Acquia (still) leads the way when it comes to digital experience

Our partner, Acquia, continues to prove itself when it comes to Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) and has once again been identified as a leader in the well-respected Gartner Magic Quadrant for a third consecutive year.

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for DXP covers technology that supports an organisation’s efforts to digitise certain aspects of its business to provide better customer experiences.

Every year, since 2018, research and consulting firm Gartner releases a highly anticipated report that evaluates digital experience platforms and positions them in a quadrant, giving an overall view of the industry. The goal is to help potential customers identify vendors that meet their needs across web, mobile and other digital channels.

As our Commercial Director, Gary Cosgrave, explained, a DXP is not a product. "It is an integrated, centralised enterprise software framework or ecosystem that gives a company the ability to differentiate from their competition and drive more customer engagement and ultimately more revenue."

A DXP can provide optimal digital experiences and help ensure continuity across the full customer lifetime journey.

Why we love Acquia

Acquia’s DXP is the Open Digital Experience Platform, comprising Drupal Cloud and Marketing Cloud. Acquia is the primary commercial company behind the Drupal open-source web content management system that Annertech uses to create beautiful yet powerful websites and web applications.

Acquia DXP offers broad capabilities for content management and customer experience, including personalisation, analytics, customer journey management and a customer data platform.

Over the past few years, Acquia has continued to surpass expectations in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for DXP.

It has done this by placing increased focus on commerce experiences, employee experiences, and growing its technology partner ecosystem, the Acquia DX Alliance.

Towards the end of last year, Acquia acquired Widen, which brought powerful digital asset management and product information management capabilities to Acquia DXP.

"Acquia’s strengths as an open, composable platform give customers the flexibility and freedom to build digital experiences without the barriers of siloed marketing technologies," Dries Buytaert, co-founder and CTO of Acquia and founder of the Drupal project, said soon after the Gartner report was released.

"With low-code and no-code capabilities for digital marketers and recent enhancements for developers, teams can move faster to build digital experiences and customise them to engage customers and drive conversions."

Most vendors stayed within the same quadrant. This is quite apparent when this year's report is compared with the 2021 report.

However, notable exceptions to this include Liferay, which moved from Leader to Challenger, and Magnolia, which moved from Niche Players to Visionaries, while e-Spirit was dropped entirely. So what do movements such as these mean?

Each year, Gartner reviews and adjusts its inclusion criteria for magic quadrants as technology improves and customer experiences change. Vendors are added or dropped according to how they perform against the criteria.

Dropping a vendor may reflect a change in the market and, therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor.

For example, in 2018 and 2019, Microsoft kept its position at the top of the Challenger category. At that point Sharepoint was popular and so was its Microsoft Cloud/Office 365 offering.

But come 2020, Microsoft was dropped from the DXP magic quadrant and hasn’t returned.

In its 2019 report, Gartner “cautioned” that Microsoft’s DXP offering was not as cohesive a DXP offering as the competition's.

"With a particular weakness in external-facing B2C use cases, its functionality gaps include content presentation flexibility, content composition, content targeting and personalisation, and multichannel delivery" Gartner said.

Another reason Microsoft may have dropped off the list for 2020 was the reliance on third-party technology integrations and partner/SI support for "Microsoft Azure-based native development and experience building capabilities for external facing scenarios", said Gartner in its 2019 report.  "Customers seeking a unified DXP platform that supports all use cases may find themselves building and assembling capabilities required for external-facing use cases."

Users of Microsoft’s PowerApps Portal will find this feedback strikingly familiar. Presented as a low-code platform for designing apps and forms, it requires the assistance of developers to do anything beyond the most basic configurations. Combined with a complicated licensing model, the costs can spiral out of control quickly, making open-source solutions such as Drupal much more attractive.

Similarly, Liferay also suffers from difficulties in implementation and development, possibly due to its Java heritage and limited digital marketing features including customer journey and customer data management. Its cloud strategy was still found to be lacking in certain areas, though Gartner did note that it is maturing.

How Annertech and Acquia change digital experiences

Annertech has been working with Acquia for more than a decade, and has implemented a number of large digital transformation projects using Acquia.

We actively work together to promote the benefits of open- source technologies – and this was one of the strengths highlighted in the Gartner report: "The Drupal open-source community is extensive and very active. This community constantly contributes bug fixes and new functionality, and seeds an extensive marketplace for modules."

Other strengths were that Acquia has focused on composability via its DXP, targeting enterprises that want to rebuild their core digital foundation around modular solution architectures. Acquia has also invested in business technology capabilities, including data science and citizen development, in order to empower digital marketers.