By Koen Roos, 21 September 2021
Nowadays organizations are looking for technology that supports new investments to generate value for them instead of keeping the technology up to date.
Traditional “monolithic” solutions are very development-heavy and complex solutions. They have high running and maintenance costs. These platforms include a lot of functionalities that should work together within one big platform, resulting in a complex setup that can reduce flexibility when wanting to launch new initiatives.
Gartner defines a digital experience platform (DXP) as “an integrated and cohesive piece of technology designed to enable the composition, management, delivery and optimization of contextualized digital experiences across multi-experience customer journeys.”
Most of the time, the base for a DXP is a content management system with modules for capturing contact data, email marketing, marketing automation and personalization embedded in one solution. The goal is serving content to different channels, enriched with data from other applications.
These platforms are called “heavyweight” for a reason: the applications have a wide range of functionalities and is rather complex by nature. The problem with this is that you miss out on agility and flexibility in times where a fast ideation-implementation-learn paradigm is critical.
The last few years we’ve seen a transition from marketing technology vendors that are switching from perpetual software package licenses to subscription-based licenses and defining a strategy for cloud-first and SaaS offerings. Kentico Xperience announced this, Sitecore has transformed their license and product strategy, and headless CMS vendors like Kentico Kontent, Contentful and Umbraco Heartcore have always been SaaS and subscription based.
Nowadays organizations are looking for technology that supports new investments to generate value for them instead of keeping the technology up to date.
If you don’t have to focus on keeping the solution running, you can invest your development efforts and IT resources in creating new solutions that add value for your target audience. To do this, you can use the best and most modern frameworks – think headless, JavaScript front end frameworks, MACH and Jamstack concept. You will need less marketing technology vendor specific experts, often certified, and include a bigger pool of developers with knowledge of these modern frameworks. For integrations with other systems, cloud first concepts can be used.
The recent acquisitions of Sitecore confirm this trend. Sitecore is heading to what they call a “Composable DXP” with SaaS best-of-breed solutions. They acquired Boxever (CDP), Four51 (Headless Commerce), Moosend (marketing automation and emailing) and the most recent acquisition is Reflektion (AI-Powered search).
With a microservices approach, choosing building blocks for your digital architecture enables you to combine the best of breed services that are being used today with the matching core services. This allows for an agile architecture that is flexible to support not only the needs of today, but also those of tomorrow.
Before talking technology, you need to have a clear view of your strategic objectives and goals – short term and long term. You need to consider different aspects, such as including your own development team and their tech stack. Or being compliant with company regulations in terms of technology and security.
Are you looking for guidance to define your future-proof digital architecture? Let’s talk!