, Liferay is working to extend its SaaS model to further enhance
low code and extensibility capabilities to meet complex business requirements
without the need for direct customization. There are also plans to improve the
adoption metrics dashboard to view user audience behavior.

Liferay also intends to provide better support for governance, adding more
cloud regions to support customers with data sovereignty requirements and
further investing in security and data handling to further comply with customer
requirements and privacy laws.

They also wish to evolve the pricing model to align to usage and value to better
support a more composable and modular approach.

Liferay is also aiming to improve customer support by advancing its Business

Outcome Validation program that helps customers identify desired business results
from their Liferay solution.

Liferay has focused on ramping up its solution partner program, transitioning to a

“Go-To-Market” model where it co-markets, co-sells, and co-delivers with solution
partners globally. Liferay intends to build on this further by developing partner
enablement programs, and defining service packages for partners to enhance their
delivery capabilities. Liferay also now wants to focus on engaging with technology
partners to integrate with Liferay. There are plans to improve the Marketplace
facility, and explore participating in other marketplaces such as Google Cloud.

Specific roadmap developments planned for the next twelve months include:
• Integration with Marketing Automation technologies
• Further use of Applied AI/ML throughout the platform, including generative AI
• Customer Journey Builder: a low-code tool to drive complex user interactions
across different experiences and touchpoints (for example, using email and
push notifications to remind users to complete an onboarding process or to
complete a purchase)
• API Builder: a new way to create headless endpoints and schema in
a fully low-code way
• Accessibility certification
• Further investment in Liferay Commerce
• Further digital workplace/intranet investments, including integration
with Microsoft technologies

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HISTORY
Optimizely was originally founded in 1994 (as Episerver) in Stockholm, Sweden. Following the
acquisition in October 2020 by Episerver of Optimizely, an experience optimization platform,
Episerver rebranded itself as Optimizely in January 2021. With this rebrand they launched
the Optimization-as-a-Service offering for targeting, testing and recommendations. Since
then, the company has continued to acquire niche providers in the digital experience space
and expand its offerings that are available on a SaaS basis.

Today, the company is headquartered in New York and has offices in the U.S., Sweden,
Denmark, Norway, Finland, Germany, UK, the Netherlands, South Africa, Australia, Singapore,
Vietnam, Bangladesh and Dubai. The company employs approximately 1,100 people.

ACQUISITIONS
• In 2015, Episerver acquired Ektron, a NH-based CMS company.
• In 2016, Episerver acquired Peerius, a commerce personalization company.
• Also in 2016, the company acquired Optivo, an email-marketing automation
service provider.
• In 2018, Episerver was acquired by Insight Venture Partners for $1.16 billion.
• In 2019, Episerver acquired idio.io, a content intelligence software provider
supporting personalization and advanced analytics.
• Also in 2019, they acquired Insite Software, a B2B e-commerce provider.
• In September 2020, Episerver acquired Optimizely, an experience optimization
platform. In 2021, Episever rebranded itself as Optimizely.
• In March 2021, Optimizely acquired Zaius, a customer data platform provider.
• In December 2021, Optimizely acquired Welcome, a content marketing platform
that also includes Marketing Resource Management (MRM) and Digital Asset
Management (DAM) capabilities.

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PRODUCTS
Optimizely’s Digital Experience Platform is fully composable and is designed to
support the orchestration, monetization and experimentation of any type of digital
experience — all from a single, open and extensible platform. The platform consists of
three overarching solutions – Orchestrate, Experiment and Monetize.

The Orchestrate solution consists of three core products:

Optimizely Content Management System is a leading CMS designed for building

dynamic websites and helping digital teams deliver rich, secure and personalized
experiences.

Optimizely Content Marketing Platform is a user-friendly platform helping marketing

teams plan campaigns, collaborate on tasks and create content.

Optimizely Digital Asset Management is a modern storage tool helping teams of any
size manage, track and repurpose marketing and brand assets (with support for all file
types).

Optimizely’s Experiment solution consists of three products:

Optimizely Web Experimentation is an industry-leading experimentation tool allowing

you to run A/B and multi-variant tests on any channel or device with an internet
connection.

Optimizely Full Stack Experimentation is a comprehensive experimentation platform

allowing teams to manage features, deploy safer tests and roll out new releases — all
in one place.

Optimizely Program Management is an add-on to core experimentation products,

allowing teams to create/segment audiences based on past behavior and deliver more
relevant experiences.

The Monetize solution consists of three products:

Optimizely Customized Commerce is a complete platform for digital commerce and

content management designed “to build dynamic experiences that accelerate revenue
and keep customers coming back for more.”

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Optimizely Configured Commerce is a templatized and easy-to-deploy platform designed to

help manufacturers and distributors create easy buying experiences that retain customers.

Optimizely Product Information Management is a dedicated tool to help teams set up

product inventory and manage catalogs of any size or scale.

Underpinning all of the above solutions Is the Optimizely Data Platform, a centralized hub to
harmonize data across all these digital experience tools, providing one-click integrations, AI-
assisted guidance for campaigns and unified customer profiles.

The platform also includes:

Optimizely Content Recommendations, providing AI-powered and real-time

recommendations to serve the unique interests of each visitor and personalize experiences.

Optimizely Product Recommendations, using machine-learning algorithms optimized for

commerce to deliver personalized product recommendations in real-time.

TECHNOLOGIES
The Optimizely DXP is built on and uses the latest .NET and Microsoft standards
for development.

Multiple REST APIs covering offerings within the Optimizely platform and extension
components offer flexible customization and integration possibilities. Optimizely’s flexible
architecture enables brands to manage their content in a coupled, decoupled or headless
approach. Optimizely's GraphQL-powered API and REST-based APIs support true headless
content delivery.

DEPLOYMENT MODELS
Optimizely is available on a PaaS basis with most components also available as SaaS. For
example, most of the products within the Orchestrate, Experiment and Monetize solutions
can be deployed as SaaS, although the core CMS is not currently available on a SaaS basis.

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PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS

Stack Integration
The Optimizely platform is based on Microsoft .NET.

Content & Experience APIs

The entire DXP product is open through APIs and documented on world.optimizely.com. The
DXP supports GraphQL and has documentation (although this appears to be still evolving).

