Forrester Wave Carries AEM Towards the Forefront

Another wave washes up upon the digital shores. Its waters recede and leave behind some CMS gems, scattered across the commerce environment.

Among the star-studded content management systems, the one perched highest among the collection was Adobe Experience Manager.

Research from the latest Forrester Wave, the independent analyst firm, took the top 15 content management system solutions and evaluated them across a comprehensive 26-metric overview, which were divided into the following categories: strategy, current offering, and market presence.

Here is a snapshot of the Forrester Wave and the content management systems that came under its scope.

With such a clear view, we see that by far and away the strongest, highest-performing content management system currently on the market is Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) – with a huge market presence, it scored highly across the board. 

As you can see, there were 3 – what Forrester calls – Leaders in the CMS space. Accompanying AEM in the elite group are Optimizely and Acquia, although they both ranked overall lower than AEM. (Consider the 3 leading CMS solutions a triangle with Optimizely and Acquia at the base holding up AEM.)

Optimizely (once upon a time called Episerver) is a useful CMS that, building on strong capabilities for content creation and management, allows customers to run multivariate testing as well as audience targeting.

Acquia is another great CMS solution that offers great cloud-native tools for customers to build digital experiences.

And then there’s AEM – cloud-native, powered by personalization, and optimized for A/B testing.

“We believe being rated a leader reflects the success of our customers and partners,” proudly stated Adobe, “who are delivering digital experiences that delight their customers, employees and partners. Our vision and strategy for agile CMS is simple: build a content system that provides IT, developers, and marketing organizations agility to deliver exceptional experiences.”

What this means on paper is that an ideal content management system ought to demonstrate several characteristics, including: 

• the ability to manage a wide variety of content types and formats, fit for building great digital experiences
• the ability for headlessness, as well as hybrid content implementations which can scale
• a large dose of artificial intelligence that helps personalize content as well as measure the performance of content 

Adobe Experience Manager is a cloud-native system, which means that it doesn’t matter the size of your business – colossus commerce brand or creative startup – AEM can deliver digital experiences on any touchpoint, which leads us to talking about the O word: omnichannel.

Omnichannel experiences

Brands and retailers that get hold of AEM have in their hands powerful tools for creating and managing omnichannel content.

If your consumer base is large then they’re divided into how they mostly interact with you: perhaps they are big email fans, many probably prefer interacting on social media, others by phone, others through games consoles, and many via a brand’s app.

But there are so many owners of content nowadays, everyone from devs on both the back- and front-end, marketers, the IT Crowd,  and the special DevOps. With such a collective ownership, their tools need to be agile, so that content is cared for all the way from thoughts on paper to its creation then to management and ultimately delivery.

Clever, clever, clever; Scale, scale, scale

Gone as the days when a brand writes a message and sends it to every one of their customers. That cookie cutter, copy and paste message has never been inspiring. And while it may be relevant to 10% of your customers, what about the other 90%? Even if your general messaging remains relevant for 90% you’re still missing out and alienating 10% of your customers.

Each customer wants their own tailored-made experiences, and relevant recommendations. And they want this on the platforms in which they use the most or find most convenient. In short, customers want personalization and brands can find that tough.

So how do brands perform better? Personalized experiences are powered by artificial intelligence, helping to find valuable info among customer data, which can then be used to tailor messages and recommendations to each person.

Also with artificial intelligence, as well as machine learning, it enables teams to scale in order to meet constant challenges, for instance with automating tags, cropping, and image manipulating.

AEM plugs in AI to enhance its cross platform capabilities such as A/B testing and targeting with collaboration from Adobe Target.

“With the Adobe platform and the Adobe cloud, our maturity is growing very quickly in terms of the way we can consume and analyze data,” said Pentair’s [an Adobe customer] VP of digital customer Patrick Theimer, as well as “advance personalization, manage site updates and improvements, and deliver an actionable and connected UX to optimize our resource management and enterprise investment.”

Quick & quality cloud content

It’s no use spending months on a finely-crafted piece of content if it gets lost among the daily flood of content that washes up on the internet and that you don’t make regular contact – unless you’re an investigative journalist who is holding on to some explosive secrets. 

To be competitive today means that commerce brands need the flexibility to create and launch constant fresh content. But because it can scale, then it can handle a company’s needs to start small and simple before branching out into its multiple content experience needs.

“Our clients operate in increasingly challenging times,” stated Dechert’s (a global law firm) digital marketing manager Alice Cervantes. “They face geopolitical uncertainty, complex modern markets and an ever-changing regulatory environment. 

“Moving our site to Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service has given us the ability to experiment and explore more innovative ways to deliver the ideal digital experience and make a difference for our clients.”

AEM also has the engine to accelerate large brands and retailers’ content workflows, emanating from a singular source of truth for its content to be used across platforms, ensuring continuity and a consistent brand messaging style.

So there you have it. A dive into the strengths of the leading content management system in the world right now, as concluded by the Forrester Wave.

PS: ArganoUV is one of the world’s leading Adobe Experience Manager dev shops. Contact us to see how we can work together.