Understanding Digital Experience Platform (DXP) in its Current Context

Today, Acquia announced it signed an agreement to acquire Widen, a leading DAM software provider, and advance into the new era of Digital Experience Platform (DXP). Brands are trying everything in the book to attract and win back customers with exciting new digital interactions. But, is it really working? Not really, as countless reports have pointed out online shoppers are more likely to abandon a brand if it fails to evoke loyalty and emotional connection with products. And, it’s happening way too many times across channels for brands to actually control on their own. They need a DXP to streamline this effect.

Let’s understand DXP better.

At the time of this announcement, we spoke to Acquia’s CMO,  Lynne Capozzi, to get in-depth insights on what DXP is and how DXP capabilities make content personalization workflows so effective in the long run.

Here’s what Lynne had to say about Digital Experience Platform (DXP).

What is the most contemporary definition of DXP? How would adding Widen’s platform to Acquia strengthen your current CXP offerings?

Content is at the heart of all great digital customer experiences, so it was important to us to fully integrate a DAM with our DXP. Doing so enhances Acquia Open DXP in a few ways.

According to Gartner, a digital experience platform (DXP) is an integrated set of technologies, based on a common platform, that provides a broad range of audiences with consistent, secure and personalized access to information and applications across many digital touchpoints.

First, it gives us the best technology on the market for managing content such as images, videos, and PDFs, complementing our historic strength in managing text. It also strengthens our ability to manage assets beyond websites and to support the marketing workflow for teams with hundreds or even thousands of marketers. Finally, it gives us a product information management (PIM) solution to allow marketers and merchants to combine marketing and product info.

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What kind of IT / Cloud integration would customers require to fully benefit from this acquisition? How would this development help you expand your digital footprints, and across which markets [regions] / industries?

Widen solutions are entirely cloud-based and the company already has a Drupal integration. With Widen, Acquia is acquiring a platform that brings a high degree of openness, extensibility, seamless integrations, and robust technical capabilities. We’ll immediately invest in building deep integrations between Widen and the Acquia DXP through Drupal, but also products like Acquia Site Studio, Acquia Campaign Studio and Acquia Personalization.

The Widen product information management (PIM) solution in particular will support Acquia’s work in ecommerce by allowing marketers to infuse product information such as size, color, materials and other specifications with marketing information.

Tell us more about your product roadmap for 2021-22. Where do you see the whole DXP industry heading to, with strong influences from AI, ML and data science?

You’ve seen investments from Acquia in low-code tooling to make creating digital experiences simple, as well as AI and ML to help marketers better understand customer data and create content for each individual. We’re also seeing strong interest in headless and decoupled, as well as technologies that feature open APIs and microservices architectures.

Conclusion

BY acquiring Widen, Acquia could advance with agility into the next era of fast-paced and seamless content experience management and delivery models. We have already seen how Cloud behemoths like Adobe, Sitecore, Salesforce, and Genesys leverage advanced computing and AI ML capabilities to make their DXPs smooth and easy to deploy at all digital points.

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]