Sue Clarke, Author at Gigaom

GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs)

Sue Clarke — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 14:54:23 +0000

The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns kicked off a large-scale move to online shopping. In turn, increased competition and the need to both showcase products in new and innovative ways and to target consumers with engaging and highly personalized content have made digital experience platforms (DXPs) more important than ever. The ability to dynamically create and deliver experiences has become a requirement for organizations, as has the use of real-time analytics to gather and analyze metrics as consumers navigate through a website so organizations can deliver content targeting individual users.

There are many more channels now than there were a few years ago—websites, social media, digital signage, kiosks, video screens, and television. One of the key advantages of a DXP is the ability to reuse content across multiple channels. Content can also be delivered to multiple devices and form factors ranging from large-screen PCs to small personal devices such as smartphones.

DXP capabilities have also evolved since the last DXP Key Criteria and Radar reports in 2023. A new key feature is the customer data platform (CDP). Most vendors either include CDPs in their portfolios or provide out-of-the-box integrations with at least one CDP.

The DXP market is mature, with many vendors. The majority are specialists that only provide DXPs, but there are a few with a wider portfolio, including OpenText, Oracle, and Salesforce. There have been many acquisitions and mergers in this area over the past 20 years, and we expect this to continue in the future.

Business Imperative
Marketers and creative teams are the main beneficiaries of DXPs. For marketers, DXPs provide an environment for creating content that can be published through a variety of channels, enabling them to run short-lived marketing campaigns, time-sensitive offers, and loyalty schemes. Creative teams can collaborate internally and with agencies to create digital assets for marketers to use or for advertising campaigns, taking advantage of integrations with creative tools such as Adobe Creative Cloud applications.

Sector Adoption Score
To help executives and decision-makers assess the potential impact and value of a DXP solution deployment to the business, this GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a structured assessment of the sector across five factors: benefit, maturity, urgency, impact, and effort. By scoring each factor based on how strongly it compels or deters adoption of a DXP solution, we provide an overall Sector Adoption Score (Figure 1) of 4.2 out of 5, with 5 indicating the strongest possible recommendation to adopt. This indicates that a DXP solution is a credible candidate for deployment and worthy of thoughtful consideration.

The factors contributing to the Sector Adoption Score for DXP are explained in more detail in the Sector Brief section that follows.

Key Criteria for Evaluating DXPs

Sector Adoption Score

Deters
Adoption

Discourages
Adoption

Merits
Consideration

Encourages
Adoption

Compels
Adoption

Figure 1. Sector Adoption Score for DXPs

This is the third year that GigaOm has reported on the DXP space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Key Criteria report highlights the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) for selecting an effective DXP solution. The companion GigaOm Radar report identifies vendors and products that excel in those decision criteria. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading DXP offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

The GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a detailed decision framework for IT and executive leadership assessing enterprise technologies. Each report defines relevant functional and nonfunctional aspects of solutions in a sector. The Key Criteria report informs the GigaOm Radar report, which provides a forward-looking assessment of vendor solutions in the sector.

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Customer Data Platforms (CDPs): A Smart Tool for the Enlightened Marketer

Sue Clarke — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 21:03:04 +0000

Customer data platforms (CDPs) unify first-party customer data from multiple online and offline systems to create a single centralized view of all interactions and touchpoints between each customer and a product or service.

These tools gather information from various disparate sources where customers interact with a company—including websites, social media, email, live chat, digital assistants, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, e-commerce solutions, and contact centers—align this information with transactional data (customer purchases, returns using information from e-commerce or purchase order systems, and so on) and with demographic data (such as name, address, gender, and age), while keeping it all compliant with customer privacy and data protection regulations.

In the Beginning

CDPs have grown out of personalization systems that have been around for more than 20 years. It all began with web content management systems (WCM) collecting data from website interactions such as clicks, page views, navigation through a website, and abandoned visits for both known and anonymous users. This data could be aggregated and analyzed to gain an overview of the popularity of specific pages or content, and to provide useful statistics such as the content with the most page views, least popular content, and the point during a transaction when visits were abandoned.

