Digital Experience Platforms Anchor Your Digital Presence

Today, the proliferation of customer touchpoints, applications, and digital interactions demands a new technology architecture. We call this architecture a digital experience platform. For most large organizations, digital experience platforms include web and mobile touchpoints today, though advanced firms are expanding their digital presence, with retailers implementing digital walls or manufacturers empowering customers with mobile apps, for example. For those firms embracing the business technology (BT) agenda — technology designed to win, serve, and retain customers — the broader picture is not technology at all, it’s the customer life cycle.

While each organization must build its own business case, one large retailer told us that mobile customers triggered its multiyear digital experience initiative. Looking at three years of double-digit annual growth in mobile traffic, it became a business-critical challenge to realign digital experience technology with this always-on digital customer. In the next 18 months, this retailer is stitching together marketing, commerce, and customer service to better serve the customer across the life cycle. It’s the biggest technology program the company has ever tackled.

Digital Experience Platforms Must Meet Six Key Needs

With the customer at the center, a digital experience platform architecture will help to align strategies, teams, processes, and technology to meet this integration imperative with six primary themes (see Figure 1):

1. Coordinate content, customer data, and core services to drive reuse and quality
2. Unify marketing, commerce, and service processes to improve practitioner workflows.
3. Deliver contextually and share targeting rules to unify the “glass.”
4. Share front-end code across digital touchpoints to manage a common user experience.
5. Link data and analytics to add insight and drive action.
6. Manage code and extensions for maximum reuse while avoiding over-customization.

The Technology Landscape Vying To Meet DX Platform Demands Attention

The Technology Landscape Vying To Meet DX Platform Demands Attention Digital experience vendors recognize the need for a broad, well-integrated set of capabilities and have gone on a spending spree to either buy or build this out. Vendors hope to expand their relationships within an account and become “sticky” to stakeholders across technology, marketing, and business roles. Despite Forrester’s belief that 1) vendors still have a long way to go on integration, and 2) an “all-in-one” platform is almost never practical given ever-present legacy technology constraints, organizational politics, and limited budgets, we firmly believe core capabilities and solid integration chops matter.

Forrester maintains that platform promises — common tooling, reusable assets, shared data models, short implementation times, and limited training — need not be limited to a single-vendor strategy. And yet, if your organization has existing investments with a technology vendor, it’s likely they can make a good case to sell you additional products to extend your capabilities. It’s now imperative to ask the following questions: How well integrated is the portfolio? How deep are the native capabilities? How much weight should prebuilt integration be given?

Digital experience Platform Market evaluation Overview

After examining past research, user need assessments, and vendor and expert interviews, we developed a comprehensive set of evaluation criteria. We evaluated vendors against 40 criteria, which we grouped into three high-level buckets:

1. Current offering. We evaluated on core capabilities, including content, commerce, analytics, marketing, service, and customer data; supporting capabilities, including digital asset management, search, social depth, testing and optimization, product information management, portal, global/localization, and mobile app platform; platform quality and consistency, including platform integration, practitioner toolkit, developer toolkit, security and permissions, multichannel delivery, codebase consistency, customer data management, dashboards and reporting, content integration, technical operations, extensions and components, and APis.
2. Strategy. We evaluated each vendor’s strategy on vision, rationalization strategy, commercial terms, account services, upgrade and release management, cloud deployment model, services partners, technology partners, and reference customer assessment.
3. Market presence. We evaluated market presence based on customer base, product revenue, product revenue growth, and global presence.

We Evaluated The Best And Biggest Vendors In The Market

Forrester included 10 vendors in our digital experience platform assessment: Acquia, Adobe, Demandware, ePiServer, iBM, Oracle, SAP hybris, Salesforce, SDl, and Sitecore. Demandware chose not to fully participate in the process, so we placed their solution in the Forrester Wave based on our knowledge from past analysis and publicly available information. each vendor has

1. A portfolio of strong products comprising digital experience platforms. We evaluated vendors with at least three strong products from the core of a digital experience platform: content, marketing, commerce, service, analytics, or customer data
2. A go-to-market strategy that solves for digital experience challenges. each platform or portfolio of products works across multiple core areas within the digital experience landscape.
3. Prebuilt integration between owned products. Owned and third-party products must communicate. each platform has a minimum level of open standards support to enable integration with legacy systems and other digital experience delivery solutions.
4. Reference customers with at least $1 billion in revenue. Each vendor must be able to provide enterprise customer references to attest to the platform’s capabilities and viability
5. Mindshare among Forrester’s enterprise customers. The vendors we evaluated are frequently mentioned in Forrester client inquiries, shortlists, consulting projects, and case studies.

