Acquia has updated to its Open Digital Experience Platform (DXP). The updates are designed to help marketers and developers architect the composable enterprise. This includes launch of Acquia Experience Platform, including Acquia CMS, an agile enterprise content management system (CMS) built on Drupal. In addition, major enhancements to Acquia Drupal Cloud and Acquia Marketing Cloud. These together comprise Acquia Open DXP, promise to make digital experiences faster, more data-driven and easier to build.
Architecting the composable enterprise
Organisations today are more focused than ever on creating custom digital experiences for customers, employees, citizens and students. To do this, they must be able to assemble sets of packaged business capabilities into new digital experiences quickly. The new Acquia Open DXP supports composable digital experiences that are agile and flexible. It gives organisations the first-mover advantage they need to experiment and rapidly adapt to ever-changing customer needs.
“Acquia’s vision is of a world where brands can personalise everything,” said Dries Buytaert, co-founder and CTO at Acquia. “The only way to do this is through composable architectures, which are open, connected and flexible. This allows fast assembly of digital services. Acquia Open DXP puts the power back in the hands of creators. To enable them to focus on building distinctive and modern digital experiences at scale.”
Providing the foundation for Drupal Cloud
New to Drupal Cloud, the Acquia Experience Platform includes Acquia CMS, Site Studio and Cloud IDE. All run on the Acquia Cloud Platform, the only Kubernetes-native, autoscaling cloud platform for digital experiences. The platform includes:
- Acquia CMS. A brand new CMS that harnesses cutting-edge capabilities from the Drupal community in a simple, out-of-the-box experience. Acquia CMS harnesses learnings from thousands of successful customer deployments. The platform incorporates pre-built content types, roles, and permissions to speed marketers’ time to delivery.
- Acquia Site Studio. The only no-code tool available within an enterprise CMS, supporting anyone to build websites without the need for technical expertise. Includes pre-set components and design templates to ensure brand consistency.
- Acquia Cloud IDE. Purpose-built development environment for Drupal to expedite development timelines and reduce barriers to entry for Drupal development.
To help customers utilise the Acquia Experience Platform, Acquia Migrate is a new UI to update Drupal 7 sites to Drupal 9. The company says it is up to 80% faster for sites with minimal custom code.
Marketing Cloud improves efficiency
With Acquia CDP at the core, Marketing Cloud includes innovations expected to help marketers tailor campaigns to their customers. This is achieved through data, machine learning and more. Updates include:
- Unified analytics. Acquia Personalisation leverages the same analytics platform as Acquia CDP to provide a comprehensive understanding of customers and business KPIs. It also enables deeper insight into the performance of marketing campaigns.
- New machine learning models. New fuzzy clustering capabilities allow customers to be segmented into multiple machine learning clusters.
- Reporting enhancements. New campaign performance reporting provides insights into the results from campaigns powered by CDP data.
- Compliance workflows. A new consumer data erasure request UI and API make it more efficient to support GDPR and CCPA deletion requests. It also confirms that deletion requests were handled properly.
Enterprise Times: What this means for business?
The composable commerce movement is on the move in 2021. A modern approach by which brands are empowered to “compose” solutions from multiple vendors, according to their exact business requirements. To date, it is unclear if Acquia fits into the movement. It’s open digital experience platform enables organizations to build, host, analyse and communicate with their customers at scale. This can be done through websites and other digital applications. At the moment the company is attempting to cover all the content bases.
The company still offers a traditional monolithic CMS. However, increasingly organisations are demanding API based headless solutions. Acquia now provides a decoupled CMS solution for organisations looking to deploy content across a variety of digital channels. But still have a desire to use javascript front end. Lastly, the company is also pushing a hybrid CMS for enterprises that have progressed beyond traditional CMS. But are not prepared for a fully decoupled CMS. Hence the middle ground of a hybrid CMS.
Many other experience management competitors have wholly-heartedly embraced the MACH route – Microservices, APIs, Cloud-native SaaS, and Headless. However, Acquia appears to be trying to still keep its fingers in all of the content management, experience pie.