A/B testing was also available, which involved testing two or more versions of a web page, with visitors to the site being shown one version often selected randomly, and the most popular version being declared the winner (in terms of sales or further interaction with the website). The prize was: the winning content became the version viewed by all visitors.

The Rise of CDPs

While the bones of personalization have been there for many years, the technology has been evolving rapidly over the past few years, with the result that we now have dedicated solutions that manage various stages in the customer lifecycle, including:

The ingestion of customer data used for profiles that comes from a wide range of sources that customers interact with.
The ability to segment customers into smaller demographic, interest, and behavioral groups.
The ability to build customer journeys that reflect the lifetime of the customer’s relationship with the organization.

While there is nothing new in using analytics to personalize experiences, it is a relatively new idea for a single platform to bring together customer data from disparate sources and provide many of the capabilities required to manage customer interactions, such as segmentation and personalization, A/B/multivariate testing, analytics and insights, and cross-channel orchestration.

CDPs are a Marketer’s Dream

A CDP should be seen as a marketer’s best friend. It was designed to be used by marketers and sales teams. Used appropriately, it is an extremely valuable tool for helping marketers to create engaging, personalized customer journeys that will keep a customer returning and buying, and to create marketing campaigns that are appropriate to the customers being targeted.

A CDP should include capabilities that help the marketer drive sales and reduce churn. It must integrate with a range of sources, both online and offline, that contain information about customers that is ingested into the CDP in real-time to build a 360-degree view of each customer. The more interactions the customer has with the organization, the more accurate the profile, and the more targeted the experiences become. The data should be cleaned to eliminate inaccuracies and duplicates. It can also be enriched with second and third-party data, which organizations can buy. The profile information is segmented according to pre-defined criteria and enables customer journeys to be built using dedicated customer journey tools.

Every Organization with a Marketing Department Should Consider a CDP

Any organization with a B2C marketing department should consider investing in a CDP. Simply put: the ability to aggregate data from multiple sources into a single system to provide a 360-degree view of the customer and a single source of truth can mean the difference between success and failure in the extremely competitive world of retail e-commerce. It allows marketing teams to create targeted campaigns and engaging, highly targeted customer journeys, which gives organizations a valuable competitive advantage.

Planning a CDP Deployment

Planning and selecting a CDP requires careful consideration and a number of steps should be followed:

Make a list of must-haves: specific out-of-the-box integrations, particular dashboards, or reports that are required and quiz vendors on whether they provide those capabilities.
Ensure that marketers can use at least most of the system without any IT input; after all, they are the main day-to-day users.
Make certain that the solution supports the favored deployment model and, if it’s cloud, that the data can be stored in the appropriate region to ensure data sovereignty.
Ensure that the vendor supplies migration tools to ingest legacy data that provides historical customer information.
Examine what resources are available in-house for the implementation and which skills need to be brought in, then figure out how professional services from the vendor or a partner can supply them to meet these needs.
Check out what is included with the CDP, what features are add-ons and are charged separately, and the way the solution is licensed – as it is likely that resources will need to scale up and down to cater to peaks and valleys in demand.

The CDP market is very much a buyer’s market right now, with a large selection of solutions to choose from and finding the optimum CDP can be a tricky process. Investigating the roadmap of a vendor, if available, is a good way to discover how innovative the vendor is and the direction in which the product is headed. Vendors increasing the AI capabilities in their solutions are likely to be among the most innovative.

Next Steps

To learn more, take a look at GigaOm’s CDP Key Criteria and Radar reports. These reports provide a comprehensive overview of the market, outline the criteria you’ll want to consider in a purchase decision, and evaluate how a number of vendors perform against those decision criteria.

If you’re not yet a GigaOm subscriber, you can access the research using a free trial.

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GigaOm Radar for Customer Data Platforms (CDPs)

Sue Clarke — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 16:00:56 +0000

Customer data platforms (CDPs) provide a central repository that pulls in customer data from multiple online and offline sources and unifies it to create customer profiles. The data is normalized and reformatted to support marketing processes and systems such as customer relationship management (CRM), analytics, marketing automation, A/B testing, digital experience platforms (DXP), social media sites, and others to create personalized content to drive sales.