The Content Delivery and related Content APIs are pluggable and configurable web APIs
for querying content, visitor data and operations, providing access to many services and
capabilities. Optimizely also now offers a GraphQL API.

Other APIs are for specific areas of the product to be integrated, such as CartAPI, OrderAPI
and InventoryAPI.

Documented REST API’s include:

• DXP and Cloud (Deployment) API: Part of the self-service deployment feature for
the DXP, this API covers functionality to start, complete and reset deployments to
individual environments.
• Optimizely campaign API: Allows for integration of Optimizely Campaign covering
management of recipient data, campaigns and mailings.
• Tracking API: Covers personalization and segmented marketing actions.
• Profile store API: Covers storing website visitor profile and behavior data collected
by the tracking functionality which is then analyzed for personalization and
marketing actions.
• Content Delivery API: Supports various delivery architectures such as headless,
hybrid, SPA, JSON or coupled.
• Content management API: Supports various content management actions such as
creating, moving, updating and deleting items.
• Content definitions API: Covers listing and managing content types.
• Service API: Covers a service layer that allows systems integrators to update and
retrieve data from Optimizely to support integrations with systems such as Digital
Asset Management, ERP and Product Information Management (PIM).

• A dedicated GraphQL API.

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Support for Headless

Optimizely has APIs relating to content management and content delivery that can
support a headless publishing model.

Optimizely also recently launched Optimizely Graph, a multi-tenant SaaS service

powered by GraphQL that allows developers to search, query and deliver content
anywhere. Together with the existing set of headless capabilities (including REST-
based Content Definitions API and Content Management API, Multi-channel
Content Mode and Multi-site Management), Optimizely Graph enables content
creation, delivery and management within a headless set-up.

Both the CMS and Optimizely Commerce can be deployed as coupled, decoupled
or headless.

ECOSYSTEM

Clients
Clients include ebay, Dolby, IBM, Microsoft, New Era, Shell, SFI Health, Salesforce,
Electrolux, VISA, Sodexo, Pizza Hut and Alaska Airlines. Clients come from a range
of verticals.

Clients tend to be medium-sized to larger enterprises covering both B2C

and B2B, although Optimizely tends to have more of a track record with B2C
implementations. The platform has supported large B2E scenarios too.

Partners
Optimizely has a mature partner program of approximately 900 global solution
partners consisting of digital agencies and systems integrators.The program takes
in certification, training, sales support, events and more. Optimizely also runs an
additional OMVP (Optimizely Most Valued Professionals) program.

The vast majority of DXP implementations are led and performed by the
partner network.

Partners are categorized by region and expertise (some specializations have

requirements for certified team members with specific technologies), along with
actively certified team members and successful customer projects There are four
partner levels: platinum, gold, silver and bronze.

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Platinum Optimizely solution partners include Rightpoint, Perficient, Yaksa, Luminos

Labs, Verndale, DEPT and Valtech. Typically, there are a high number of smaller
solution partners in the network. Geographical coverage tends to lean more strongly
toward North America and Western Europe, with particular strength in the Nordics.

Additionally, Optimizely also has a global technology partner program — again

with platinum, gold, silver and bronze levels. Technology partners offer apps and
integrations. This network is also characterized by a high number of smaller operators.
Currently there are only three platinum technology providers (Contentsquare, Quantum
Metric and Siteimprove), with a further five gold partners (6Sense, Digizuite, Fullstory,
Snowflake and UserTesting). There are dozens more silver and bronze partners.

Marketplace
Optimizely has a marketplace for apps and integrations available on its website. Apps
can be filtered by technology category, price and the product they serve.

Extensions & Contributions

The DXP prioritizes extensibility, through hundreds of supported connectors to
other products and the option of utilizing the completely documented API for
specific customizations.

STRENGTHS
• Optimizely has a growing set of features to support digital customer experience.
Recent acquisitions have made this a more complete marketing stack with the
addition of a DAM and CDP into the platform.
• Optimizely includes commerce capabilities targeted at both B2B and B2C
organizations.
• Optimizely has advanced multi-variant testing and experimentation capabilities to
allow teams to perform data-driven optimization across multiple channels.
• Optimizely has recently provided better support for harmonizing data across the
platform with the introduction of a new data layer and a CDP product.
• Optimizely has particular strength in B2C scenarios and has continued to attract a
range of clients, including leading global brands.
• Optimizely has made more of its products available on a SaaS basis, providing
opportunities to use these as part of a wider composable architecture.

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CHALLENGES
• Optimizely may still look to acquire companies and there could be delays in fully
integrating services and products, which could impact other service areas.
• While the partner ecosystem involves a high number of providers, it is not as
comprehensive as some other leaders in the DXP space.
• Optimizely has a weaker track record in supporting B2B use cases compared
to B2C.

TRAJECTORY
Historically, Episerver struggled with its market presence and brand recognition
outside Europe compared to DXP leaders like Sitecore and Adobe. However, being
acquired by Insight Venture Partners in 2018 gave the company the investment
required to buy Optimizely and carry out the subsequent rebrand. This appears to have
given them a stronger basis to compete against other DXP leaders.

Experiencing growth during 2021, the company also accelerated its acquisition activity
to extend the power of the Optimizely platform to deliver a fuller digital marketing
stack. The better ability to merge content, commerce, personalization testing,
optimization and customer analytics has been viewed favorably by multiple analysts in
the space. In particular, the acquisitions of Zauis and Welcome have plugged missing
gaps in the platform’s core features including CDP, DAM and MRM capabilities. These
added functionalities may position Optimizely to compete more effectively with larger
players like Adobe.

Optimizely has also revised its offering around the Orchestrate, Experiment and
Monetize solutions, helping to provide clarity to the different products available across
the platform.

More specifically, Optimizely has produced better support for using and harmonizing
customer data with the launch of its “Data Core Service,” a common data layer covering
assets, behavior and customers while also navigating privacy challenges.

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HISTORY
Sitecore is a privately held software company with 1,300 employees. It currently is
headquartered in San Francisco and has offices in over 30 countries across the world.

