UNRVLD’s Optimizely leadership team were at Opticon San Diego this month to hear the key announcements and innovations from Optimizely following an uncharacteristic 18 months without any acquisitions or major technology integrations. We weren’t disappointed as the 8x DXP Leader for 2023 announced an array of major content updates and One major mission to deliver the world’s first “Operating System for Marketers.”  

Optimizely One

Optimizely has long been lauded for providing powerful, flexible and highly intuitive DXP propositions for Content, Commerce (historically under the EPiServer flag) and more recently Experimentation.  

In announcing Optimizely One, they’ve doubled down in this area, promising to revolutionise the way marketers work, focusing on greater collaboration, efficiency and efficacy by creating a seamless integration and workflow throughout the experience creation process.  

Optimizely One broadens the traditional CMS offering to support the marketer’s needs throughout the content production and promotion lifecycle. By combining the company’s Content Marketing Platform, CMS and Commerce capabilities – as well as DAM, Experimentation, Personalisation and more, Optimizely aim to “unify teams through a single, seamless workflow, embedding AI to accelerate the entire marketing lifecycle.”  

This approach recognises that much of the effort in delivering amazing digital experiences is in creating engaging content which connects with the customer – much of which is typically done before considering how it is delivered within a CMS or Commerce platform.  

The goal to break down barriers between teams, create greater collaboration and support increasingly mature digital operations in an increasingly remote working-centric world is an ambitious but insightful strategy.  

Answering the Composable Question – Optimizely SaaS CMS

The Optimizely One announcement may seem counterintuitive in a world where Composable and MACH architectures are increasingly common and attractive to digital and technology leaders. But Optimizely’s CEO Alex Atzberger and recently appointed Chief Product Officer Rupali Jain were both keen to clarify that while the vision was to create a single seamless experience for marketers, the new product architecture was designed to support organisations who sought Composable and MACH solutions, ensuring optionality for best of breed across the stack.  

To support this, they announced the availability of a Optimizely SaaS CMS, ensuring Optimizely can now be welcomed at the same table as the recent wave of cloud based, SaaS first, Headless CMS options.  

Optimizely's SaaS CMS will be available in Q1 2024, in addition to their long standing PaaS version. It will be supported by a Visual Builder / experience editor which supports commerce scenarios. Optimizely Graph will also be expanded to support more complex builds and integrations in MACH architectures.  

Optimizely One was introduced to create “Flexibility in your tech stack, Simplicity in your workflow”. By supporting open architecture and composability but focusing on collaboration, data centricity and continuous improvement, everyday, we believe Optimizely has set out an impressive vision for the future of the DXP space. UNRVLD is ready to deliver on it.

Read on to our second insight piece from Opticon, revealing more updates around Optimizely's Commerce, Experimentation and AI offering.