Acquia Agrees to Acquire Widen, Advancing Acquia Open Digital Experience Platform (DXP)

Leading DAM and PIM software maker Widen is all set to be part of Acquia Open Digital Experience Platform (DXP). Acquia has announced it will acquire Widen’s cloud-native digital asset management (DAM) and product information management (PIM) software to bring full control to the existing digital content lifecycle. Currently, Widen cloud-based DAM and PIM software enables brands to manage marketing workflows and rapidly expanding digital footprints.

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As per the deal, Widen will be available as part of Acquia Open DXP or as a standalone offering.

Why Acquia Chose Widen to Expand Open Digital Experience Platform (DXP)

Personalization of content and experiences force a majority of content marketers to seek out capabilities beyond existing Martech stacks. A stand-alone DAM and PIM may not serve the purpose if content management teams have to deal with a huge volume of content. To create personalized customer engagement at scale, brands create immense volumes of digital content. That’s why Acquia chose to expand on DXP.

Why You need a DXP?

Traditionally, the DAM simplifies marketers’ access to this content and manages versions and workflow to ensure consistency. But within the context of a DXP, a modern DAM must also provide robust technical capabilities and extensibility. A PIM solution should enable the enrichment of product data with marketing copy and digital assets to easily create branded product content. Together, these capabilities help organizations create and refine distinctive digital experiences based on evolving customer preferences.

At the time of this announcement, Acquia CMO Lynne Capozzi spoke to us on the current trends in DXP and how the latest developments would create new opportunities for digital content creators.

Lynne said, “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.”

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Acquia Open DXP with Widen maximizes the value of digital content 

“Content is the heart of any digital experience,” said Matthew Gonnering, CEO of Widen.

Matthew added, “It influences action across marketing channels; email, social media, content management systems, marketing campaigns, ecommerce, product information management and more. By combining with Acquia, a company that shares Widen’s belief that radical innovation starts with a commitment to customers and the community, we will continue to rapidly innovate our solutions to support the first and only open digital experience platform.”

Widen unites digital assets such as rich media, product information and marketing copy in a single workflow and provides an intuitive interface to democratize access for marketers to all of a brand’s resources. By providing a foundation for collaboration, coordination and control of the full digital content lifecycle, Widen enables marketers and website builders to create richer and more distinctive customer experiences using Acquia Open Digital Experience Platform (DXP).

“Acquia has long been an established leader in managing textual website content. Now, with Widen, we offer world-class capabilities around rich media and product information content,” said Dries Buytaert, Co-founder and CTO of Acquia.

Dries added, “Widen is consistently ranked a leader by industry analysts for vision, execution and market presence. We have numerous joint customers today and believe Widen software will deliver value to Acquia Marketing Cloud and Drupal Cloud customers. We’re excited to welcome the Widen team to the Acquia family and to collaborate with them on Acquia Open DXP.”

“With Widen, we continue to differentiate Acquia Open DXP with enterprise-grade, cloud-native DAM and PIM capabilities,” said Mike Sullivan, President and CEO of Acquia.

Mike added, “We will immediately invest in accelerated development of the Widen solution, and leverage our global capabilities and partner network to bring it to marketing organizations that use Acquia Open DXP to manage, transform and deliver digital assets at scale.”

Today, 700 organizations, including Energizer, New Balance, Crayola and Hootsuite, use Widen solutions to deliver content with confidence.

Widen solutions simplify how marketers create, review, manage, distribute and analyze content across the content lifecycle. Its design and architecture make it uniquely able to support complex marketing workflows and enterprise DXP requirements. These encompass use cases that go beyond managing creative assets to include storing unstructured data such as legal documents, insurance claims and contact lists. The marketing-friendly Widen PIM solution brings product data from creators to customers, centralizing it for syndication across websites, catalogs and ecommerce channels.

Currently, Acquia empowers the world’s most ambitious brands to create digital customer experiences that matter. With open-source Drupal at its core, the Acquia Digital Experience Platform (DXP) enables marketers, developers and IT operations teams at thousands of global organizations to rapidly compose and deploy digital products and services that engage customers, enhance conversions and help businesses stand out.

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