Digital Experience Platforms Are Rapidly Evolving

We have changed our evaluation criteria and weightings to reflect our enterprise customers’ evolving needs. We assessed the core and supporting capabilities that anchor a digital experience platform and increased the contribution of integration, extensibility, APIs, and connector frameworks in order to evaluate the strength of the broader portfolio. We found substantial changes in the products and market since our last evaluation in 2014:

• The outlines of the platform are coming into clearer focus. Every vendor in this evaluation has at least three of the six building blocks we deem important to a digital experience platform: content, commerce, marketing, service, analytics, and customer data.2 But most vendors anchor their platform with content, marketing or commerce, and customer data management.
• Some vendors joined and some left the list of digital experience platforms. We removed vendors that have strengths in individual areas but not across our definition, and added EPiServer because of its efficacy and platform breadth. This market is still very much a work in progress, with no vendor showing clear leadership in the evaluation.
• Vendors lead in some areas and lag in others leading to a bunched overall lineup. No vendor has best-of-breed offerings in all six core building blocks, which leads to a neck-and-neck race in some cases. Overcome this by customizing the Wave spreadsheet to reflect your key requirements so vendors with the products you need bubble up the list.
• Most vendors have embraced the cloud as a primary deployment option. Almost every vendor already was or is now committed to platform-as-a-service (PaaS). This is a major benefit to companies looking to move quickly, run the newest cost, and deploy at scale.
• Product rationalization — not acquisition — defined the dynamic in 2015. Every vendor showed a more unified practitioner, administrative, and development experience. The vendors have more work to do here, particularly for on-premises deployments.

We also found consistent gaps in what enterprises need from a digital experience platform:

• Mobile app support is still nascent or missing. Every vendor tells a responsive web design story. But mobile moments need personal, contextual, and immediate support. We saw little understanding that mobile is more than small web. When it comes to mobile apps, IBM, Oracle, and SAP lead with mobile infrastructure platforms.
• Most lack a rationalized data story. One of the biggest challenges in building a portfolio through acquisition is rationalizing the core resources — content, data, integration, and security. While we saw big advances in security and some in content, we saw gaps in the strategy and capabilities to create a single customer view. However, every vendor is investing here, so the situation next year, particularly with cloud offerings, will be much better.
• Analytics and content integration is very much a work in progress. Betting on web analytics is not a strategy. Neither is point-to-point content integration. While some vendors showed solid analytics or content hub functionality, all vendors have work to do.
• Customer service scenarios are underserved. The customer life cycle is more than discovery and purchase. Forrester’s customers need to integrate customer care and service. Vendors need to improve their ability to help.

This evaluation of the digital experience platforms market is intended to be a starting point only. We encourage clients to view detailed product evaluations and adapt criteria weightings to fit their individual needs through the Forrester Wave Excel-based vendor comparison tool.

Vendor Profiles

Leaders

Adobe’s integrated platform leads the market, but mostly supports marketing. San Jose, California-based Adobe has established a platform of best-of-breed technologies that support marketing activities. This portfolio includes web content management (WCM), testing and optimization, analytics, audience management, social publishing, and campaign management. Beyond the scope of this research, its portfolio also includes ad-serving and video broadcast technologies. Adobe’s core services strategy standardizes some product engineering and user interface (UI) efforts. Adobe’s biggest gaps in support of customer acquisition are a strong focus on business-to-consumer (B2C) markets and a lack of commerce offering; it continues to rely on partnerships. Adobe also has little in terms of a customer service offering.