The company was founded in Denmark in 2001. Originally, Sitecore sold content
management systems only in the Danish market. In 2004 the company began expanding,
first into the U.S. market, followed by the UK in 2005, Australia in 2007, and further
expansion into Europe and Asia-Pacific. Since 2007, the company has continued to expand
into a global provider of customer experience management software targeted primarily
to corporate marketing departments and marketing service providers. Sitecore is now
considered a leader in the DXP space.

Sitecore was acquired by private equity firm EQT in April 2016 for $1.1 billion. In January
2021, EQT announced a significant $1.2 billion private investment to fund Sitecore’s
long-term growth, although details were sparse. In recent years Sitecore has acquired a
number of different niche tech providers and consultancies in the customer experience
space. The most significant of these was the acquisition of Stylelabs in 2018. These
acquisitions have led to new functionality offered to clients and key people being placed
into leadership roles.

In the past three years, Sitecore has accelerated its SaaS journey, making individual
services and features from new acquisitions available both as independent SasS offerings
as well as part of a composable DXP ecosystem. Sitecore also offers its traditional focus on
a highly integrated, essentially monolithic DXP and marketing platform. Although progress
has been made, the exact product map is still evolving and there appears to be some
duplication of capabilities and features across both the existing integrated core platform
and the new SaaS offerings.

ACQUISITIONS
• In 2018, Stylelabs rebranded their existing offering to Sitecore Content Hub, adding
DAM, CMP, MRM and PCM capabilities.
• In 2019, Hedgehog Development (a digital consultancy) helped Sitecore bolster its
support to Solution Provider Partners and developers.

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• In 2021, Sitecore acquired four companies:

• Boxever, a Customer Data Platform (CDP) dedicated to customer
experience optimization.
• Four51, a headless e-commerce solution that allows more flexibility
to drive powerful customer experiences.
• Moosend, a marketing automation platform provider that supports
email marketing and campaign management.
• Reflektion, an AI-powered digital search platform focusing
on e-commerce.

PRODUCTS
The overall Sitecore Experience Platform includes a number of core products.
Different sets of these are bundled together as Content Cloud, Engagement Cloud
and Commerce Cloud.
Sitecore Experience Manager (XM) Cloud is the core WCM system, which supports
global, multilingual content for omnichannel delivery across all sites and devices.
Sitecore Experience Platform (XP) builds on the content management capabilities
of Sitecore XM with the addition of customer data, analytics and marketing
automation capabilities to nurture customers throughout their journey, with
personalized content in real time across any channel.
Sitecore CDP is a customer data platform that captures, unifies and activates
customer data in an omnichannel environment. It offers customer profiling, real-
time segmentation and the ability to bring customer data together while meeting
any privacy challenges. Sitecore CDP is a rebranding of the previous offering from
Boxever, which was acquired in 2021.
Sitecore Personalize is the core personalization engine of the platform, and is
traditionally regarded as one of the platform’s main strengths. It supports clients
with experimentation and A/B testing and includes AI features to automate aspects
of personalization.
Sitecore OrderCloud is a headless commerce and order management platform that
can work in conjunction with other commerce products such as Sitecore Send and
Sitecore Discover. OrderCloud was originally offered by Four51, which was acquired
in 2021. (Previously, Sitecore’s commerce-related offering was branded as Sitecore
Commerce Experience.)
Sitecore Send is an email marketing and automation platform that provides
campaign management capabilities. It is based on the Moosend platform, which
was acquired in 2021.

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Sitecore Discover is an AI-driven search and identification platform that helps to deliver
real-time product recommendations and individualized results for shoppers, as well as
providing accompanying analytics. Sitecore Discover is based on the previous offering
from Reflektion, which was acquired in 2021.
Sitecore Search provides AI-driven search capabilities that can be applied to any site and
includes analytics, multilingual management and support for personalized search. (Note
that Search is aimed at websites, while Discover is for commerce sites.)
Sitecore Content Hub is a single SaaS-delivered platform that supports content
strategy, planning, creation, collaboration and management with modular Digital Asset
Management (DAM), Product Content Management (PCM), Content Marketing Platform
(CMP) and Marketing Resource Management (MRM) capabilities. These enable marketing
teams to own the entire content creation and production lifecycle. Sitecore Content Hub
was offered after the acquisition of Stylelabs in 2018. Within the suite of capabilities,
Content Hub DAM and Content Hub Operations (covering MRM capabilities and more)
are offered as separate SaaS-based products.
More recently, Sitecore released Content Hub One, a more lightweight and agile
headless CMS designed to support omnichannel environments.
Sitecore Connect is a low-code interface that makes it easier for business teams to
access and implement Sitecore connectors and also manage the interactions between
different Sitecore products. It also allows teams to set-up and manage automation and
workflows.
Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) is a component-based framework for building
sites. It contains a comprehensive suite of configurable and fully customizable
components, giving customers the ability to build sites from the ground up with little to no
coding.
Sitecore Experience Edge is a set of services that allows organizations to deliver headless
content at scale. Experience Edge enables teams to deliver solutions using JAMstack to
both the Experience Manager (XM) and the Content Hub through a GraphXL endpoint. It
can also act as a content delivery network (CDN) optimized for both Experience Manager
and Content Hub.

TECHNOLOGIES
Sitecore is a .NET-based solution. The core platform offers headless and hybrid headless
capabilities and extensive .NET-based API access, allowing teams to choose how
they wish to use Sitecore in their architecture. Sitecore started with a .NET-based API
that covered essentially all aspects of Sitecore functionality, allowing for unmatched
extensibility and customization opportunities for developers. In more recent years the
core API has been augmented with advanced APIs optimized for headless development
across all products and services.

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The architecture is modular and pluggable in all areas. The core platform itself is "built
on Sitecore" — the user interfaces utilize the same APIs that are accessible to the
developer. Many configuration elements are represented as Sitecore items and can be
edited directly in the product, rather than requiring developer or file-based changes.
Sitecore has added capabilities around hybrid headless applications via Sitecore
Headless Services, providing Software Development Kits (SDKs) for Javascript, ASP.
NET Core and Next.js.
Sitecore’s Universal Tracker also captures and processes data about interactions
happening outside Sitecore, helping teams to track activity across multiple channels.
Partners and customers in turn use these APIs to build web and portal sites quickly
and enable an enterprise to focus on their own higher-level application aspirations.
The company has worked quickly to integrate its new SaaS acquisitions as part of the
core DXP platform, although this is still evolving. With machine learning solutions via
Sitecore AI and Cortex and the xConnect API layer around xDB, Sitecore has built a
robust foundation upon which almost any solution can be delivered.

