Identifying DX vendors is a challenge.

The last years has seen businesses in every sector accelerating their digital transformation plans in response to a customer base that clearly prefers to interact and buy digitally. This increased investment in digital transformation projects invariably results in a Digital Experience Management (DXM) project; either to replace the existing DXM or Web Content Management platform, or to consolidate the same across the company. 

Modern DXM systems must support the delivery of compelling experiences across the whole customer journey, with real-time retrieval even needed for resource-intense media assets like video, even virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) images. The global market for DXM software and projects is therefore very healthy as companies replace their current older systems to ensure success in their digital marketing and digital selling.

Out of curiosity, I went through the 36 Martechstack examples published by Scott Brinker the other week and found these vendors named by various marketing organizations in their DXM (or similar) stacks. 

• 6Sense listed under “Digital Experience” PathFactory, Mutiny, Wisia, and WordPress.
• Akamai has Adobe, Drift, Siteimprove, SDL, and Swiftype.
• IBM names Adobe, Brightedge, Contentful, Clearscope, and WordPress.
• Merkle lists under “Experience” just Adobe, Meta, and Salesforce.
• Verizon has Adobe and Medallia.

Almost every marketing software vendor will claim some element of DXM, so there are potentially thousands of vendors with DXM solutions. For historical reasons, (the stuff is already installed), many companies have multiple digital experience solutions in their stacks. So, the greatest challenge for them is integration.  Which means that my new Vendor Selection Matrix^tm research on DXM, to be published this week, is going to be more useful than ever for potential buyers of software for that process. 

As usual, as the report reflects the view of the market, 1500 business decision-makers reported their opinions and ratings for the DXM vendors they know. That is quite different than the standard research reports from my old colleagues (remember, I am ex- Gartner and ex-Forrester) that focus on an analyst’s rating of the product, based on briefing presentations by the vendors invited to speak with them. Indeed, Forrester managed to put Oracle, Salesforce and SAP into the leader category in their report, though these vendors are hardly mentioned in other surveys, including our’s below. 

The survey respondents named several priorities for DXM projects with #1 being system performance (meaning responsiveness) followed by customer experience. A new priority this year was advanced analytics and recommendation engines.  On a global basis, 76% of the respondents told us they were consolidating numerous and disparate DXM systems; two years ago this share was 68%.  49% of those respondents cite “Achieving a 360-degree view of the customer” as their top reason for the consolidation.

These are the Top 15 vendors as selected by 1,500 users surveyed based upon their rating of product, company, and service quality (listed alphabetically): ACQUIA*, ADOBE*, BLOOMREACH*, CONTENTFUL*, COREMEDIA*, CROWNPEAK*, IBEXA, KENTICO, LIFERAY, MAGNOLIA*, OPENTEXT*, OPTIMIZELY*, ORACLE*, SITECORE, and SQUIZ*.  These vendors* are the Market Leaders as they scored over 4 out of 5 in both the Strategy and Execution categories.  

Always keeping you informed! Peter O’Neill