Tag Archives: digital experience platforms

News

A quarter of UK webmasters worry web platforms stifle sales – Danebury Research survey reveals chief CMS concerns-

Odense, Denmark, 17th January 2022, a cross-sector survey conducted by Danebury Research and sponsored by Umbraco, has revealed that a quarter of respondents believe their company websites are costing them business. Over half of the survey participants said they need to extend website functionality by connecting to new technologies that enable analytics, personalisation and transactions. Almost a third (30%) report that their companies are paying for CMS features that will never be used. Despite these findings, 32% of respondents are delaying migrating to new content management systems (CMS) and digital experience platforms (DXP) that would allow them to gain the required functionality to meet customer demand.

What drives CMS selection:
The survey, conducted among 150 UK decision-makers with responsibility for websites, working at organisations with between 100 and more than 10,000 employees, found that the most important factors influencing CMS selection were the cost (43%), familiarity with the brand (35%) and personal recommendation of the CMS (35%).
For enterprises with more than 10,000 employees, brand familiarity, ongoing support and security updates, the ease and cost of adding new features and the ability to support multiple languages, heavily influence CMS selection.
Software licence fees and reduced time to market were the most important factors in CMS selection for enterprises with 5,000 – 10,000 employees.

CMS evolution:
Over half (54.7%) of the respondents across all sectors agreed that they need to be able connect company websites with additional technology to increase functionality as their businesses evolve.
When asked about new demands on CMS, over half of the survey participants (50.7%) agreed that their websites need to deliver personalisation, analytics and transactions, in addition to the usual content management. This finding was highest among respondents from the retail (68%), manufacturing (56.3%) and technology (50%) sectors.

Empowering marketing teams:
Almost half of all respondents (46%) agreed that they need to empower their marketing teams to rapidly adjust content in response to customer needs. This figure rose to 60% in the retail sector, just over half (53.3%) in the public sector, and half (50%) of respondents from the technology sector.

Kim Sneum-Madsen, CEO of Umbraco comments, “These survey findings indicate that organisations are leaning more heavily on their digital platforms and demanding more of their CMS providers as they expand their digital services to engage with customers on their preferred devices and in their local language.”

Chief CMS concerns:
When asked about their chief CMS concerns, the ease with which new features could be added over time, the cost of doing so and the lack of internal development skills to enable the organisation to get the best out of the CMS were cited most frequently. For respondents from public sector and digital agencies, slow performance of the CMS was also a major concern.
Ensuring ongoing support and security updates for CMS is the chief concern shared by all organisations with between 500 and over 10,000 employees.

Almost half (48%) of respondents from the technology and retail sectors cited lack of in-house coding skill as their main CMS concern. However, this issue may be exacerbated by their choice of CMS. Almost a quarter (24.7%) of all respondents from technology, public sector, digital agencies and the retail sector agreed that their current CMS made their organisation less attractive to talented developers.

Lock-in indications:
Almost a third (32% of respondents) agreed that they were staying with their current CMS and shortcomings of their websites because re-platforming would be too expensive, despite 30% of respondents agreeing that they are paying for CMS features that their organisation will never use. This figure rose to 40% of public sector respondents paying for unused features. Over half of respondents from all sectors (54.7%) agree that they will need to be able to be able to connect their website with additional technologies and functionalities as their businesses evolve.

Commenting on the Danebury Research findings, Kim Sneum-Madsen, CEO of Umbraco said, “Content management systems have had to evolve to enable organisations to deliver omnichannel engagement, transactions and personalisation. As a result, we’ve seen increased adoption of composable digital experience platforms, with CMS at the core, that allow organisations to integrate new technologies that meet fresh business requirements. However, this survey indicates that many organisations are stuck on digital platforms that no longer meet their needs. As an open-source CMS company, Umbraco’s mission is to make it as simple as possible for companies to extend their CMS by integrating technologies that serve their immediate business needs and provide the flexibility to adapt over time. We recently launched Umbraco Marketplace to help our customers to find technologies that easily integrate with Umbraco, and other composable DXPs, so that they can expand content, marketing and commerce capabilities. The survey findings strongly validate this strategy.”