CDPs offer a number of capabilities to support marketing initiatives:

Segmentation enables marketers to categorize customers according to a range of criteria such as age, gender, location, behavior, or buying history. Segments can then be used in marketing campaigns.
Customer journeys consist of customer interactions with a company, allowing marketers to manage the entire lifecycle of a customer and ensure they receive content that will interest them and keep them returning through their preferred channel.
Customer journey mapping enables marketers to track every interaction with a customer and determine what the next best step is.
Analytics and insights enable users to analyze their customer data, which can be used to predict trends and likely buying patterns. If organizations are collecting data from backend systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), the CDP can be used to analyze sales and manufacturing data to ensure supply always matches demand. Analytics is also important for evaluating the success of marketing campaigns, and to assess the lifetime value of a customer, which is useful for determining which customers should be offered loyalty rewards.

A CDP mainly collects first-party data, although it can be enriched with third-party data. This is important because third-party cookies are largely disappearing, eliminating a data source many organizations collected as customer data to provide personalized content. Companies that are using a CDP to manage customer data to provide a single source of truth will run more successful marketing campaigns than those that are still using disparate systems to store customer data.

A CDP is most valuable to marketing and sales teams that need to deliver highly personalized, targeted marketing and advertising content, both to individuals and to more general segments to drive sales and increase profitability. This Radar report will therefore be of particular interest to the CMO.

This is our first year evaluating the CDP space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This GigaOm Radar report examines 20 of the top CDP solutions and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading CDP offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

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GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating Customer Data Platforms (CDPs)

Sue Clarke — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 19:41:46 +0000

A customer data platform (CDP) is a solution that collects and unifies first-party customer data from multiple online and offline systems in real time to create a single centralized view of all of the interactions and touchpoints between each customer and a product or service to build a profile of every customer. That profile can be made accessible to other systems to analyze, track, and manage customer interactions.

A CDP gathers information from a variety of sources that would not normally communicate with each other. These include systems through which the customer interacts with the company, including websites, social media, email, live chat, digital assistants, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, e-commerce solutions, and contact centers; transactional data, including customer purchases and returns using information from e-commerce or purchase order systems; and demographic data such as name, address, gender, and age.

This information is collated, standardized, transformed, and combined with data from each system to create an increasingly comprehensive customer profile of the customer. The data is reformatted to support marketing processes and systems such as CRM, analytics, marketing automation, A/B testing, content creation and personalization, and social media sites. As more data is collected, the content delivered becomes increasingly personalized. CDP supports lead scoring, product recommendations, optimizing content, and omnichannel automation.

A CDP must also manage data privacy and customers’ personal rights by controlling and managing the flow of data between marketing systems, and manage customer consent to comply with regulations such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CPRA). These laws give consumers the right to access their data as well as have it deleted by exercising their “right to be forgotten.”

Business Imperative
A CDP provides a single location to bring together and store all customer data, creating a single source of truth and potentially replacing multiple applications that store parts of a customer profile. This 360-degree view of the customer allows organizations to create the next best actions or customer offers to increase sales and reduce churn. This capability is tremendously valuable to marketers who need to create engaging, highly targeted content and campaigns that will keep customers returning and buying.

There is nothing new about using analytics to personalize retail experiences—this technology has been available for many years—but the idea of a single platform that brings together customer data from disparate sources and provides many of the capabilities required to manage customer interactions, such as segmentation and personalization, A/B/multivariate testing, analytics and insights, and cross-channel orchestration, is relatively new.

Two main types of vendors provide CDPs. The first is standalone specialist vendors that provide a single solution. These platforms need to integrate with digital experience platforms (DXP), which are the platforms used by marketers to create customer experiences. The second type of vendor sells CDPs as part of a DXP platform. An increasing number of DXP vendors have been adding CDPs to their portfolios. Because DXP is becoming increasingly modular, organizations can generally choose whether to implement the CDP that comes with the DXP, implement a standalone solution, or choose not to use a CDP at all. However, the third option will put organizations at a disadvantage and make it much more difficult to build coherent customer profiles and track customer journeys across multiple touchpoints.

