Optimizely (formerly Episerver) is rapidly pushing the Digital Experience Platform (DXP) category forward. The merger of companies in 2020 sets up rapid innovation within the space. Here’s a quick list of visionary ideas that may change the DXP landscape in 2021. These are concepts only. Episerver has not released an Optimizely and Episerver integration roadmap publicly.
AB and multivariate testing baked into an enterprise CMS
Optimizely has provided revenue-generating experimentation for years. The combination with Episerver’s CMS greatly increases the odds that a CMS editor will know about experimentation as an out-of-box function. Where Episerver AB testing and self-optimizing blocks have been around for many years, Optimizely increases the tools in the toolbelt by order of magnitude. Episerver, in the few months since the acquisition, has already begun integrating Optimizely and Epi functionality. The early stages are integrations of Content Recommendations and Product Recommendations within Optimizely. The future state promises a complete integration with even more power out-of-box within Episerver itself.
Workflow Testing and Optimizely Full Stack
Full Stack provides users like product managers the power to conduct tests of workflows and deployments without as much reliance on web developers. Imagine changing your membership or subscription flow with less web development needed. Where Episerver DXP already provides a level of DevOps, Optimizely Full Stack promises to increase an Epi DXP user’s ability to control their release cycle.
Today, in Epi DXP environments, deployments are rigid and opinionated. With Full Stack, there’s a potentially game-changing addition to the deployment workflow. We have not seen a competitor provide anything like this for CMS editors. Most managed services platforms like Acquia or WordPress VIP don’t reach this level of sophistication in deployment testing. Optimizely brings testing like one would expect of email marketing to deployments. Imagine a product manager hitting the “deploy button” and watching the machine learn if the deployment is successful before rolling it out to all subscribers. Imagine a product manager rolling back a failed deployment in Epi DXP. This is the age of the possible. If Episerver can integrate the promise of Optimizely Full Stack this would be unparalleled differentiation in the DXP arena.
Optimizely Visual Editor
When Episerver started growing in the North American market around 2010 to 2015, the CMS’s front-end visual editor was an industry leader. But over the years, competitors have leapfrogged Episerver’s visual editor. The current Episerver visual editor is often neglected by implementors and CMS users alike. Epi code tends to add unwanted HTML bloat to the visual editor code, making it tricky for front-end-developers to match the actual user-facing look and feel perfectly. Adding additional complication is the fact that the Epi CMS editor is coded in Dojo JS. Dojo JS is comparatively not widely used by front-end developers and doesn’t provide the appeal of an of the moment JS framework like React JS.
With the slight differences in presentation for the end-user and the difficulty in working with Epi/Dojo to make it perfectly 1:1, the visual editor loses value to the Epi CMS editor. In our experience, most Episerver editors stick with the properties views to make their content changes. The lack of an DXP industry-leading visual editor is unfortunate given that in the DXP space competition sells on the CMS editor’s user experience. Drupal and WordPress both have very sophisticated editors built on the open-source project Guttenburg and Cohesion respectively. Guttenburg is not without its critiques. Many complain about its usability. In the WordPress universe, this is where “page builders” come in. Divi, Elementor, and WP Bakery are just a few of the more popular page builders. Now what is important here for Optimizely and Episerver is that Optimizely has a great visual editor. If this visual editor becomes integrated with Episerver’s core CMS editing functionality, this will bring Epi back to industry relevance with its own best-in-class page builder.
Only days after the Episerver rebrand to become Optimizely, Gartner announced Episerver Optimizely’s highest ranking in the DXP Magic Quadrant to-date as described by Optimizely CEO Alex Atzberger:
“The recognition is also a reflection of our product strategy – the same strategy that led us to rebrand our business to Optimizely last week. There is an immense need in the market to level the playing field in today’s digital-first world.”
Optimizely CEO Alex Atzberger. Source: Looking for the fastest rising star in DXP? It’s Optimizely
Image Credit: “The First Lecture in Experimental Philosophy (print)” by J Hinton is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
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