DEPLOYMENT MODELS
Sitecore offers PaaS and SaaS options. Traditionally, Sitecore was available on a PaaS
basis, with some limited capabilities such as Content Hub available on a SaaS basis.
Fueled by a need to support the composable DXP model and its 2021 acquisition
spree of a number of SaaS providers, Sitecore continues to decompose the platform
to make existing and new capabilities available on a SaaS basis. These have been
branded as different Sitecore services, such as Sitecore Send and Sitecore Discover.
The Sitecore Connect product helps teams manage integrations and connections
between different products.
In terms of PaaS, the Sitecore platform allows implementers to use their own cloud
hosting infrastructure and then deploy in the manner their operations team requires.
Containers are supported for both local development with Docker and managed
orchestration with Kubernetes. Sitecore’s PaaS offering provides the standard cloud
abstraction capabilities and its containerization strategy expands abstraction support
to other cloud platforms. Sitecore can be deployed on IaaS (any public cloud), PaaS
and fully managed PaaS infrastructure solutions (with one bill for license, infrastructure
and Azure spend).
Sitecore 10 supports Docker, Kubernetes and extensive new Sitecore-provided image
repositories and deployment files, enabling delivery teams to move to a continuous
delivery model with rapid infrastructure-as-code deployments and more efficient
solution/team onboarding.

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PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS

Stack Integration
Sitecore Experience Platform is architected as a highly extensible, configurable
and open platform. From the pipeline-driven approach to multiple API layers across
applications to headless integration options, Sitecore’s DXP allows technology teams
to integrate with their existing ecosystem. The recent acquisition of SaaS services
and the start of decomposing the platform helps support a composable architecture,
allowing customers to tailor their DXP to their own specific needs.
Sitecore Data Exchange Framework facilitates synchronization of data between
systems. It allows you to define the logic needed to read data from a source system,
transform that data into a format that is compatible with a target system and write the
transformed data into a target system. Developers can build connectors that allow
third party systems to serve as source and target systems.
With the launch of Sitecore 10, Sitecore Connect for Salesforce Marketing Cloud
provides deeper functionality for marketers to leverage visitor analytics data stored in
Sitecore’s Experience Database (xDB), the data repository that underpins the platform.
With the latest update to the connector in Sitecore 10, businesses can make use of
this connection in real-time and have access to new Sitecore marketing automation
activity, specifically for Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC), allowing marketers to
configure a real-time event to integrate with SFMC.

Content & Experience APIs

Sitecore offers an extensive and mature set of APIs to help teams leverage all of
Sitecore’s benefits while using a different front-end technology.
Currently, Sitecore offers a GraphQL API as part of Sitecore Headless Services, which
allows retrieval of content for presentation purposes. Sitecore’s GraphQL APIs support
search queries as well as direct item queries, which can retrieve any data from Sitecore
— not just content. This enables development teams to query Sitecore data and only
use the data you want while also providing marketing teams all the advantages of
the marketing tool set, leveraging personalization and optimization on any device or
application. Sitecore’s GraphQL support is licensed separately, but this may change
and is relationship dependent.
As already noted, Sitecore Experience Edge enables teams to deliver solutions using
JAMstack to both the Experience Manager (XM) and the Content Hub through a
GraphXL endpoint.

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Delivery — Content/Assets: Sitecore XP provides REST APIs for headless content

access via the Sitecore Services Client (SSC), which allow for retrieval of any asset
from the delivery layer. Headless Services, which supports full hybrid-headless
delivery, can also be used to retrieve content via the GraphQL API if layout is not
required. This functionality was introduced with the Sitecore 9.x series and now has
several years of production usage.
Delivery — Marketing/Personalization: Sitecore’s Headless Services provide APIs
to allow for full personalization of layout and content, enabling hybrid headless
marketing solutions. Sitecore’s XP Services such as xConnect, marketing
operations and marketing automation also have API endpoints, which allow
development teams full control to do real-time integrations.
Delivery — Commerce: Sitecore’s commerce offerings provide multiple REST APIs,
plugins, and microservices, allowing for full extension and integration capabilities.
The microservice nature of the Sitecore XC solution enables a vast array of
integration points.

Support for Headless

Sitecore has put the composable DXP at the center of its strategy and now offers
an increasing range of SaaS-based offerings that can be deployed independently.
The main Sitecore Experience Manager CMS supports headless, while the more
lightweight Content Hub One is also a headless CMS.
Sitecore has continued to extend support for headless publishing — such as its
launch of Sitecore Headless Services. Sitecore has also extended the number
of frameworks — React, Angular and Vue.js — that can be used by Sitecore in a
headless setup for front-end development.

ECOSYSTEM
Sitecore has an open platform and marketplace consisting of over 800 tools and
apps. Some come from Sitecore, some from partners or independent developers,
and some from commercial 3rd-parties. In addition, Sitecore’s technical partner
organization is focused on implementing architectural framework design
improvements and APIs, along with launching/maintaining important first-party and
certified partner connectors.

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Clients
Sitecore’s current and recent customers include many large global brands covering
multiple industry sectors. They include Microsoft, Toyota, L'Oreal, Kimberly-Clark;
Nestle, Procter & Gamble, American Express, United Airlines, PUMA, ASOS and
Volvo Cars.

Partners
Sitecore has partnerships with hundreds of global, regional and local systems
integrators, consultancies and digital agencies across the Americas, EMEA and
Asia-Pacific. There is a three-tier network for solution partners consisting of
Platinum, Gold and Silver levels, in addition to specializations in specific product
areas (Content Hub, Commerce, etc.). Partners are vetted and must demonstrate
commitment and competency and undergo relevant training. Partners are required
to have a minimum number of certified developers and Sitecore architects. They
must also complete a minimum number of projects annually with a high customer
satisfaction score.
Most Sitecore implementations are managed by partners. The company also
has a number of global alliances with major implementation partners, including
Accenture, Avanade, Capgemini, Deloitte Digital, Dentu, Publicis Groupe and WPP.
Sitecore Professional Services can provide direct implementation services but
predominantly operate to complement Sitecore partners with services focused on
QA, architecture and strategic advisory.

