Why Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) Must Offer Easy Integrations: Acquia Launches Its New Open DXP

Acquia releases an Open Digital Experience Platform for marketers

Acquia yesterday unveiled its new Acquia Open Digital Experience Platform (DXP), which is powered by Acquia Marketing Cloud and Acquia Drupal Cloud. This unified solution enables marketers to leverage data and content to deliver new digital experiences.

Designed to be a low-code marketer-friendly solution, Acquia’s Open DXP seamlessly integrates with both Drupal and Marketing Cloud platforms to prove an end-to-end, data-driven solution for enhancing customer journeys. With its built-in customer data platform (CDP), Acquia Marketing Cloud now enables marketers to gain a comprehensive 360-degree view of the customer with real-time data integration, machine learning-driven insights, and marketing support for delivering unique customer experiences at a global scale.

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“The Acquia Open DXP integrates acquired technologies including AgilOne, Mautic, and Cohesion into our portfolio to create the most powerful platform to drive digital transformation,” said Mike Sullivan, CEO of Acquia. “Our open approach makes it easier for customers to add new functionality and components as they grow, or fast-forward into a full digital experience platform, depending on their level of maturity. The Acquia Open DXP is built to scale and support personalized customer journeys of all sizes.”

New features in the Acquia Marketing Cloud include:

• Customer Data Platform: CDP provides a 360-degree view of every customer by enabling seamless data flow between back-end and front-end systems. Marketers can leverage the CDP’s machine learning capabilities to gain deeper insights into new customer segments based on consumer behaviors and product affinity, predict engagements and conversions, and suggest next-best offers and next-best actions.
• Personalization: This feature, formerly known as Acquia Lift helps marketers create and deliver targeted campaigns based on CDP data to provide next-best offers to consumers
• Campaign Studio: By using CDP data to break down traditional channel silos, Campaign Studio enables marketers to engage with audiences across digital properties like email, social, and more.
• Campaign Factory: CMOs and marketing leaders using Acquia CDP can now scale global campaign management across brands, regions, and local marketing teams.

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New features in the Acquia Drupal Cloud include:

• Site Studio: This builds on the new DXP’s marketer-friendly promise and introduces a low-code experience to design websites for different devices and interaction types, without a developer. Site Studio provides marketers fine-grained control over all aspects of experience design, eliminating traditional IT delays and bottlenecks for ongoing site enhancement and optimization.
• Developer Studio: The new Cloud IDEs allow developers to build, stage, and deploy new Drupal sites and applications from anywhere in the world by simply using a web browser. Acquia Cloud IDEs include a comprehensive set of tools and integration for Drupal developers.
• CMS Migrate: The new feature includes tools to accelerate migration to Drupal 9 from older versions of Drupal and any legacy CMS
• Edge CDN: It helps marketers deliver superior digital experiences by continually optimizing availability and performance, and mitigating risk associated with increased volatility in traffic due to more online customer engagement.
• Edge Security: Positioned as a security-as-a-service solution, Edge Security mitigates catastrophic security threats in real time by leveraging data-driven insights to dynamically update and protect all sites and experiences from malicious attacks, ensuring brand trust.
• Cloud Platform: Cloud Platform provides best-in-class infrastructure for trusted, cloud-native Drupal experiences, allowing developers to host and govern digital experiences at scale. Includes enhanced support for maximizing performance, availability, and security of any Drupal site or application.

What Does This Mean for Marketers?

At a time when delivering in-the-moment digital experiences is crucial for brand loyalty, challenges in integrating APIs and middleware can prove to be detrimental for brands using DXPs. According to Gartner, about 85 percent of the effort and cost in a DXP is spent on integrations with internal and external systems.

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Martech analysts have also shed light on the complexity surrounding DXP applications across multiple channels and platforms. The lack of vendor initiative to demystify DXPs means that the number of people who can work with the platforms are few and far between.

Acquia’s welcome move in opening its DXP to Acquia Marketing Cloud and Acquia Drupal Cloud will help brands with fewer resources also to deliver delightful digital experiences. By taking a user-focused approach to designing the platform, Acquia has kicked open the gates for further innovation within the DXP market.

We should expect to see more DXP vendors offering CDP integration and AI capabilities to keep up with the increasing number of channels available to consumers today. Acquia’s deep expertise in adaptive intelligence has made its way into their DXP. As other vendors begin considering the impact of Acquia’s open platform ecosystem on the DXP market, it will be interesting to see how DXP solutions evolve over the next few months.