Sector Adoption Score
To help executives and decision-makers assess the potential impact and value of a CDP deployment to the business, this GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a structured assessment of the sector across five factors: benefit, maturity, urgency, impact, and effort. By scoring each factor based on how strongly it compels or deters adoption of a CDP, we provide an overall Sector Adoption Score (Figure 1) of 4 out of 5, with 5 indicating the strongest possible recommendation to adopt. This indicates that a CDP is a credible candidate for deployment and worthy of thoughtful consideration.

The factors contributing to the Sector Adoption Score for CDPs are explained in more detail in the Sector Brief section that follows.

Key Criteria for Evaluating CDPs

Sector Adoption Score

Deters
Adoption

Discourages
Adoption

Merits
Consideration

Encourages
Adoption

Compels
Adoption

Figure 1. Sector Adoption Score for CDPs

This is the first year that GigaOm has reported on the CDP space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This GigaOm Key Criteria report highlights the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) for selecting an effective CDP solution. The companion GigaOm Radar report identifies vendors and products that excel in those decision criteria. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading CDP offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

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GigaOm Radar for Digital Asset Management (DAM)

Sue Clarke — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 15:00:32 +0000

Digital asset management (DAM) solutions provide a means for organizations to manage digital assets such as photographic images and video and audio content. These assets often need to be presented in 3D, as spinsets, and delivered as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) experiences so organizations can provide engaging, highly personalized, and relevant user experiences.

The growth in online shopping and the need for organizations to become increasingly innovative in the way they showcase products mean that DAM has taken on a new importance in recent years. Time to market has become critical as well because companies compete in an increasingly crowded online marketplace, with the largest brands creating hundreds or even thousands of assets every day.

Given these requirements, many DAM vendors are investing in automation capabilities to help speed up tasks, including the workflows that handle mundane tasks such as moving an asset between participants during a review process, auto-tagging to make it easier to find the right asset to use in a marketing campaign or for a personalized experience, and intelligent cropping to ensure that the main subject of an image is optimally positioned.

A DAM system can’t be used in isolation, and therefore, integration is vital. The best integrations are seamless, allowing users to access DAM assets from within a third-party application. Many vendors offer a large selection of out-of-the-box connectors to other solutions, including digital experience platforms (DXPs), customer relationship management (CRM) tools, product information management (PIM) tools, and applications that can extend the capabilities of the DAM. Tools such as Adobe Creative Cloud and others for digital rights management (DRM), AI, analytics, and collaboration are common types of applications DAM solutions may need to natively integrate with.

In a matter of months, generative AI will move from being a “nice-to-have” to a “must-have” functionality for DAM vendors if they are to remain competitive. Vendors therefore need to consider how they can use the technology both in their own products to make tasks within the product less complex, perhaps by dynamically providing suggestions on the next stages in the implementation, and by generating or manipulating assets to make the lives of marketing and creative teams easier.

This GigaOm Radar report highlights key digital asset management vendors and equips IT decision-makers with the information needed to select the best fit for their business and use case requirements. In the corresponding GigaOm report “Key Criteria for Evaluating DAM Solutions,” we describe in more detail the capabilities and metrics that are used to evaluate vendors in this market.

This is our first year evaluating the digital asset management space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. All solutions included in this Radar report meet the following table stakes—capabilities widely adopted and well implemented in the sector:

Support for a wide range of assets
Auto-tagging
Search
Ability to organize assets in collections
Taxonomy support
Workflow

How to Read this Report

This GigaOm report is one of a series of documents that helps IT organizations assess competing solutions in the context of well-defined features and criteria. For a fuller understanding, consider reviewing the following reports:

Key Criteria report: A detailed market sector analysis that assesses the impact that key product features and criteria have on top-line solution characteristics—such as scalability, performance, and TCO—that drive purchase decisions.

GigaOm Radar report: A forward-looking analysis that plots the relative value and progression of vendor solutions along multiple axes based on strategy and execution. The Radar report includes a breakdown of each vendor’s offering in the sector.