Marketplace
Sitecore is available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace and is listed on Microsoft's
price list for its sellers. Likewise, Sitecore is on the Salesforce AppExchange;
Salesforce sellers participate in joint sales engagements offering Sitecore CMS,
DXP and DAM solutions.
Sitecore continues to grow its Technology Alliance Program with a strategic
approach to complement Sitecore capabilities through partnerships with third-party
technologies. These partnerships include productized, supported connectors for
seamless integration across leading best-of-breed solutions.
The Sitecore community is also extremely active in building out new extensions
and distributes them either via the marketplace or via GitHub as open-source
repositories. Sitecore has recently revamped its connector and app marketplace,
which is available via its website. At the time of writing the marketplace includes
nearly 100 entries.

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STRENGTHS
• Sitecore received significant levels of investment in 2021, helping to fund continued
growth and investment in the platform.

• The breadth of features across the Sitecore platform is very wide, with the ability
to deliver complex and world-class customer experiences across multiple B2B and
B2C scenarios.

• Sitecore can successfully support clients who need to develop multiple sites and
digital experiences across multiple channels and devices as well as geographies
and languages and require the flexibility to integrate with other technologies like
CRM and ERP.

• Sitecore XP is capable of tracking in-session or historical behavioral interactions

across all channels and from external systems. This data, stored in Sitecore
Experience Database (xDB), can then be leveraged for personalization, marketing
automation or machine learning purposes such as predictive outcomes.

• Sitecore has gone all in to support the composable DXP and is well positioned to
serve this market through its growing portfolio of SaaS offerings.

• Sitecore continues to invest aggressively in the platform with a range of new

features and interfaces,

• Sitecore has excellent support for e-commerce through merchandise and product
management, payments and orders management, discount management and
customer account management.

• Sitecore’s DAM facility through Content Hub is now fully integrated with the rest of
the XP.

• Sitecore continues to expand its AI and ML capabilities, particularly its

personalization automation, which provide future potential opportunities to drive
value from Sitecore.

• Sitecore has increased support for containerization to support better deployments.

• Sitecore Experience Edge is also helping teams to support seamless headless

content delivery at scale.

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CHALLENGES
• Small businesses are typically not a fit. It can be expensive to deploy and operate
Sitecore.

• As a solution focused on the needs of mid-market and enterprise organizations,

Sitecore isn’t ideal for organizations that don’t have existing requirements or
aspirations to develop an omnichannel digital marketing program, or only need
relatively straightforward WCM capabilities.

• A common concern expressed about Sitecore is that the system has a steeper
learning curve than other platforms. This product complexity can prevent some
marketing teams from realizing Sitecore’s full potential.

• Integrators also cite a shifting licensing model (away from perpetual licensing) as
being a weakness and responsible for introducing some pricing confusion.

• The platform is currently evolving, moving to a SaaS model to support a

composable DXP while also integrating four recent acquisitions. This means there
is still some overlap between different capabilities and features, and the overall
roadmap is not clear, causing some confusion in the marketplace.

• Sitecore’s products and offerings are often renamed over time, again causing some
market confusion.

• The long-term future of Sitecore’s traditional integrated PaaS offering is not clear.

TRAJECTORY
Sitecore continues to invest extensively in its roadmap and products. Recently this has
been primarily through acquisitions, which also help to increase its portfolio of SaaS
products. Much effort has been spent on integrating these services together, but there
is still some work to do on the integration. There is also likely to be further investment in
the new Horizon editor interface, as well as AI and ML capabilities.
There is also still a lack of clarity about overlaps between the SaaS products and
features within the traditional integrated core Sitecore Experience platform, as well as
the future of Sitecore’s PaaS offering. We expect a clearer picture will emerge in the
coming months.

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HISTORY
Uniform was formed in 2020 by three former Sitecore executives. It positions
itself as the world’s first vendor-agnostic composable DXP orchestration platform,
making it easier for developers to integrate API-first services and allowing business
users to use them more independently.
The company is based in San Francisco and has additional offices in Berlin,
Germany and Copenhagen, Denmark. It currently has 55 employees. To date,
Uniform has raised $35M over two funding rounds, with principal investors
including Array Ventures, Elad Gil and Insight Partners.
Uniform’s founders saw that composable architectures held a lot of promise to
make organizations more agile and flexible, but felt that most implementations
repeated the patterns and related problems of legacy solutions — only now across
multiple vendors. The complexity of integration work was negating much of the
advantages of a composable approach, and content was often becoming siloed
within each service. The original idea behind Uniform was to create an integration
and orchestration layer that would realize the potential of composable architecture
and make it available to more organizations.
Early clients were primarily tourism and hospitality brands running on legacy Web
CMS solutions. These clients were looking to improve front-end performance and
scalability while reducing operational costs, yet still retain the advanced features of
DXP platforms including personalization and A/B/N experience testing.
Currently the Uniform platform is positioned as a Digital Composition Experience
Platform (DCXP) that supports both developers and marketers, headless scenarios
and consists of Mesh (an orchestration layer), Canvas (a no-code interface for
marketers) and Context (personalization and testing). Consuming data from
multiple headless sources and combining this content and data also enables
business users (rather than developers) to define how content is reassembled and
delivered to end-users. Additionally, Uniform for Sitecore offers tools to accelerate
Sitecore implementations.

ACQUISITIONS
In March 2022 Uniform acquired Headless Creator, a learning platform that
provides sessions and courses on the best practices for using headless
technology platforms.