Key findings from the Umbraco survey:
● 30% of respondents report that they are paying for CMS features they will never use
● Over half of respondents (54.7%) agree that they need to connect to new technologies to extend website functionality
● Half of survey respondents (50.7%) need their website to deliver personalisation, analytics and transactions, in addition to content
● A quarter (25.3%) of respondents believe their company websites are costing them business
● Just under a quarter of all respondents (24.7%) and 30% of public sector respondents believe their current CMS makes them less attractive to talented developers.
● Nearly a third (32%) of companies are making do with outdated CMS because they believe it would be too expensive to re-platform.
Kim Sneum-Madsen concludes, “We understand organisations’ reticence to move off monolithic CMS. However, over time, this strategy risks making them more vulnerable to market changes and new competitors that are using more nimble technology architectures that deliver what customers want. Moving to a composable digital experience platform offers a more sustainable route that avoids wasting budget on unused features and allows organisations to select, connect and invest only in technologies that deliver to the business and the bottom line.”

News, Tech Thought Leadership

Three key ways CMS platforms will help businesses in 2023

Written by Kim Sneum Madsen, CEO of Umbraco

“Organisations faced numerous challenges in the past year, including rising costs, supply chain issues and increased competition for talent. In addition, the effects of climate change are becoming more evident, making it imperative for companies to find new ways to reduce their environmental impact.

In spite of these headwinds, we know that necessity is the mother of invention and, as an open-source company working with thousands of creative people, we see many reasons to be hopeful as we head into our nineteenth year in business.

The pandemic accelerated digital transformation across all sectors, enabling a seismic shift in working patterns and putting customer experience at the top of the tech agenda.

Considering these combined factors, we believe that three trends will dominate our industry in 2023:

● CMS solutions will evolve substantially to enable broader digital experiences
● Data protection will be a key factor when building digital experiences
● Companies will adopt holistic sustainability

Let’s dig into why:

CMS solutions will evolve substantially in 2023

As we enter a new period of austerity, organisations will have a firm focus on technology ROI. Anything that doesn’t meet business needs will be off the menu. Paying license fees for unused software features will become a painpoint. When it comes to CMS selection, we predict that many organisations will rethink their monolithic approach and opt instead for composable architectures that allow them to combine best-of-breed technology components such as CRM, analytics, AI, automation, commerce and CX, which directly benefit the bottom line.

The adoption of composable architectures will increase the appetite for open-source solutions to reduce licensing costs, ease integration and increase agility.

While CMS were the engines that powered the world’s websites. Now, content management is just one element of the more complex digital experiences we see our digital agency partners building today. However, CMS will remain a crucial component in composable DXPs built from API-connected solutions that are selected and seamlessly integrated to meet immediate business requirements.

We’ve observed that the B2B experience of buying software has become more akin to the B2C experience. This pattern will continue in 2023 as it allows organisations to select what they need and incorporate fresh DXP elements such as automation, PIM, DAM, AI and personalisation software, to support composable commerce strategies and put customer experience at the forefront.

Anders Holt, CEO of our longest-standing partner, Novicell, predicts, “Organisations must be led by what customers demand, not what their technology will allow. More companies are recognising that consolidating their digital presence on a single large platform can limit business opportunities. Instead of trying to serve customers from a single solution that’s expensive and slow to update, in 2023 we’ll see more organisations using a combination of specialised component solutions that directly meet current business needs and which can be more quickly and economically replaced as customer requirements change.”

Data protection will be at the heart of digital experiences

The technology market has been governed by national and data protection regulations for decades. The right to privacy of correspondence was enshrined in the European Convention of Human Rights in 1950, the first UK Data Protection Act was passed in 1984 and the EU GDPR updated those protections for the internet age and came into force in 2018. We have seen major companies being called to account and fined millions of Euros for their handling of customers’ data. Apart from the threat of fines for breaking data protection laws, the reputational damage and loss of business resulting from breaching customers’ trust are the greatest deterrents. This will drive a stronger focus on the ethical use of data by technology companies.

As CMS platforms evolve, data protection will be a key factor in the way that data is processed, transferred and protected within API-connected architectures. Many countries outside of the European Economic Area have adopted similar regulations to EU GDPR and provide equivalent protection for citizens’ personal data. As more organisations adopt cloud-based services to benefit from reduced operating costs, we anticipate that there will be a customer-led demand for greater data sovereignty to provide reassurance that their personal and financial information is stored within their own borders and protected by their local jurisdiction.