Adobe’s strategy matches its offerings: heavy on marketing-related technology, such as targeting, mobile, and campaigns, but light on customer service. Adobe states that its main investment in the next 18 months will be an initiative to consolidate all customer data into a unified data platform with a singular runtime and computation environment on top of the data. Adobe outshines the other evaluated vendors when it comes to services partners, though some of these partners have begun to complain about Adobe’s cost and complexity, leaving potential openings for competitors. Adobe remains a fit for companies with sophisticated marketing needs that require best-of-breed solutions — and with the budget to support them.

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Strong Performers

Salesforce offers a sales, service, and marketing platform, but needs more integration. San Francisco-based Salesforce leverages much of its ExactTarget acquisition to tell a DX story, but is starting to piece together a much broader narrative. Salesforce remains the odd duck in this evaluation, as it does not have its own delivery tier in the form of a WCM or eCommerce engine. While Salesforce remains a powerhouse on sales and service, and the Marketing Cloud has many loyal customers, the integration between these clouds and marketing is not fully executed — lacking common tooling, architecture, or code base. Fortunately, as a native cloud platform, the robust APIs and extensions owned by the sales and service clouds overcome some challenges, but even this approach is not shared across the portfolio today.

We view Salesforce’s vision as one of the most likely to provide large organizations with the tool set to realize digital transformation goals. However, as a PaaS platform with a healthy technology partner ecosystem, Salesforce shows its true strategic strength. Among this field of competitors, Salesforce is the closest to true PaaS, limited by its proprietary code development strategy. This strategy enables confident expansion into areas like mobile and platform that others have be unable to tame. However, with a hodgepodge of commercial terms and product strategies, the broader portfolio is hard to wrap your arms around. But even without the connection to the PaaS offering, ultimately Salesforce owns important, industry-leading solutions for sales, service, and marketing that support digital experiences.

Oracle’s integration across commerce, content, and campaigns hinges on cloud. Redwood Shores, California-based Oracle has continued its aggressive acquisition streak for its digital experience delivery platform. Last year we cited Oracle’s eCommerce strength, but after this past year’s investments — including BlueKai and Maxymizer— they now boast one of the largest marketing capabilities portfolios. Oracle’s work to leverage all its acquisitions in an integrated fashion is patchy at best, but the bright spots are unmistakably in its cloud products where it has unified API management, UI, permissions, and technical tooling. Unfortunately, most cloud functionality is new (not yet to beta) and doesn’t include the entire portfolio — currently missing is the WebCenter Sites product line.

Oracle’s acquisition strategy has a history of underinvesting in the acquired product; but in this evaluation we’re starting see glimpses of the turnaround strategy, and it is cloud. Oracle’s cloud product strategy appears to have good technical bones and the “CX cloud” management has the influence to push architectural changes to each product team. Conversely, the licensed products demand heavy investment with services partners and while Oracle boasts a number of traditional systems integrators (SIs), clients tell us that they struggle to find consistent quality in its services partners.

While legacy, enterprise scenarios remain valid for complex CRM and portal products, Oracle’s CX Cloud strategy is still currently a best fit for organizations focused on commerce-driven use cases. In parallel, marketing automation, customer data management, and targeting are rapidly pushing Oracle into marketing discussions.

Demandware’s cloud and partner strategies are strong, but pricing limits relevance. Burlington, Massachusetts-based Demandware has a 10-year track record as an enterprise B2C eCommerce solution. Demandware’s pure software-as-a-service (SaaS) strategy provides a common data layer, common user interface, and common API set. Demandware’s developer and API strategy is strong, if somewhat rigid. Demandware’s extension strategy has paid off with a robust marketplace, supported by Demandware’s technology partner certification process. This marketplace strategy is increasingly critical to customer’s broader DX success.

Demandware continues to invest deeper into commerce as it moves into the store. These technologies combine with its SaaS delivery model and revenue-sharing-only commercial model to form the most laser-focused strategy in our evaluation, limiting relevance to B2C commerce. Beyond this, Demandware’s multichannel delivery relies heavily on its Link technology marketplace to extend its functionality. Demandware’s services partner network (Link solution partners) include some global players, such as Accenture, Cognizant, Razorfish, and SapientNitro.