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PRODUCTS
Overall, Uniform is positioned as a Digital Composition Experience Platform (DCXP).
Uniform Mesh acts as an orchestration layer for composable architecture over an
expanding number of base digital experience solutions. This first was Sitecore, with further
market leaders added.
Mesh aims to fill the gaps in how headless vendors interact and work with each other,
through a modular approach that allows services to be easily added or replaced as the
organization’s needs change. Pre-built integrations eliminate the need for complex, custom
and time-consuming integration work. Uniform’s SDK supports custom integrations for
proprietary services or any that aren’t supported out of the box, allowing organizations to
easily utilize the modular approach across their stack.
The Mesh integration for Sitecore means that Sitecore customers can gradually transition
to composable architecture with far less reliance on IT resources or a “big bang” moment
of having to move to an entirely new stack.
Uniform Canvas is a no-code interface that allows business teams to build web pages and
other digital experiences across their headless services and some legacy systems. For
example, marketers can utilize content from Contentful and products from BigCommerce
directly into a landing page, user guide or shoppable content, rather than work across
platforms. Integrated previews and a drag and drop interface help make the design and
content creation process intuitive for marketing teams.
A recent improvement to Canvas is the introduction of Dynamic Pages that utilize data
from a CMS, commerce engine or other system, enabling marketers to make changes at
scale which are then applied to pages for a more consistent experience. This also enables
the easier creation of specific custom marquee pages that might override standard
template layouts. A new Uniform Redirect Manager makes it easier for business users to
manage all their redirects without IT support, and execute faster redirects.
Uniform Context uses edge-side rendering to drive personalization, testing and
optimization across your composable DXP, meaning that content and commerce teams
can deliver personalized content without sacrificing page speed. This way of running
personalization is designed to support SEO and user experience, while utilizing multiple
inputs to create sophisticated profiles and drive conversions. Uniform Context allows small
teams to execute personalization using third-party data sources or intent data from session
browsing experiences. They can also deploy tests to better understand their customers.
In 2023 Uniform launched a Component Starter Kit including open-source and
customizable components to help customers get a head start or a testing environment in
creating marketing and commerce sites.

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TECHNOLOGIES
Uniform supports clients implementing modern Jamstack solutions and therefore
tends to support latest generation frameworks such as Next.js and Nuxt. The internal
tech stack is all greenfield serverless AWS with Next.js powering the business
user dashboard (although this does not have direct relevance to customers as the
platform is a SaaS-delivered application).

DEPLOYMENT MODELS
Uniform is a 100% cloud subscription. Uniform was developed from the ground up as
a cloud SaaS offering and will continue to deliver in this fashion.
Uniform is a multi-tenant application. Users can connect to multiple instances (called
Teams in the platform) and manage multiple projects within those.

PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS

Stack Integration
The Uniform platform is built around integrations, making them work together in an
orchestrated fashion to enable experience creation and delivery.

Content & Experience APIs

Currently, Uniform offers a simpler REST format for their API rather than GraphQL.
This is a production grade service that returns the structured data (components
and references to external content). In Uniform’s view this makes their system
“approachable” and reduces the requirements on the client side significantly. At
the moment their position is there isn’t a strong case for GraphQL as Uniform is
solving some of the problems GraphQL is solving differently (like data over fetching).
However, Uniform’s approach aims to allow the developers to maintain control of how
they want to fetch the data from the backends Uniform Mesh integrates with, making
it possible for developers to fetch data from their headless backends differently
(using GraphQL, for example) if desired.
REST APIs:
• Administration: Mature APIs and Command Line Tooling.
• Back Office/Content Management: Robust APIs for consumption into Uniform
Mesh for assembly and delivery.
• Delivery — Content / Assets: Mature APIs, examples and SDKs for Next.js and
other frameworks.

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• Delivery — Marketing/Personalization: Mature APIs and Command Line Tooling.

• Delivery — Commerce: Uniform does not have specific commerce “cart” APIs, but
Mesh has “pass through” queries for displaying product content.

Support for Headless

Uniform is an orchestration platform that can source content and functionality from
any number of content or commerce systems. Uniform argues that it embraces the
headless approach, but doesn’t stop at the API boundary. For example, it provides
SDKs for React and Vue libraries, as well as a special edge SDK that allows customers
to use CDNs like Cloudflare, Akamai and Vercel in their composable architecture.

ECOSYSTEM
Uniform is built largely for clients implementing on modern Jamstack, therefore,
most examples are in a framework such as Next.js. The platform has an open SDK to
specifically enable Mesh integrations to other third-party systems in order to allow
partners or customers to add extensions not created by Uniform.
Uniform is primarily designed to work with cloud-based content management systems,
and therefore is less ideal for on-premises systems, although it can work with them.
Similarly, unstructured content systems are difficult to provide value against.

Clients
Uniform particularly appeals to customers looking to either start or transition to a
modern, composable architecture, customers who also have practitioners involved in
deep experience creation. Current clients include Comcast, Klépierre, Cirque du Soleil,
Life Extension, Sunweb and Trimble.

Partners
Uniform has a growing network of over thirty agency and SI partners. Uniform’s
services team also offers advisory consulting and best practice guidance. Key partners
include R/GA, Apply Digital, Kin + Carta, Appnovation and VMLY&R. Customers will
purchase software directly from Uniform and then work with the partner on the
implementation, iterations and maintenance.

Marketplace
Uniform currently has no marketplace for third-party models and extensions that work
with the platform, but has integrations available. An SDK and design system support is
in place for customers to build custom integrations for services that do not yet have a
Mesh integration available.

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Extensions & Contributions

Uniform was originally developed to work with Sitecore and has a growing library
of integrations with leading CMSs. In particular, it has deep, embedded integrations
with Contentful and Contentstack — both adding personalization and testing within
their interfaces (as add-ons) as well as via Canvas (which also enables combining
content sources from multiple systems). Additional integrations are also available for
GatherContent, Kontent.ai, Prismic, Salesforce CMS, Sanity, Sitecore, Strapi, Umbraco
Heartcore, BigCommerce, commercetools and Algolia. For Digital Asset Management,
Uniform has an integration with Cloudinary.

