Aligning customer demand and business need during every stage of the product development process
Here at Candyspace our mantra is to ‘build digital products that are loved by everyone’ and we do this through the alignment of customer demand and business need during our product development process. We use technology as an enabler for business growth through our use of best-in-class API-driven, cloud-based, headless PaaS solutions.
Working with the Optimizely (formerly Episerver) platform enables us to deliver on this vision and allows us to do our best work for our ambitious and growth-focussed clients, providing them with the best possible ROI.
Making the big decision
Choosing a digital experience platform (DXP) is one of the biggest business decisions that many CIOs and CTOs will make during their careers. The alignment with a particular DXP platform is likely to govern whether their businesses are able to scale and grow effectively for many years to come. The right DXP platform provides businesses with a powerful set of centralised capabilities to help build, manage and optimise digital journeys for business success. Choosing the wrong platform or sticking to an outdated technology stack is likely to hamper a business’s ability to both innovate and grow in two key ways:
1. Monolithic platform architecture = slow growth
Modern businesses need to be able to act swiftly, but technology leaders are often hampered by outdated monolithic platforms which fail to rapidly respond to market demands and business opportunities. These monolithic platforms are typically designed to handle multiple end-to-end tasks and are architected without modularity and scalability in mind. This outdated approach to enterprise architecture often leads to a build up of technical debt, typically leading to longer integration and roll out times and business change. These limitations lead to slow rates of product iteration and in turn business growth.
Such outdated, legacy systems can be seen in stark contrast to the microservices architecture approach which is characterised by loosely-coupled services which can be developed, deployed, and maintained swiftly and independently.
2. Outdated platform capabilities = lack of a customer insight
Legacy technology stacks with outdated capabilities tend to lead to businesses failing to meet customers’ rapid and increasing demand for integrated, personalised, continuous and frictionless digital experiences. Technology leaders and marketing teams are finding it hugely challenging to deliver seamless and relevant experiences across touchpoints without embedding a deep understanding of the customer into powerful digital experience platforms. Businesses who are not able to adopt best-in-class technologies (such as DXPs) struggle to maintain pace with the competition.
Why Optimizely is the DXP of choice for accelerated business growth
There are a number of key reasons we believe that Optimizely is an important market player and a real differentiator in the DXP space.
1. Modular and flexible
Decision-makers in technology need to deliver optimised digital experiences at speed and scale. The best-in-class product offerings from Optimizely – including Content Cloud, Intelligence Cloud and Commerce Cloud – provide composable modularity and in turn powerful business agility. Of course, not all businesses require the entire Optimizely product suite. Through the use of well-defined API endpoints and ready made integrations all Optimizely products can be either used together or with parts of our customers’ existing technology stacks to improve productivity, drive cost savings and ultimately increase revenue.
By 2023, organizations that have adopted an intelligent composable approach will outpace competition by 80% in the speed of new feature implementation
Gartner 2020
2. An exciting roadmap and strong acquisition
Optimizely has recently made a number of exciting acquisitions. Episerver acquired the world’s leading experimentation platform Optimizely in October 2020. The Optimizely platform helps to accelerate product release cycles, drive conversion, adoption, engagement and retention. The recently launched Optimization-as-a-Service solution is a harmonious solution that offers everything a digital marketer would need for digital experience optimization in one powerful package. More recently in March it acquired Zaius, a customer data platform (CDP) which furthers its commitment to helping businesses unlock their digital potential – by seamlessly unifying and providing insights on all of their digital data in a singular data platform.
3. Highly extensible
Optimizley’s vision is to make the platform more versatile and extensible. There has been a huge growth of over 60% in the Optimizely App Marketplace in the past year which provides a vast array of apps and integrations to increase productivity and assist with a quicker route to market.
4. A market-leading platform that delivers tangible results through optimised customer experiences
Optimizely enables us to measure the outcomes of different options to create unique digital experiences for each customer at scale. It was named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for 2021 – a huge achievement and a testament to their level of ambition and innovation in the DXP space. The platform consistently earns industry accolades and award recognition for its business success stories, broad range of powerful capabilities and its unique product vision. It is a truly global success helping over 9,000 brands optimise customer experience, increase revenue and grow.
Customers leveraging Episerver's Cloud infrastructure for 1+ years typically see a 70 percent increase in engagement and a 43 percent increase in conversions.
Why Candyspace and Optimizely?
Your organisation must not be content to just keep pace — it must set the pace.
GARTNER 2021
To survive – let alone to thrive – businesses need to embrace digital transformation at a pace like never before, adapting and responding faster than ever. This is where the partnership between Optimizely and Candyspace can help you.
Candyspace’s experience and knowledge of the platform ensures that your Optimizely investment leverages the end-to-end power of the DXP with support that helps you develop your business. Our approach prioritises insights above assumptions, with human-centered thinking at its heart; data-driven decision-making; and innovative thinking with a growth mindset. And all of this delivered at the speed that will enable your business to stay ahead of your competitors.
So whether you are looking for an improved e-commerce presence, brand building or increased engagement and conversion of your customers, Optimizely is the platform to help you unlock opportunity and achieve digital success and Candyspace the right partner for your business on this journey.
