Zone technology directors Adam Jenkin and Joel Williams delve into the Episerver developments they’re most excited about for the coming year…
Episerver’s Partner Close-Up touched down in Stockholm earlier this month, bringing together more than 600 participants from 20 different countries. As a long-time Premium Partner, Zone had tech directors (and former Epi developers) Joel Williams and Adam Jenkin in attendance to reflect on the successes and lessons learned from 2018, and to look ahead to the roadmap for 2019.
After a busy two days in the bustling Swedish capital, here are their top five takeaways.
1. Stronger partner and client relationships
As the Epi ecosystem grows and clients’ digital needs become more complex, deeper relationships with partners and clients will ensure maximum value is being delivered from the platform.
In 2019, customer account managers and partner success managers will be introduced to assist partners in building these relationships by connecting them with the right experts within Episerver. Onboarding teams will support partners and clients during projects and new business opportunities, aiding with product positioning and providing early access to training via an overhauled learning system.
Feedback is becoming increasingly important in Episerver’s evolution, especially with the newer service offerings that deal with customer profiling, insight and personalisation. The message from Epi is that “they are listening”, with feedback influencing the backlog priority and overall platform direction.
2. Go to market
In 2018, some considered the platform ecosystem a little confusing. Many great new products were introduced, but brand messaging lacked a clear view as to how they could be used to deliver organisational goals and meet user needs. Partners and developers had a degree of understanding but from a customer view — and importantly a new customer view — it was obscure.
To address this, Epi has developed a go to market strategy that packages its products and services into offerings that map to organisational needs and their digital maturity. The offerings come with the base functionality for Content, Campaign and Commerce products, but enhanced versions exist that encompass additional AI-based services. These AI services have been integrated to allow better targeting through the customer data platform that underpins all offerings.
3. Digital Experience Cloud
The Digital Experience Cloud (DXC) platform has further matured over the past 12 months, with 300 new customers launching on it in 2018. The focus in 2019 is to provide increased levels of security and flexibility that will make it easier for larger enterprise organisations to use. The roadmap includes the ability for customers to use their own content distribution networks, VPN management and the choice of Azure region hosting.
Developers will see improvements that will help across the entire software development lifecycle, including more access to Azure (specifically Web Jobs), while DevOps will be able to use CI/CD platforms like Octopus Deploy and VSTS to deploy to and manage all environments including production.
4. Customer Data Platform
This year will also see the customer data platform (CDP) become a first-class citizen of the DXC. This is an integral component to the dynamic, personalised and AI-driven technologies that Epi is building to provide the best possible customer experience across Content, Commerce and Campaign.
These technologies have always been regarded as add-ons to longstanding products; however, now that the CDP is part of the core platform architecture it is easier for customer data to be tracked, learnt from and acted upon across the entire journey.
New features to use aggregated event data are also being introduced and Microsoft Power BI connectors will allow data analysis outside of Episerver, as well as provide embedded dashboards from within.
5. Commerce
Commerce was the highest growth area on the Epi platform in 2018, with sales outpacing Content for the first time. This shows both the direction in which digital needs are heading and that Epi’s commerce offering is competing — and winning — in the tussle of the main players in the Gartner and Forrester reports, as detailed below:
In 2019, new tiered subscriptions models break down the barrier to entry of clients needing commerce. Specifically, the “Catalog only” tier is attractive for clients wanting to list products but not transact or provide post-purchase experience. A common approach for clients new to commerce or ones who transact through third parties.
Richer integrations between Commerce and Campaign will be coming in 2019. Plans to integrate segmenting from Commerce and CMS into Campaign will allow joined-up, end-to-end personalisation across the entire customer journey.
Like the CDP, Commerce has become a core architecture component within the platform and an integral part of the roadmap. Headless and Service API provides the opportunity to build experiences in applications (SPAs, PWAs) but also speeds up the integration of Commerce with emerging in-store purchasing technologies (apps, POS, AR, VR). The takeaway is that omnichannel Commerce is just as important as Content, if not more, so it’s encouraging to see Epi building a mature and performant architecture to enable these opportunities.
And finally…
There is a strong roadmap ahead for Episerver. Early investments in cloud, personalisation and commerce are showing promise and slowly coming to fruition. The recent acquisition by Insight Venture Partners further bolsters Epi’s credibility and brings significantly increased investments in product development and marketing.
The continued drive for customer experience excellence is the most exciting thing for us, as we believe this is the area that derives the most value for clients and our customers. The customer data platform, personalisation, Campaign and Commerce advancements will help us in achieving our goal of delivering the best possible customer experience.