STRENGTHS
• Uniform has a precise marketing offering (articulated around the DCXP concept)
with a clear value proposition focused around building bridges across multiple
vendors in their quest to help brands move incrementally toward a more agile,
composable approach. This is very relevant to the current general market focus of
the composable DXP.
• The combination of orchestration capabilities, no-code interfaces, Mesh
connectors and SDK, helps to create flexibility while removing many of the
hurdles that are commonly experienced with building composable solutions, as
well as likely reducing the overall costs and time to market.
• The rise of SaaS services, DXP vendor support for the composable model,
customer demand for complex digital experiences, and increase in Jamstack and
MACH practices, means that the composable DXP is currently in the spotlight.
Uniform is very well-positioned to serve this market.
• Uniform’s last round of funding ($33M) occurred in late 2021 and this has helped
to continue to power the evolution of the platform.
• The Canvas tool helps bridge some of the gaps in the composable approach
to managing component and page structures, ensuring underlying content in
the source systems is “clean” and portable. The no-code interface also enables
marketing teams to be less reliant on IT functions.
• Context offers an achievable way to drive personalization and A/B testing across
a composable DXP (which is not always straightforward to implement).

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CHALLENGES
• Uniform is not a DXP offering in itself, but an orchestration platform that relies on
the underlying or adjacent systems that make up the composed solution.
• The Uniform platform is still at a relatively early stage of maturity — its product
positioning, scope of offerings and strategy are still evolving.
• The libraries of connectors and integrations available out of the box are somewhat
limited. Customers will want to look closely to understand the scope and maturity of
the integration points.

• The partner network is not as extensive as some other providers in the DXP space.

TRAJECTORY
In 2021 Uniform received $33m in a series A funding round and has since released
various improvements, for example adding dynamic pages and a redirect manager to the
Canvas product, as well as the Component Starter Kit.
In 2022 Uniform told us they intend to release a number of integrations and functionality
marketed to different industry sectors; features will cover commerce, email, analytics and
content planning tools. Uniform has also released tools to make it easier for agencies
and customers to build their own integrations.
Other future roadmap plans include tools to enable practitioners, designers and
engineers to collaborate together as they plan, develop and maintain their designs, code
and content in parallel.

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HISTORY
Zesty.io is a privately-owned company headquartered in San Diego with additional offices
in Madrid, Spain and Manilla, Philippines. The company currently employs 32 people.

At time of publication, the company has raised USD $6.9 million over five rounds, with
the latest round in October 2021 from a debt financing round. There are currently six
investors, including ClearVision Equity Partners.

The company was founded by Andy Fleming, Gerry Widmer and Randy Apuzzo in
2010. Zesty.io started as an internal solution built for an agency called Variable Action.
The agency was servicing clients and juggling several different platforms, so Zesty.io’s
founders built a solution that helped manage their content operations. Zesty.io has been
cloud-native and hybrid headless from its inception.

PRODUCTS
Zesty.io is a hybrid, headless DXP that enables omnichannel content distribution. The
Zesty DXP suite comes with a proprietary technology called WebEngine to create, edit
and manage content.

All content is versioned, so teams can roll back or compare how different versions of
content have performed. SEO and metadata is automated upon creation but can also be
optimized and refined. Teams can define custom workflows for approval and compliance
purposes. There is also built-in optimization guidance for SEO, page elements and bad
links. The platform supports multisite and multilanguage management.

Recently, Zesty.io has been investing in its visual editing experience. The Live Editor
(available via a Chrome extension) allows teams to edit both headless-powered websites
and websites powered by WebEngine. Content editors can see all content from any
source and see how edits render in the front-end experience — for example, at the web
page level, and in a stage environment so they can make changes before publishing.

A Layouts feature allows business users to create page custom layouts using a drag-and-
drop interface, visually building pages by adding content and components. Layouts can
also be used to build forms.

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Duo Mode allows teams to preview their website, applications, digital signage or other
outputs as they edit side-by-side to the content editor. They can preview changes to
desktop and mobile versions of their content in real time and publish instantly.

Zesty.io has recently overhauled the native light DAM system (“media app”), which
includes dynamic image editing and delivery and the ability to host videos, PDFs and
other files. There is also improved search, file management and other features. Clients
can choose to integrate with third-party DAM solutions if preferred.

A new AI content assistant allows users to generate content within the Zesty CMS,
querying the OpenAI GPT Large Language Model.

While the platform includes some native optimization guidance (for example, around
SEO), performance needs to be reviewed using a third-party analytics platform. Zesty.
io recently launched an integration with Google Analytics 4 designed to help teams
less familiar with GA4 to derive advanced analytics, single page analytics, version
comparisons for native A/B testing, and more. Zesty.io says it is partnering with third
parties to begin developing tools using machine learning and AI to offer deeper
insights to optimize experiences and content.

Zesty.io does not directly offer e-commerce functionality but integrates with leading
e-commerce platforms including Commercetools and BigCommerce. Clients can
integrate core features such as cart functionality and payment processing, as well
as complementary applications such as Product and Inventory Management (PIM)
systems. Zesty.io also integrates with payment gateways like Stripe.

A Next.js Starter provides a one-click integration for Zesty.io and Next.js, helping
teams to build React websites more quickly and easily.

TECHNOLOGIES
Zesty.io is based on React and Next.js in the front end and Golang, Node and PHP in
the backend. The company has also started shipping WebAssembly to take advantage
of edge computing.

DEPLOYMENT MODELS
Zesty.io is a cloud-native solution. It can also be hosted on a client’s private cloud
configuration with support for AWS, Azure and GCP platforms. It supports multiple
tenants out of the box.

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PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS

Stack Integration
Zesty.io is designed to be API-first, which allows it to be extremely flexible when it
comes to integrating with virtually any technology stack.

Zesty.io’s core stack technology frameworks are JavaScript-based: Next.js/React

and Nuxt.js Vue for presentation plus Node.js for SDK implementation. Moreover,
Zesty.io operates a full set of APIs, which are agnostic to any stack.

Content & Experience APIs

The platform offers four ways to consume content:
• eRead/Write Rest APIs
• JSON Get APIs
• Direct integrations to Next.js or Nuxt.js APIs
• GraphQL APIs for presentation content and search on content models.
Although the GraphQL option was released in 2019, Zesty.io says that they have
found customers have such an easy time with other API options that they are less
inclined to deal with the complexities of GraphQL.