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GigaOm Radar for E-Discovery

Sue Clarke — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 15:00:54 +0000

Organizations can face litigation or discovery requests under regulations like GDPR at any time. Discovery must be undertaken in a timely fashion, and the ability to undertake an early case assessment (ECA) will allow counsel and courts to determine whether a matter is worth pursuing or if a settlement should be sought.

Without an e-discovery solution, it’s time consuming and expensive to find the right assets among the millions of items that enterprises have stored. Often, the volume of the final dataset is not known at the start of the project, and so-called “smoking guns,” or relevant items of information that no one knew existed, may be discovered during litigation, landing the organization in trouble and resulting in larger settlements.

For that reason, it’s in the best interest of organizations to have an e-discovery solution already in place when a request is received. This proactive measure allows organizations the time to properly compare solutions well before the need for one becomes critical, ensuring they invest in a solution that best meets their requirements.

E-discovery solutions accelerate the search for and retrieval of assets. The increasing use of automation for tasks such as review, redaction, and tagging reduces the manual effort required and helps deliver depositions to opposing counsel, a court, or regulator in a shorter time frame. By helping organizations to address access requests and prepare for litigation more quickly, e-discovery solutions can also reduce the cost of the e-discovery process.

E-discovery solutions follow the electronic discovery reference model (EDRM), a framework that defines all of the stages of e-discovery, from identifying the data to presenting it to a court. Some solutions provide end-to-end capabilities, while others stick to either the initial stages (identification, preservation, collection, and processing) or the later stages of the model (review, analysis, production, and presentation).

There are two distinct audiences that e-discovery software must support: organizations that undertake the initial searches for data that may be relevant to a matter and legal teams—either legal departments within large enterprises or law firms—responsible for reviewing and putting together the final dataset of content.

This GigaOm Radar report highlights key e-discovery vendors and equips IT decision-makers with the information needed to select the best fit for their business and use case requirements. In the corresponding GigaOm report “Key Criteria for Evaluating E-Discovery Solutions,” we describe in more detail the capabilities and metrics that are used to evaluate vendors in this market.

This is our second year evaluating the e-discovery space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. All solutions included in this Radar report meet the following table stakes—capabilities widely adopted and well implemented in the sector:

Search multiple repositories and sources
Audit logging
Optical character recognition
Data governance
Case management
User management

How to Read this Report

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Key Criteria for Evaluating Digital Asset Management (DAM) Solutions

Sue Clarke — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 17:16:46 +0000

Digital asset management (DAM) solutions manage, organize, and store digital assets, normally in a dedicated repository. DAM solutions support many file types, including photos, 3D images, animations, video, audio, and PDF files. Many organizations also store catalogs that combine content and images in a DAM solution.

Digital assets tend to have very large file sizes, and large enterprises with multiple brands can have millions of live assets at any one time. This means that DAM systems must be highly scalable and ensure that assets are easily searchable; therefore, metadata management is an important factor. A DAM solution cannot be used in isolation; it needs applications to build experiences and also to deliver the assets, which means that integration capabilities must be built into the solution. Other core capabilities that should be included with a DAM solution are collaboration, library services, search, and at least basic workflow capabilities.

The ability to manage digital assets has been a requirement for many years, but the growth of streaming services emphasized the need for dedicated repositories for storing and managing vast libraries of assets. The COVID-19 pandemic was another important factor as retailers and organizations in services industries suddenly found themselves having to adopt 100% online models. Without the ability to showcase goods in a physical location, retailers had to find new and innovative ways to provide immersive experiences online. Although digital assets have always been an important element in delivering engaging experiences, they became much more prominent during the pandemic as spin sets (the ability to turn an image through 360 degrees) and video became more prevalent. Innovative companies also turned to virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) to gain a competitive edge.

DAM is an integral part of a digital experience platform (DXP), but while the DAM capabilities within a DXP allow digital assets to be stored and managed and will suit the requirements of organizations with modest requirements, they do not include the capabilities required by organizations with large libraries of assets and complex needs. Some DXP vendors have acquired standalone DAM solutions, and while these have been integrated with and included as part of the DXP offering, they are also still sold as standalone solutions, and several of these are included in the accompanying Radar report.

