The Q1 2021 Forrester Wave for Agile CMSes. The content management system category, unsurprisingly, is heavily overlapping digital experience platforms. The leaders are the usual suspects: Adobe, Optimizely, and Acquia. Optimizely is again recognized as a leader in web content management. While Optimizely is technically a digital experience platform or DXP, a core feature set is web content delivery.
Key Acquisitions Contribute to Optimizely Rising in Forrester Wave
Optimizely (formerly Episerver) received high marks for its developer and practitioner tools. Among the acquisitions noted are Idio and Optimizely experimentation tools. Idio, now named Web Content Recommendations, acquired in 2020, provides an AI content recommendation engine to the platform. The combination of Idio and former Optimizely experimentation tools provides customer-valued personalization and content recommendation features.
Key Challenges
Forrester analysts point out that the acquisition and addition of Optimizely’s experimentation tools have “boosted the company’s ability to take a more agile approach to omnichannel content management.” Comparatively, Optimizely lags behind Adobe in two key areas: market presence and workflow and approval capabilities. Adobe acquired Workfront for $1.5 billion in November 2020 to boost its collaboration and orchestration within its DXP.
After recent stumbles, the acquisition is Adobe’s biggest effort to reorient its Experience Cloud division, which includes marketing, advertising and analytics software, toward areas that are growing.
Bloomberg
Of course, the Forrester Wave focuses on the current offering, strategy, and market presence. Other analysts include time to market and return on investment, where Optimizely is a clear leader. As for “market presence,” Optimizely is snowballing in 2021. In February 2021, Optimizely announced the global expansion of its B2B Commerce Cloud offering. We are excited to see Optimizely gaining speed and growing market presence.
