Adobe Named a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management, 9 Years Running
Today we’re thrilled to share that for the 9th consecutive year, Adobe has been named a Leader in the newly published Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management. Gartner Magic Quadrants evaluate vendors within a market based on completeness of vision and ability to execute. This year, the report says, “Adobe is positioned the highest for ability to execute and furthest for completeness of vision.”
We believe we have received this recognition because of our relentless focus on customer success, product innovation, and our cutting-edge work with our customers and partner ecosystem. Our customers have continued to realize tremendous value from our omnichannel content management offering Adobe Experience Manager Sites, both from increased engagement with their own customers as well as productivity gains from their internal teams. We are proud of our passionate customers, who continue to rapidly grow the Experience Manager community. Since the launch of Adobe Experience League last year, we have more than 700 active users. Our partner ecosystem is also crucial to the success of our customers, and it is larger and stronger than ever, with over 600 partners certified.
At Adobe, our mission is to help every brand excel in Customer Experience Management (CXM) by delivering impactful digital experiences in real time and at scale. In today’s digital-first age, personalized and connected experiences across all channels are simply table stakes. Customers are looking for “wow” experiences, and brands have to adapt quickly or face extinction. We believe today’s web content management systems need to rapidly adapt to this omnichannel world and embrace a more customer-centric approach, and this is what guides our innovation with Adobe Experience Manager.
We aim to ensure our customers across every industry, from manufacturing to retail, hospitality to financial services, and every size, whether mid-size or enterprise, make every experience they deliver count. It is our dedication to this vision and the support of our customers and partners that enabled us to achieve this leadership position.
Modern web experiences
In addition to the proliferation of channels and devices that brands must deal with today, the web experience has also evolved dramatically. The traditional HTML model is often not enough to deliver against the heightened expectations of today’s consumers — in fact, our content study revealed over half of consumers would stop engaging with content altogether if it takes too long to load. Brands are looking for a more efficient way to deliver dynamic and engaging experiences through the web, and they are increasingly turning to single-page applications and progressive web apps in order to do so.
The advent of these web app experiences brings its own challenges — these developer-centric frameworks reduce content velocity and make it difficult to manage and govern experiences at scale. For example, we launched SPA Editor last year to facilitate better collaboration between marketing and IT teams, enabling in-context preview and editing of JavaScript-based SPAs to drive the content velocity that brands need. This year, we enhanced SPA Editor to include the enterprise-level capabilities needed to manage these experiences at a global scale, such as server-side rendering and localization and translation workflows. In addition, we’ve purpose-built reusable components and archetypes that support quicker development within front-end frameworks. As we look to the future, we see Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) as the next evolution of these web experiences, and we’re making investments to support those frameworks.
Intelligent personalized experiences across all channels
In addition to the explosion of content that brands are faced with, the increasing complexity of the customer journey is posing its own challenges. Brands now have to consider how to deliver experiences across mobile apps, social media, IoT apps, and voice-enabled devices. This creates a challenge for marketers, who need to create and manage variations of content to support the breadth of customer touchpoints. In addition, IT teams now need to play a larger role in content delivery given the channel-specific complexities that traditional content management systems cannot address.
With Experience Manager, capabilities such as Content Fragments and Experience Fragments make it simple for brands to centralize content creation for reuse across any endpoint. The ability to deliver content via HTTP and RESTful APIs allows brands to leverage Adobe Experience Manager in a headless mode — delivering content regardless of the front-end framework. Pawan Verma, chief information and customer connectivity officer at Foot Locker, sees the value of Experience Manager: “The real value there is that we can innovate much faster. If we have a new feature coming in or we drop a new enhancement, we don’t have to code it six times for six different banners. We can code it one time, or consider it one time. We can expose it as an API one time and our partners can consume it.”
To capture the full value from customers, personalization is key — in fact, our study revealed that more than half of consumers are more likely to make a purchase if the content they receive is personalized. Experience Manager provides the analytics and granular insights around site performance and customer journeys that enable organizations to optimize their experiences. Fluid Personalization in Experience Manager allows brands to take these insights and create fully contained personalized experiences optimized for any channel — including modern web app experiences.
Agility for IT and marketers in the cloud
While experiences have grown to be richer and more complex, brands are still expected to deliver them faster than ever. We’ve added to our growing list of core components, which are fully tested and upgrade-ready out-of-the-box components that can be used to quickly spin up most experiences. The Style System in Adobe Experience Manager removes much of the component and front-end development effort typically associated with design and styling, and provides marketers with a way to easily select and apply pre-approved styles in the context of the experiences they’re editing. With these tools, brands can create, style, and populate experiences in the matter of days.
“Before Adobe Experience Manager Sites, it could take up to two weeks to author new content for the web. Now it’s a single-day process. Even if we need to create widgets or templates for a brand-new experience, the process is four times faster with Experience Manager,” said Brian Sierer, director of e-business and marketing platforms at National Instruments.
Using Cloud Manager, an application within experience Manager that we launched last year, IT teams can roll out customizations or major updates in nearly real time by leveraging state-of-the-art continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. In addition, built-in automated performance testing and code inspection help customers expedite time to market quicker than ever.
We’ve also made it easier for developers to get up to speed on Experience Manager and our best practices for development. Our multi-part WKND tutorial provides developers hands-on training and examples to create fully functioning, responsive experiences from scratch in a matter of minutes using the out-of-the-box capabilities in Experience Manager. In addition, Adobe Experience League provides persona-based guided learning paths on how to be efficient in your implementation.
Digital transformation can be a daunting journey, but we at Adobe are devoted to the success of our customers and ensuring every business can differentiate themselves on the basis of experience.
View the full Gartner report here.