Demandware is most relevant to those in the retail space who want to build out their broader digital experience delivery capabilities centered on commerce, as opposed to a broader platform supporting more of the customer life cycle. Note that Demandware did not participate in the research for this report, so Forrester based its findings on past briefings, products demos, and customer reference interviews.

Acquia’s cloud-first, open source platform lacks breadth but emphasizes integration. Boston-based Acquia extends the open source Drupal product to digital experience platform with cloud deployments, enterprise-scale support, and some additional products. Its strengths are in the areas of WCM and social depth tools. However, little of the rest of Acquia’s functionality — such as commerce, optimization, or mobile in particular — is on par with the other solutions we evaluated. But Acquia emphasizes integrations with third-party products to meet digital experience challenges. And with solid partner support and a horde of Drupal developers available, it’s a viable plan. Unlike our 2014 evaluation, customers report using Acquia as the center of their platform, with integrations in place.

Acquia’s stated vision is being an open, cloud-first, integration-centric platform. This is appealing for companies looking to anchor digital experiences with content and community, but extend it out to commerce and service though integration. Acquia is cloud-first and offers the product as PaaS for more than 800 customers and a SaaS service for more than 3,000 customers. Acquia’s biggest strategy gap is a lack of focus on the complete customer life cycle, particularly for customer service. Given its lower price point, cloud options, and rapid growth, Acquia has the potential to play a significant role in the digital experience platform market, particularly for companies with hundreds or thousands of sites. Acquia is best suited for companies looking for a digital experience platform they can utilize in a land-and-expand strategy

SAP hybris branches out into marketing with a raft of not-yet-mature products. Munich, Germany-based SAP hybris has traditionally played in the eCommerce space with a best-of-breed offering, but is now expanding into marketing. Launched in February 2015, SAP hybris Marketing brings a customer data-centric approach to personalizing content, but lacks some email, social and automation capabilities when compared with competing marketing products, nor does it share common code or UI with the core platform. SAP hybris has also continued to invest in platform extensibility and integration via a data hub to connect to various back ends and this makes it a logical choice for many B2B manufacturers currently leveraging SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP).

SAP hybris’s vision focuses on adding marketing and microservices to extend to be a full frontoffice platform. SAP hybris-as-a-service (YaaS) will be a cloud-based extension environment to lighten up the core product for faster iteration. SAP hybris Profile will roll out on YaaS to improve the platform’s data management capabilities for better personalization and targeting. Outside of YaaS, SAP hybris’ cloud strategy has not kept pace against the competition’s PaaS and SaaS strategies due to a lack of autoscaling, on-demand deployment, and seamless upgrades.

But given its backing from some of the biggest, global agencies and SIs, SAP hybris remains a solid choice for large, product-centric organizations who want to enable omnichannel strategies.

Sitecore touts a flexible platform, but commerce is not yet battle tested. Copenhagen-based Sitecore offers a platform that combines its WCM, digital marketing, and commerce solutions. Sitecore focuses on technologies supporting customer acquisition, as opposed to supporting later stages of the customer life cycle, such as service. Its WCM offering is best-of-breed, while adjacent functionality such as email campaign management, personalization, testing/optimization, and social capabilities is midlevel. The investment in a scalable data architecture is paying off by adding credibility to data-driven-marketing scenarios, while other areas like the mobile software development kit (SDK) strategy fail to push the envelope. But unlike others in this evaluation, all of these offerings — with the exception of commerce — were designed and built (or OEMed) to work together.

Sitecore’s marketing-centric vision aims to leverage data from all Sitecore-supported customer touchpoints in order to build a customer view. Sitecore has begun to talk about more predictive functionality in its strategy, with suggested next best actions in some of its marketing tools. Its hybrid cloud strategy focuses on Azure, but the software doesn’t take full advantage of the platform yet, and support for multitenant SaaS is at least several years away. Its content-andcommerce story is nascent; one customer reference expressed their fears of “being a guinea pig” when considering using both products together. Sitecore doesn’t have much of a story around third-party integration, either. But customer references in general are very strong, and Sitecore also has an extensive service partner network, second only to Adobe’s.