DAM is continually evolving as new asset types are developed and additional delivery platforms such as the metaverse are created, and DAM vendors must ensure their products support them. The latest innovation is generative AI, and vendors are already starting to productize it to enable marketers to create images without the need for intervention from a creative team.

This GigaOm Key Criteria report details the capabilities (table stakes, key criteria, and emerging technologies) and nonfunctional requirements (evaluation metrics) for selecting an effective digital asset management solution. The companion GigaOm Radar report identifies vendors and products that excel in those capabilities and metrics.

Together, these reports provide an overview of the category and its underlying technology, identify leading digital asset management offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

How to Read this Report

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Key Criteria for Evaluating E-Discovery Solutions

Sue Clarke — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 16:07:35 +0000

E-discovery software manages the process of proactively preserving, discovering, collecting, reviewing, producing, and presenting electronically stored information (ESI), including records for legal or regulatory proceedings and requirements. It has become increasingly important over the past few years, as companies and individuals have become more litigious and increasing legislation and resulting regulations around the world dictate that digital data should be discoverable.

With data volumes growing exponentially and comprising much of the evidence in litigation and other discovery requests, it is impossible to address those requests using standard software such as search tools. Discovery can involve finding the proverbial needle in the haystack, often searching millions of items of content to find a single file or small group of them, so specialized e-discovery tools have become a “must have” for enterprises handling discovery requests.

E-discovery now reaches far beyond traditional data repositories such as documents, emails, drawings, faxes, and correspondence to encompass video, audio, photographic images, social media posts, and other internet-based content. It can include video surveillance material, phone call audio files, and video conference data.

E-discovery software users comprise two distinct categories. The first includes those in an organization responsible for the initial search to locate information that could be relevant to the case or matter. These searches are often conducted in-house and may include some initial culling to filter out obviously irrelevant content. The remaining data is then generally passed on to an external law firm to review, process, and produce the final data set. This is the second category of users, although this work may be performed by in-house counsel in large enterprises.

This division of labor meant that e-discovery vendors in the past tended to develop tools that addressed either the search and collection of data or the review, analysis, and production of the final data sets. Recently, however, some vendors have extended their offerings to provide end-to-end capabilities.

The technology is also advancing to support additional capabilities that address new needs. For example, more media and sources of data are accepted in litigation today, including video, audio, and social media sites. Today’s e-discovery tools must support the search, collection, and review of these sources. Additionally, vendors have begun to make it easier and quicker for users to review data because initial data sets can comprise millions of individual data items. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are playing an increasingly important role in helping to automate at least some of the review process. In the future, blockchains may become another data source that a judge decides should be admissible as evidence, and e-discovery solutions will need to be capable of gathering data from it. Similarly, when the metaverse finally emerges, data generated within virtual worlds will need to be collectable as potential evidence.

This is the second year that GigaOm has reported on the e-discovery space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Key Criteria report highlights the capabilities (table stakes, key criteria, and emerging technologies) and non-functional requirements (evaluation metrics) for selecting an effective e-discovery solution. The companion GigaOm Radar report identifies vendors and products that excel in those capabilities and metrics. Together, these reports provide an overview of the category and its underlying technology, identify leading e-discovery offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

How to Read this Report

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GigaOm Radar for Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs)

Sue Clarke — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 15:00:07 +0000

Digital experience platforms (DXPs) allow organizations to build personalized, engaging experiences that can be delivered across multiple channels and devices. With the number of organizations migrating to an online-only model, DXPs are becoming much more important for delivering these experiences. Many organizations are currently undertaking digital transformation initiatives, and the implementation of a modern, headless DXP can provide a return on investment (ROI).

The advantage of a headless system, in which the content is separate from the applications that use it, is that the system is future-proof because applications that support new and emerging technologies such as the metaverse can work with the content in the DXP repository. In the case of the metaverse, vendors that include standalone or enhanced digital asset management (DAM) capabilities have an advantage as they are more likely to support the types of digital assets and technologies required, such as 3D and spin sets, and likely already support technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). In terms of devices, DXPs should support computers, smartphones, tablets, IoT devices, kiosks, video screens, and more.

