After 18 months without any acquisitions or major technology integrations, Optimizely made a triumphant return at Opticon San Diego 2023.UNRVLD's Optimizely leadership team was on hand to witness the unveiling of a series of major announcements and innovations that are set to reshape the platform.
Read UNRVLD’s extended insights which cover updates around Optimizely One and SaaS CMS, plus Optimizely Commerce, Experimentation and AI updates, or see a highlights summary below.
Optimizely One - The World's First "Operating System for Marketers"
Optimizely has a longstanding reputation for their powerful, flexible, and highly intuitive Digital Experience Platform (DXP) for Content, Commerce and Experimentation. With the introduction of Optimizely One, they're going to the next level, promising to revolutionise the way marketers work by enhancing collaboration, efficiency and efficacy.
Optimizely One takes the traditional Content Management System (CMS) a step further, extending its support throughout the content production and promotion lifecycle. By combining Content Marketing, CMS, Commerce, DAM, Experimentation and Personalisation, the aim is to unify teams through a single, seamless workflow. This workflow will be infused with AI to accelerate the entire marketing lifecycle.
Answering the Composable Question with Optimizely SaaS CMS
Optimizely also didn’t shy away from the Composable and MACH architectures which have been rapidly gaining popularity. The availability of anew SaaS CMS sees Optimizely enter the ring amongst other emerging cloud-based, SaaS-first, Headless CMS options.
Optimizely SaaS CMS is set to be available in Q1 2024, alongside the existing PaaS version. It will be supported by a Visual Builder/experience editor designed to cater to commerce scenarios. Furthermore, Optimizely Graph will be expanded to support more complex builds and integrations within MACH architectures.
Commerce and experimentation updates
Optimizely didn't stop at Optimizely One and their new SaaS CMS. They also introduced Composable Commerce Modules, aimed at enabling MACH-oriented, composable commerce solutions. These modules can be used on top of both B2B and B2C versions of the Commerce (Core) platform. This will provide development teams with increased flexibility and agility to deliver lightweight, scalable and headless commerce experiences.
New innovative partnerships
Optimizely has forged several intriguing partnerships, designed to enhance capabilities in key areas for Commerce enablement and performance.
- Search & Product Recommendations: A partnership with Google, leading partners in the field of search, will no doubt enhance the search Experience for customers.
- Order Lists & Management: A partnership with Microsoft to support large-volume B2B order creation and management for largescale scenarios.
- Payments: Collaborating with Spreedly, a global payments orchestration platform, to accelerate globalisation and enable organisations to sell more effectively in markets all over the world.
- Simple /Composable Checkout: A partnership with Bolt, promoting a "Shockingly Simple Checkout," offering new options for integrating checkout capabilities that could accelerate commerce projects.
Experimentation Collaboration
Optimizely's Web and Feature experimentation platforms have long been market leaders. This year's growth in this area was expedited by the recent sunset of Google Optimize. More than 200 new customers have joined, and notable enterprise organizations like Zoom have started using the platform.
UNRVLD were delighted to showcase our learnings when Polly Walton, UNRVLD Head of Experimentation and CRO, presented her own “shockingly simple” 3 golden rules for “Maximising the commercial impact of your experimentation program” in San Diego. Sign up to catch Polly’s talk as a webinar on November 9.
AI takes centre stage
In a world where AI is becoming increasingly vital, Optimizely introduced Opal, their AI assistant. Opal leverages Generative AI to assist content and commerce marketers, experimenters and testers in creating and optimising digital experiences.
Opal's capabilities extend from drafting briefs to making recommendations for tests and variations, accelerating the test-and-learn process.
An impressive vision for the future
Optimizely’s platform roadmap is as extensive and exciting as it has been in recent years. While the technological advances are impressive, what stands out most is the vision to support the real and pressing needs of marketers. By prioritising collaboration, data-centricity, and continuous improvement, Optimizely has set forth an impressive vision for the future of the DXP space.
Our Optimziely experts are on hand to help you implement Optimizely’s new capabilities, get in touch to start your journey today.
.webp)