Sitecore is a fit for companies looking for an all-in-one package as opposed to those looking to bolt on their own best-of-breed components to a content or commerce offering.

IBM’s portfolio rationalization slowly accelerates via cloud, but lacks shared urgency. Armonk, NY-based IBM is now rationalizing the acquisitions it has made over the past several years. It is simplifying and linking the products and commercial terms, implementing mobile apps, adopting the cloud and a continuous delivery release model, and building a content integration hub. Customers building a complex B2C or B2B experience or employee or partner portal will find much of what they need in IBM’s portfolio. IBM has made strides since our last evaluation in its cloud version with better mobility, simpler practitioner tools, tighter security, and stronger content integration. The on-premises implementations are still a collection, however, requiring WebSphere, security, and integration skills. IBM needs to continue to implement customer profiles and complete the content hub.

IBM defines digital experience platforms much more broadly than most of the vendors in this evaluation, emphasizing consumer, business customer, partner, and employee experiences across the customer life cycle. It also embraces the cloud for most products, running as PaaS IBM Bluemix Cloud. Another part of IBM’s strategy is its services for strategy, design, development, and implementation. IBM must continue to rationalize its tool sets, particularly on-premises, and build relationships and connections to third-party tools. It should also invest more in agency partnerships outside of IBM Interactive Experience and OgilvyOne — though it seems disinclined to do so. IBM is best fit for companies that have existing IBM relationships and products and that look to expand digital strategies beyond marketing and commerce.

Contenders

SDL makes strides with the cloud but is small with only recently revitalized growth. UK-based SDL is winning new business, particularly in travel and hospitality, with its SDL web product — an integration of a series of acquisitions hosted by SDL as a PaaS. SDL has strong WCM tools and its BluePrinting and language translation capabilities are best-of-breed. The company has also invested in analytics, social listening, marketing, and content integration. However, SDL does not go far beyond its core marketing and content roots. SDL must build stronger commerce and customer service integrations as well as customer data management and on-premises product rationalization.

SDL’s strategy focuses on cloud deployments, global customers, and a refined list of industries, including travel and hospitality, manufacturing, and automotive. This builds on the company’s bestof-breed language translation capabilities. The company’s executive leadership is in transition, though Forrester believes the company will maintain its consolidated product organization with a revitalized focus on North America to complement its European installed base. SDL still has work to repair its partner ecosystem — it lacks established partnerships and integrations with many bestof-breed technology vendors and service providers. SDL is a best fit for organizations looking to support global, non-transactional digital experience delivery initiatives with heavy localization needs

EPiServer supports low-complexity scenarios, but won’t hit next gear until 2016. Stockholmand Nashua, New Hampshire-based EPiServer, which is now the combination of EPiServer and Ektron, is a new entrant in our evaluation this year. The company has a solid .NET offering that is comprised of good WCM and basic marketing and commerce that is well-suited for customers with midlevel needs. Product strengths include content, APIs, and developer tools. The company rightfully avoids complex enterprise scenarios but could still improve its offering with better mobile support, analytics, and customer data management as well as prebuilt integrations with marketing, search, and commerce.

The firm’s strategy is centered on the cloud, increasingly running as a PaaS on Microsoft Azure. The cloud version benefits from continuous delivery. The company has a strong partner strategy to sell and serve customers in 30 countries, as well as more than 25,000 developers registered in its network. We are increasingly optimistic that the company is navigating the tough merger and leadership transitions gracefully, though the product rationalization is a work in progress. The next two releases in Q4 2015 and Q1 2016 will determine the success of this effort. Companies with well-defined, content-rich scenarios without advanced marketing or deep commerce needs should look at EPiServer, and look again next year.

Lessons Learned From Customer Interviews

When it comes to vendor satisfaction among its customers, we found reoccurring themes that served as a cautionary tale:

Integration is more difficult than the vendors claim. Customers found that integration among customer-facing engagement applications and to back-end systems of record was more challenging than anticipated. One reference stated that the cost to integrate the vendor’s product with existing third-party solutions was cost-prohibitive to address. Another reference mentioned that trying to integrate the vendor’s own products with one another was causing problems, to their surprise. As one reference put it, “The integration is only as good as the team that implements it.”

