Q4 2019 Product Updates to the Acquia Open Digital Experience Platform
Looking back on all that has happened throughout 2019, it’s pretty reasonable to claim 2019 as the biggest year in Acquia’s history. In the last year alone we launched five new products, 70 new features and acquired three companies to help bolster our vision of building true 360-degree customer experiences. In September, we also announced our own acquisition by Vista Equity Partners. This investment allows us to accelerate our development effort and more quickly execute on business in the future as we pursue greater digital transformation. Winning in the experience economy means always pursuing new opportunities for growth and innovation and never being satisfied with the status quo.
Today, Acquia offers unique clouds designed specifically to address the challenges of everyone who has a hand in shaping digital experience. We have the Acquia Drupal Cloud, designed for developers, site builders and IT operators who require effective and efficient ways to build, design, launch and manage new sites. For marketers and content creators, we have the Acquia Marketing Cloud, equipped with everything marketing teams need to personalize and engage with customers on any channel.
Together, these clouds form Acquia’s Open Digital Experience Platform (DXP), an open solution that helps businesses achieve success in an increasingly complex digital world by connecting open technology, cloud and data-driven experiences on the only platform optimized for Drupal. Each quarter, we deliver enhancements and new capabilities designed to unify the entire digital ecosystem. Here’s a look at the new product features we released or enhanced last quarter and how they empower our customers and partners to create and scale digital experiences spanning every channel within the customer journey.
Acquia Drupal Cloud - For Developers and Operators
Acquia Cloud Platform
New Relic Pro - Acquia customers are always looking for ways to improve the experience of their own customers. As a leading application performance management solution, New Relic Pro empowers developers and operations teams to improve site performance by providing insight into their Drupal applications. Best of all, it’s now available to all Acquia Cloud Platform customers.
Acquia +SumoLogic Dashboards
SumoLogic has partnered with Acquia to deliver custom dashboards that allow developers and IT operators to utilize custom graphs and data insights to identify potentially problematic anomalies in log data.
These dashboards are available to Acquia customers using our Log Forwarding feature. To get started, configure both services to get infrastructure logs flowing. From there, follow SumoLogic’s instructions to get the app up and running.
Acquia Lightning
Alongside the launch of Drupal 8.8 this past December, we’ve made improvements to Acquia Lightning, our leading Drupal 8 distribution to help customers more rapidly develop their sites.
Recent updates to Lightning include:
Improved Usability - This Lightning release delivers Drupal’s Claro as the default admin UI. Layout Builder Everywhere is also available in Beta to improve UX capabilities.
Drupal 9 Deprecation Status Tool - This complimentary new service enables users to determine which modules are Drupal 9 compatible, and for those that are not, provides specific information useful in determining exactly which issues need to be addressed.
Acquia Site Studio
In September, Acquia acquired Cohesion (now Acquia Site Studio), a fully featured, low-code site builder tool with dynamic UI to make it easier than ever to design and deploy new websites. Site Studio’s governed site style, themes, components, templates and menus allow site architects to create 4x faster, a necessity for organizations managing multiple sites and multiple agencies across multiple regions around the globe.
Here are the recent features and updates we’ve added to Acquia Site Studio:
UI to Manage a Core Design Template as a “Master Brand” - As digital properties proliferate and the number of websites continues to grow, keeping tight control over brand consistency becomes an incredibly challenging problem. Site Studio’s new Core Design Templates help drive overall brand consistency by empowering brand managers to share design elements across Drupal sites.
Live Preview in Template Styles Prior to Publishing - In the interest of accelerating site creation and deployment, site builders can now preview their designs “live” prior to publishing.
Acquia Marketing Cloud - For Marketers and Content Creators
Acquia CDP
In December, we announced that Acquia was acquiring AgilOne, a leading customer data platform (CDP). Acquia CDP’s machine learning and AI capabilities empower marketers to make informed decisions by providing a single, holistic view of the customer. Acquia CDP adds a unified intelligence layer to the Acquia Marketing Cloud that gives marketers real-time insights and lets them deliver immediate value through personal experiences across every channel.
Here are the major features the Acquia CDP offers marketers:
Single Customer View - To understand what your customer needs, you first need to understand who that customer is. Yet with so many different teams involved in shaping the customer experience, it’s far too common for identifiable information to get spread across silos. Acquia CDP provides data hygiene, profile unification, deduping, data append and cookie stitching, all of which make unifying customer data fast and easy to achieve.
Analytics and Machine Learning - Understanding patterns and trends in past behavior is crucial to inform strategic planning. Acquia CDP applies machine learning and behavioral analytics across 300+ dimensions and measures to provide key insights into audience engagement. Predictive algorithms, custom ML model support, SQL query access to data, data visualization and exploration all help satisfy the needs of data scientists.
Customer Data Activation and Orchestration - Knowing your customer and understanding their behaviors are the first two parts of delivering a compelling digital experience. Successful execution of campaigns informed by this data are the critical final piece. Acquia CDP offers behavioral segmentation, dynamic content, one-time use offer management, triggered orchestration, API connectivity to ads, marketing and customer-facing systems, as well as modern real-time APIs to drive successful engagement.
Acquia Personalization
Today, customers expect brands to deliver 1:1, hyper-personalized experiences. Acquia Personalization, our personalization tool optimized for Drupal, makes it easier to build personalization campaigns that offer the right content in the right context.
Updates to Acquia Personalization include:
Multilingual Personalization - Companies addressing audiences across countries and regions must contend with the challenges of managing multi-language sites. Acquia Personalization now can create personalizations once and have them automatically display in the correct language by region.
Multisite Campaign Management - In the past, Acquia Personalization customers were challenged by deploying campaigns from one environment into another. Acquia Personalization now allows marketers to build personalizations in dev/stage sites and simply and easily launch them into production with the click of a button.
Improved Campaign Analytics Capabilities - Analytics are the key to unlocking more effective personalization. The latest release of Lift introduces a way to isolate analytics by individual campaign to better understand their efficacy.
Looking ahead, there are many opportunities in digital experience to explore in the new year. We’ll be back with another product update recap next quarter.
Former Senior Director of Product Marketing marketing Acquia
