You may be wondering, “What are the advantages of a digital experience platform (DXP) over a CMS?” or “How are people moving to DXPs?”

Well, you’ve come to the right place because we’re here to answer all of those questions!

Advantages of DXP over CMS

1. Large Scale Management

One reason we find companies moving to a DXP from a CMS is that a DXP has the ability to handle asset management and content on a large scale. A DXP allows you to manage, sync and push content across the web, IoT devices, digital billboards, in-store kiosks, and wherever else your content gets published, optimizing the customer experience all these points instead of just on your website.

2. Multitenancy

A powerful DXP can help your brand create intranets, manage multiple microsites, and launch your eCommerce projects with multitenancy. Multitenancy is where you have a single core application (and often digital assets) that create multiple clients, or tenants. This helps with software upgrades (in the core) and consistent brand messaging (from using the same digital assets across different tenants). A DXP makes it simpler to manage all this tech, as opposed to, say, multiple WordPress microsites.

3. Better Personalization

DXPs enable your organization to personalize omnichannel campaigns on a deeper level due to centralized data. In addition, these campaigns can be more contextually personalized due to its ability to roll out content that is based on a customer’s needs or even context as well.

4. Unified Data Source

A DXP analyzes and collects customer behavior, which unifies data to create a centralized view. The result of this advantage is that a DXP can combat organizational silos, which leads to more informed decision.

5. Productivity

Another advantage of a DXP is that it can take away silos by allowing employees to access information or data at any time, which helps to streamline employee productivity. DXPs are especially valuable for multilingual organizations, or for organizations that create content in different languages

How To Move to A DXP

1. Documenting Technology Architecture

When deciding if you should move to a DXP, it is important to document your current technology architecture to determine what kind of technology stack you have, who uses it, what they use it for, and how it is connected (both architecturally and organizationally).

A buyer journey map should be created to map the technology usage. By doing so, this may show weaknesses in parts of the journey where there are few technologies to deliver desired outcomes. Therefore, this creates the case to move to a DXP.

2. Use Cases

In the buying journey stage, documenting and defining your use cases for the technology will help in selecting a DXP. Providing answers to questions such as who will be using it, how it will allow those people to do new things, how it will make those people more productive, how it will make the customer experience better in parts of their journey, and what other platforms and systems it will have to be connected to, including the level of ease when connecting to those platforms and systems, are key.

After creating these use cases, it is much easier to select a DXP that satisfies these use cases and your needs.

When a DXP is implemented, you’ll need to train your organization to use the new technology. The proper training and encouragement of adopting the new DXP is crucial in ensuring that the DXP is successfully deployed.

When your organization is successfully trained to use the new DXP, determine digital experience results and compare outcomes from before implementing the DXP and after implementing the DXP. Make sure that the DXP is meeting your organization’s original goals.

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant

Of course, Gartner has a Magic Quadrant for digital experience platforms. Gartner divides their DXP Magic Quadrant into 4 quadrants: challengers, leaders, niche players, and visionaries. The grouping of these quadrants are based on two platform characteristics: ability to execute and completeness of vision. Below displays some software providers of digital experience platforms based on their ranking in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant.

The four digital experience platform leaders according to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant are IBM, Sitecore, Adobe, and Salesforce.

Vista Equity Partners’ Investment into Acquia

In September 2019, Vista Equity Partners made a $500 million investment into Acquia to move Drupal to a digital experience platform, giving it more than 50% ownership of Acquia. This is a positive signal that digital experience platforms are beneficial, since huge organizations like Vista are investing in them. It will take years for Drupal to develop some of the features that visionary DXPs currently have. But it’s a sign that DXP’s are where the market and investments are headed.

Beyond the investment in features, Acquia said it will spend some of Vista’s investment to improve the “learnability” of Drupal to attract diverse individuals, sponsor more of Drupal’s community events and meetups, increase the amount of Open Source code, and improve diversity in Drupal by funding initiatives.

What might be the next CMS that decides to bulk up and head down the DXP path?

This article was originally published in 2020.