DXPs should also support a content repository, analytics, workflow, search, digital asset management, collaboration, and integration capabilities. Some of these capabilities may be basic, and organizations should be able to integrate more advanced tooling if required. As virtually all DXPs are cloud-native or cloud-first, many work with the large cloud providers such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft and use their cloud services in areas such as analytics to provide profiling information for creating personalized content and recommendations.

As more shopping experiences move online and competition among retailers intensifies, organizations will need to make their experiences more engaging and immersive to provide something like an in-person shopping experience. Some retailers are already using VR and AR to enhance online shopping, and some are beginning to explore whether and how they could exploit the metaverse to provide the feel of a physical shopping experience.

However, the metaverse has been put on the back burner by DXP vendors and organizations as interest in generative AI burgeons. Used appropriately, the technology can be incredibly useful to enable less-creative users to create text and images using written descriptions without any particular input. However, the technology is open to abuse, and vendors that offer it must take measures to ensure that it is used safely and to prevent inappropriate use.

This GigaOm Radar report highlights key DXP vendors and equips IT decision-makers with the information needed to select the best fit for their business and use case requirements. In the corresponding GigaOm report “Key Criteria for Evaluating DXPs,” we describe in more detail the capabilities and metrics that are used to evaluate vendors in this market.

This is our second year evaluating the DXP space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. All solutions included in this Radar report meet the following table stakes—capabilities widely adopted and well implemented in the sector:

Repository
Analytics
Workflow
Personalization capabilities
Multichannel support
Integrations
Low/no-code development tools
A/B and multivariate testing

How to Read this Report

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Key Criteria for Evaluating Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs)

Sue Clarke — Tue, 29 Aug 2023 17:32:23 +0000

Digital experience platforms (DXPs) are systems for building engaging, personalized customer experiences, often for delivery on websites but also on any digital channel. DXPs should be intuitive and easy to use, allowing both creative teams and marketers to create and publish content.

DXPs are becoming increasingly important as more retailers move online and close physical stores. Companies need to showcase goods and services in the best possible way, and they need to target potential customers with content that will interest them and result in sales. Competition is stiff with the ever-increasing number of online retailers, and presenting engaging, highly personalized content through the recipient’s preferred channel can mean the difference between the success and failure of a business. Thus it is vital to select a DXP that supports multiple types of content and digital assets; delivery through multiple channels, including signage, kiosks, internet of things (IoT) devices, advertising boards, and video screens across a wide variety of devices (such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktop PCs); and out-of-the-box connectors with an array of complementary and back-end technologies, including customer relationship management (CRM), human resources (HR), and enterprise relationship planning (ERP).

DXPs are evolving, and they’ve now superseded web content management (WCM) platforms as the go-to systems for building appealing customer experiences for delivery on websites and digital channels. The types of assets supported by the platforms are expanding as retailers use technologies such as virtual and augmented reality for content delivery, which requires support for digital assets such as 3D. Moving forward, DXPs will also need to support the metaverse, as some innovative organizations are considering how they can use that technology to improve the customer experience. Generative AI will also have a big impact on DXPs as marketers use it to generate images and content without the need for input from the creative team.

This is the second year that GigaOm has reported on the DXP space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

New key criteria this year are the number of prebuilt connectors to common applications, which help to speed up implementation and deployment; text summarization, which generates an automated summary of a piece of text that is often used in place of a longer piece to make it easier to read on a small form factor device; social support, which allows organizations to publish content on social media sites, monitor brand mentions, and create their own social sites; and chatbots, which can reduce reliance on human contact.

This GigaOm Key Criteria report highlights the capabilities (table stakes, key criteria, and emerging technologies) and non-functional requirements (evaluation metrics) for selecting an effective DXP. The companion GigaOm Radar report identifies vendors and products that excel in those capabilities and metrics. Together, these reports provide an overview of the category and its underlying technology, identify leading DXP offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

How to Read this Report

The post Key Criteria for Evaluating Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs) appeared first on Gigaom.

Sue Clarke, Author at Gigaom

GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs)

Key Criteria for Evaluating DXPs

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