Zesty.io provides full documentation and active Software Development Kits for all
APIs (Content, Presentation, Media, Account Management).
• Administration: Full Rest API for accounts management, permissions, creation,
invites and more.
• Back Office/Content Management: Full Rest API for content modeling,
auditing, publishing, webhooks, code, settings, versions and more.
• Delivery — Content / Assets: Full RPC API to upload content of any size,
automated to global CDN delivery with full API capabilities to modify image
sizes, cropping, colors, rotation and filters. There are various API options for
content consumption: Rest, GraphQL, custom JSON and SEO meta editing, as
well as integration APIs to popular frameworks like Next.js.
• Delivery — Marketing/Personalization: Presentation APIs can be customized
to accept marketing parameters like tags or persona types, which will result
in personalized results or randomized A/B options. Content APIs can render
experiences for email marketing.
• Delivery — Commerce: Zesty.io APIs work with popular commerce solutions.
Import/export ingestion of data can be set up to synchronize inventory IDs for
presentation matching. The Content API can generate embeddables to inject
microexperiences into product pages.

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In terms of the migration of content entities, automated scripts are available for most
popular CMS systems. There is also a Node SDK that allows for bulk operations to
support migrations.

Support for Headless

Zesty.io has offered a full headless option from the beginning. Its native WebEngine
capabilities offer the opportunity for a hybrid headless approach.

ECOSYSTEM
Clients
Clients include Sony, Epic Games, Uber, BJ's Wholesalers, Phoenix Suns, Rocket
League. Kin Insurance, OpenX and Rhyme. Focus sectors include fintech and
insurance. Clients tend to be mid-market and enterprise size companies. Zesty.io says
the platform is “built for rapidly-growing companies looking to scale to new markets,
grow their brand and connect with customers faster.”

The platform may not be a good fit for smaller businesses who may find that the
number of tools available and relative costs do not suit their needs.

Zesty.io can be used for B2E use cases such as intranets and portals, although this
only counts for about 10% of overall business.

Clients can purchase subscriptions both directly from Zesty.io amd through partners.
In terms of migrating to Zesty.io, training and support is included in the license.
However, clients have the option to use agency partners or work directly with Zesty.
io, which offers white glove migration services.

Partners
Zesty.io has a partner network consisting of services agencies, technical
implementation partners and digital marketing companies. Partners include Blue Pixel
Creates, Simple Focus, Tandem Theory and Surfcode. However, the partner network
is smaller than some of the other providers featured in this guide.

Marketplace
Zesty.io launched a new marketplace facility in the summer of 2022 where apps,
templates, modules and extensions can be accessed. Categories include Commerce,
Analytics, Security, Frameworks, DAM, SEO, A/B Testing, Personalization and Search.
Zesty.io continues to grow their marketplace with key partners and integrators. New
additions are considered based on customer feedback and requests.

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Extensions & Contributions

Zesty.io is designed to be extensible. It also supports webhook requests that can be
integrated with client’s systems. Zesty.io offers a number of key integrations with
partners including:
• CRM: Salesforce
• Analytics: Google Analytics 4,, Adobe and Splunk Analytics
• Commerce: CommerceTools and BigCommerce
• Single Sign-On: Okta, Google, GitHub and Microsoft.
• DAM: Bynder, Amazon, GCP and more

STRENGTHS
• Zesty.io is well-placed to support headless and hybrid headless scenarios.
• Zesty.io has a strong reputation for being easy to learn and use for editors, admins
and marketers.
• Zesty.io provides a flexible, scalable and potentially cost-effective option for
organizations looking to create multi-channel and multi-site experiences and is
already serving some high-profile brands.
• Zesty.io provides different API and Next.js options for integrating content in the
platform, suiting the preferred approach of different developer teams.
• The platform comes with a range of features aimed at marketers including in-line
editing on the Live Editor, automated SEO, Duo mode and more.
• Some integrations such as the Google Analytics 4 integration deliver high value.

CHALLENGES
• Zesty.io is significantly smaller than some of the other DXP providers in this guide,
with a less extensive partner ecosystem. Larger global and complex companies
requiring extensive implementation support may need to check whether partners
can offer the levels of support they expect.
• Zesty.io comes with fewer native features than some of the other DXPs in the guide.
• Zesty.io may be less suitable for smaller organizations or those that are not ready to
embrace a headless approach.

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TRAJECTORY
Zesty.io continues to invest in the platform, adding new features as well as
extending its partner network. A new marketplace launched in 2022 and continues
to grow with some key offerings such as the integration with Google Analytics 4.
Other newer features across the Zesty.io platform include the ChatGPT integration,
the new Layouts interface and a refresh of the DAM. We expect that new features
will continue to be rolled out going forward.

Other focus areas for investment include:

• Real-time editing for content managers and search marketers
• An advanced audit trail facility, offering a historical view of edits across all
content, settings and code in a Zesty.io instance, team productions tracking
and automated reports.

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SOURCES
Main
• CMSWire (2023). State of the Digital Customer Experience Report.

• Vendor Interviews and questionnaires. (2023).

Further Reading:
• Bennett, R. (2023). “Does the Integrated Enterprise DXP Still Hold Value in the Composable Era?”

• Bhimani, R. (2023). “DXP vs. Web CMS: What's the Difference and What's Your Choice?”

• Clark, S. (2023). “The Benefits — and Challenges — of Composable Digital Experience Platforms.”

• Nicastro, D. (2023). “Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs): What to Know.”

• Nicastro, D. (2023). “Emerging Trends Shaping the Future of Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs).”

• Weldon, G. (2023). “Decoding AI-Driven Personalization: Setting Realistic DXP Expectations.”

• McQueeny, M. (2022). “8 Things to Know About Composable DXP.”

• Remekie, S. (2022). “Composable: The Marketer’s Perspective and Roadmap.”

• Torres, J. (2022). “What's Your Definition of a Digital Experience Platform?”

• Bennett, R. (2021). “What Is a Composable DXP?”

• Nicastro, D. (2021). “What Marketers Need for the Digital Experience Platforms Multivendor Reality.”

• Nicastro, D. (2021). “Why Cloud & Governance Matter When Scaling Digital Experience Platforms.”

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