Service partners, not vendor professional services, are vital to successful integration. The message from customer references was loud and clear: They regard service partners such as Accenture and Razorfish Global as instrumental partners throughout the integration process. The service partners knew their needs better than the platform vendors did. References also noted that vendors’ professional services fell short in their expectations for two main reasons: lack of available support technicians and online libraries/user support groups that vendors infrequently maintain.

Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Customers that found themselves buying into a platform’s suite of products believed they bit off more than they could chew. Running into integration issues, slower-than-expected feature rollouts, and in some cases realizing a product did not run as advertised caused customers to rethink the use of additional products. One reference told us, “Sadly it isn’t what we expected it to be. We thought it was going to support [our systems] more fully.” A number of references told us unfortunately, they were paying for features they weren’t using.

Aggressive sales teams are off-putting. No romantic partner wants to rush into a long-term commitment weeks in a relationship. Similarly, customers don’t want to constantly “be sold” new products at every opportunity. Their opinion of a vendor changed when sales teams aggressively pushed new products on them before rolling out the ones they purchased. One customer put it bluntly, “When we talk with our account managers they’re always trying to sell us something new. We’re happy to talk with them and go out to dinner, but we don’t want an iPad shoved in our face while we’re eating.”

Other Vendors Worthy Of Consideration

The digital experience platform market is multidimensional with vendors focused on every industry, capability, and stage in the customer life cycle. We track hundreds of vendors, including those with point solutions to augment a platform, like Qubit’s or Persado’s; established vendors in specialized markets like portal vendors Backbase and Liferay; 25 other WCM vendors including Crownpeak, Hippo, and Magnolia; and vendors with strong products that AD&D professionals may wish to consider, including some vendors we evaluated in last year’s Wave:

Digital River. Minnetonka, Minnesota-based Digital River has been in the eCommerce space for 20 years, differentiating from its competition by acting as the merchant of record on behalf of clients. Given the limited scope of the Digital River platform — combined with the fact that the solution is 100% SaaS — the core traits are strong: a common UI, data layer, reporting/analytics, and release cycle. However, while touting broad global commerce support, Digital River’s services partner relationships are currently limited, weakening the chances for the largest customers, with large SKU counts. Two recent moves suggest Digital River is trying to invigorate growth: Digital River both went private and partnered with Adobe Experience Manager in early 2015. While those pan out, Digital River remains a good fit for organizations who need a tightly focused commerce solution — often for digital or high-tech goods— to complement their broader digital presence.

Hewlett Packard. Hewlett Packard Enterprise inherited the Autonomy knowledge management assets, while TeamSite and the other HP Marketing Optimization products went to HP Inc. While the individual products are strong, it’s not clear how PC- and printer-centric HP Inc. will approach enterprise digital experience customers or partners. However, the company continues to invest in the products with improved practitioner tools, mobile support, and integration with its marketing software. The HP digital experience product set today is best suited to existing HP customers or content-centric enterprises with large, complex requirements that demand heavy customization.

Intershop. A stalwart in the eCommerce space, the Jena, Germany-based company complements a top-of-the-line commerce platform with relatively rudimentary marketing tools. WCM, campaign management, product information management (PIM), digital asset management (DAM), testing, and social capabilities are native to the Intershop platform, but in recognition of the industry demands, Intershop partnered with Adobe Experience Manager in 2014. As a single-solution offering, Intershop stands out through a consistent user interface across nearly all of its platform components, and embedded capabilities for both personalization and analytics that are necessities for data-driven marketers. Limited North American market share works against Intershop, but its relatively low price point is a bright spot.

OpenText. Waterloo, Ontario-based OpenText has more than 20 years’ experience in the enterprise information, content, and process management software markets. OpenText’s platform spans functionality across WCM, DAM, campaign management, social depth, and via a partnership with SAP, PIM technology. The company’s strengths are in its core business process management and content management capabilities and potential to work in secure portals for employees, partners, and B2B customers. OpenText is a good fit for portals and B2B organizations where technology management groups are leading the charge and have established OpenText relationships due to heavy content and process needs.