If you’re new to the marketplace, the report will help you understand what these technologies can offer, and which DXP best meets your specific needs.
But at 39-minutes long, Gartner’s report is a pretty hefty read - so in the spirit of busy times, we thought it might be useful for us to summarise it.
So, here’s the gist:
DXPs focusing on a more rounded suite of products are showing improvement with Gartner. Shifting from Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to Software-as-as-Service (SaaS) seems to be the smart move for growth. Adobe is a good product, but it’s pricey. You can get the same power from Optimizely and Sitecore, and have budget left over to use the full extent of these platforms.
But wait a minute. If you’re new to all this, maybe we need to back up a step and ask:
What is a DXP?
A Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is a group of cohesive technologies used to deliver digital experiences to consumers. Aimed at optimising user experiences, a DXP’s capabilities include content management, personalisation, analytics, data management and more.
Using a DXP helps you to generate increased success from all your digital touchpoints, supporting your move towards digital maturity. Getting the full whack out of your DXP is crucial if you want to offer a competitive user experience.
The Magic Quadrant
Gartner’s Magic Quadrant positions competing DXPs along two axes, into four key groups: Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries and Niche Players.
Optimizely, Adobe, Acquia and Sitecore sit in the Leaders’ quadrant. The acquisition and product roadmaps coming out of these four organisations points clearly to the fact that composable architecture is a focus area for ensuring growth.
Let’s start with Optimizely
Optimizely’s offering is broad, composable, scalable and transparent in terms of pricing. Customers can start small and grow with Optimizely. It’s a user experience powerhouse that allows brands to improve personalisation and targeting, using actionable insights. A number of strategic acquisitions enables Optimizely to innovate consistently and compete with the more costly DXPs, whether you’re looking for PaaS or SaaS.
What about Sitecore?
Sitecore are making a play for composable and the cloud and are currently moving to a SaaS model. This is an indicator of the demand from organisations wanting to ensure their CDXP is optimised for their business and their goals. Sitecore’s capabilities are broad, with pages and pages of use-cases. They’re a leader for a reason, with an extensive partner network and a fast evolving composable proposition.
Then there’s Adobe
Adobe is a premium product. It’s widely recognised and used and has a broad set of capabilities. The total cost of ownership is high, and the learning curve is steep - but its integration with the full Adobe suite makes collaboration simple.
Acquia
Acquia has an open source DXP based on Drupal Cloud and Marketing Cloud, with a focus on composable architecture. The Drupal community is large, active and proactive. Site Studio is a low-code or no-code experience builder, giving marketers power to circumvent development time.
Recently, Acquia has looked to acquire others such as Widen for DAM to boost its capabilities. However, despite its ‘open’ claims, Acquia’s technology partners are few and innovation is slow, making it a difficult choice, especially if optimisation and analytics are important to you. [RM1]
Salesforce
With excellent market penetration, Salesforce is always going to be in the conversation. Customers who have already invested in Salesforce software benefit from an extensive developer network, making deployment rapid - but this comes at a cost as Salesforce is a premium product. And, when it comes to DXP, they are behind the pace. Having brought multiple products into their suite, deployment time can often take longer than Salesforce make out. The Experience Cloud, which promises to be the glue that holds all of its products together, lacks the functionality its competitors boast.
Oracle
Oracle’s DXP is largely based on its Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience (CX) products. It has a good partner ecosystem, with good content and digital asset management, but a narrowed focus means that competitors focused on a more complete DXP management model have gained the upper hand. In fact, many DXP buyers don’t even list Oracle as a DXP vendor unless they’ve bought several products from them.
OpenText
The OpenText media widget is an excellent tool and a good example of early-stage composability, but they’re behind the race for excellence in customer data, relying on an integration with Google Cloud.
HCL
HCL is a complex product with some issues with speed, responsiveness and coverage of support. That being said, its cloud capabilities have improved tremendously. Due to its complexity however, there is a reliance on HCL partners or HCL themselves for support.
Bloomreach
Bloomreach’s partner network is expanding, but it’s still narrow. Their modular approach to stacks gives clients a more transparent view of what they’re purchasing and facilitates a more incremental approach to DXP implementation. However, their transition from PaaS to SaaS is in its infancy and so far, lacks broad customer adoption.
And the rest?
Niche players, Crownpeak, CoreMedia, Progress, Squizand Kentico all have varied strengths and weaknesses that align themselves to specific business problems. Smaller partner ecosystems seem to be the core cautions.
Still feeling overwhelmed?
Too much information isn’t always a good thing and that’s why experts exist - to help brands find the solutions that best work for them. It’s important to remember that one size rarely fits all, and best-in-class doesn’t necessarily mean best for brand.
As Sitecore and Optimizely Platinum partners, we have a great level of expertise within the DXP space. And, with technology platforms rapidly embracing a move towards composable architecture, UNRVLD is situating itself at the forefront of this change. Our experience stretches from enterprise, modular DXPs such as Sitecore and Optimizely to fully-composable stacks, enabling us to build an agile strategy based upon what is best for your customers. We're helping our clients to engage with their customers across a plethora of different landscapes by shifting the way that they architect. Leveraging technology as an enabler to deliver forward-thinking, user-centric experiences.
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