Mark Lusted, CEO of MagiClick, which has developed a number of digital platforms for financial institutions also believes that 2023 will see organisations incorporating DXP elements that support data compliance: “The EU Digital Market Act looks to be a game-changing piece of legislation which will force the major players in technology to break open their “walled gardens” in 2023. This has major implications for all companies designing and building digital experiences.

The impact will also likely be felt well beyond the borders of the EU because, as we’ve seen with the previous GDPR legislation, many global businesses seek to implement key areas of compliance globally. Other jurisdictions are also likely to follow suit with similar legislation.

The wider direction of travel for the technology market is clear and those designing and building digital products need to embed the ethical use of consumer data in their product design approach and embed transparent, clear standards on how they will use this data. I also believe these changes will create opportunities as the data held within “gatekeeper” platforms from Big Tech giants are opened up and I have no doubt that innovative use cases for this will soon follow.

CMS vendors will need to adapt the privacy and interoperability features of their platforms and I believe these changes further strengthen the case to move in the direction of composable digital experience platforms, rather than monolithic solutions, as composable architecture affords much more flexibility to adapt and choose components from different ancillary products which best fit the new legislative requirements.”

Sustainability evolves to a more holistic vision in companies

We predict that environmental, social and governance factors will drive DXP decisions in 2023. Sustainability will become more holistic and be incorporated into the earliest stages of digital design and technology selection.

Any company that wants to put its customers first needs to start by listening to them. Customers are looking more closely at the way that organisations treat the environment and their employees. Companies that are seen to put profit before people are losing market share.

The technology industry is coming under greater scrutiny for the resources that it consumes and the volume of its byproducts, whether that be electronic waste, heat from servers, or CO2 emissions from datacentres. This will extend to the way that digital experiences are designed. Every click consumes energy. As customers become aware of ways to reduce the environmental impact of online activities, organisations will be driven to reduce energy consumption, adopt greener solutions and put back into society and the planet.

We have already seen the technology industry making strides to improve diversity and inclusion. This will continue in 2023 as organisations recognise the social and financial benefits of viewing the world from multiple perspectives and accessing fresh problem-solving capabilities. As an open-source company we have long understood the value of crowd-sourcing creativity. In challenging times, this collective effort will help organisations to survive and thrive.

On the governance front, competition for talent is pushing organisations to select technology platforms that attract the best employees and help them to deliver seamless digital experiences to their customers.

Good governance promotes profitability without being heavily detrimental to the environment and employees. In 2023 there will be greater pressure to create better profitability paths in the tech industry so that companies can be financially sustainable as well as ethical.

Here too, we see composable architecture playing its part in a sustainable culture. By enabling technologies to be swapped in and out of the stack to meet business opportunities, organisations can extend the life of digital platforms without major investment in re-platforming.
Andy Eva-Dale, Technical Director at digital agency and Umbraco gold partner, Tangent, offers some excellent advice: “The IT industry is responsible for 3-4% of global CO2 emissions. Every http request uses energy. The good news is that designers of digital experiences can help to reduce this impact. In 2023 we’ll see more organisations adopting sustainable digital design practices such as asset bundling and optimising images to reduce their size, improve load speeds and lower energy consumption.

Sustainability also extends to considering how we might reuse common code and reference architectures, rather than duplicating developers’ efforts and squandering scarce resources. Adopting a composable approach to digital experience development allows API-connected technologies to be swapped in and out, rather than ripping and replacing an entire platform. In a challenging economic climate, the ability to extend the life of digital experience platforms by adding in lighter weight technologies that precisely meet business needs and avoid the organisation paying expensive license fees for unnecessary features, is more likely to win over the C-suite too.”

How Umbraco helps partners to profit

At Umbraco, we do everything we can to keep up-to-date with current business trends and put them into practice ourselves, so that we are the best choice for organisations seeking a future-proof, user-friendly CMS that supports the move to composable architectures and has data protection at its heart.

As a European company, we already abide by the toughest data protection regulation in the world. Earlier in 2022, we launched regional cloud hosting in the U.S., providing our American customers with the option to store data locally, within their own country’s jurisdiction.

Our digital agency partners are already building composable digital experience ecosystems with Umbraco. The recent release of Umbraco 11 includes a new Marketplace, which makes it easier to discover technologies that seamlessly integrate with our CMS. Our mission is to make complex tasks simpler, so we’re actively expanding the number of Technology Partners contributing integration packages to the Marketplace, to make it easier to find the right tools to build powerful digital experience platforms that keep customers loyal and help businesses thrive. ”