News Analysis
The Gist
- AI-powered enhancements. Acquia introduces new AI features in its digital asset management (DAM) solution to boost productivity and streamline content creation.
- Facing industry challenges. Despite innovations, Acquia grapples with a challenging year, including layoffs and increasing competition in the digital experience market.
- Shaping the AI in DX Future. Acquia’s AI-driven roadmap suggests a focus on content enrichment and optimization.
NEW YORK CITY — Acquia made another artificial intelligence infusion into its digital customer experience software ecosystem this week — this time for its digital asset management solution, Acquia DAM.
The news — touted by the Boston-based company to help marketers increase productivity and extract more value from their digital content — comes at the company’s roadshow customer tour conference, Acquia Engage; this one hosted in the Big Apple at the Dotdash Meredith Event Center.
Acquia’s the latest provider in the space to try to stand out amid a flurry of AI integrations into the DX stack. We heard all about those across the US this year: Adobe Summit in Vegas in March and Sitecore Symposium last week in Nashville.
Now here we are in City That Never Sleeps, and Acquia's looking to close out a challenging year that included layoffs. The private company did not announce the reductions publicly, but they surfaced on LinkedIn in recent weeks and also around the first quarter. Its roadshow, also called the “Digital Freedom Tour,” ends in person Nov. 12 in Tokyo and online Nov. 14-15 with Engage Boston, the company’s home turf.
Update from the Acquia CEO from New York City at Acquia Engage Thursday, Oct. 24, post original publication:
Acquia CEO Stephen Reny told CMSWire in New York City today the company's restructuring this year was focused on allocating resources toward innovation for 2025 and beyond, what he called the "largest percentage of our roadmap that's being dedicated to innovation relative to almost any year I can think of for the company." (more on this in the last section of the article).
That innovation's taking a strong step forward with announcements this week in the Big Apple, according to Chris Jorgenson, director, strategic partnerships for Phase2, a digital experience agency and Acquia partner.
“Acquia’s AI-powered offerings, especially the AI-assisted search through Acquia DAM, are a promising step forward,” Jorgenson said. “... Acquia's roadmap demonstrates its shift towards these innovative features, ensuring it remains at the forefront of digital experience platforms in an evolving market.”
Who Is Acquia?
Before we explore Acquia’s latest AI innovations via digital asset management, let’s take a step back and level-set with this digital experience platform provider powered by the open source Drupal content management ecosystem. Drupal’s founder Dries Buytaert is Acquia’s chief strategy and technology officer.
Drupal Roots, DXP Evolution
According to the CMSWire Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) Market Guide, Acquia is a private enterprise SaaS company that began in 2007, originally providing support for the open-source Drupal content management system. Over time, it has evolved into a comprehensive digital experience platform, now known as Acquia Open DXP. This platform is designed to help enterprises create, operate and optimize digital experiences across websites, apps and other customer touchpoints.
Key offerings of Acquia include a range of tools for content management, customer data, digital asset management and marketing automation. Acquia Open DXP includes tools like the Acquia Cloud Platform for hosting, Site Studio for low-code content building and Site Factory for managing multiple sites. Additionally, the platform provides personalization, AI-driven customer insights, campaign management and composability features that allow teams to integrate it with other martech and IT systems.
Acquia does not offer native commerce solutions but integrates well with external platforms such as Shopify and Magento. Its technology is heavily based on Drupal, offering a flexible and composable architecture for both marketers and developers. The company continues to invest in AI and other cutting-edge technologies to help organizations optimize and scale their digital experiences.
What Are Acquia's Strengths and Cautions?
Acquia’s strengths lie in its extensive customer journey mapping, personalization and AI-enhanced segmentation capabilities, making it accessible for non-technical users, along with its large open-source Drupal community, which fosters innovation, according to the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms (February 2024).
However, market confusion persists between its open-source Drupal and commercial Drupal Cloud offerings, and its less-developed partner channel for implementation limits qualified talent for optimizing its technology investment, Gartner found.
“Acquia continues to build and acquire functionality (including the recent DAM and PIM features) that helps take it beyond its roots as a content management platform toward a true digital experience platform that addresses the needs of experienced designers and marketers,” CMSWire researchers wrote in the DXP Market Guide. “These moves continue to advance Acquia in the market and position the company as a full digital experience suite competitor against Adobe, Optimizely, Sitecore and others.”
Related Article: Acquia Engage 2023: AI in Marketing's Evolution
AI-Powered Integrations for DAM
What did Acquia announce this week in New York City?
Here’s a snapshot of the news:
Acquia Video Creator
Powered through an OEM partnership with Moovly, this feature is now available as an add-on module to the Acquia DAM and PIM (product information management) solutions.
The solution allows users to:
- Produce videos using a drag-and-drop interface, existing assets from their digital asset library, customizable templates and a library of graphics, animations and video clips.
- Start new projects, edit existing videos and use AI features to generate scripts, voiceover, subtitles, transcripts and translations.
- Collaborate for internal sharing and review to use videos across websites, ecommerce channels, social media, events and more.
AI Video Transcription
This solution now enables users to:
- Add an AI-generated video transcript that is stored on the video’s asset digest page.
Automated Color Filtering
This solution:
- Uses AI to analyze the color profile of an image and provide filtering and search of specific HEX values, without any administrator work required.
Ask Acquia: What’s New With AI in DAM?
We asked an Acquia spokesperson for a deeper analysis on the new AI features within its DAM solution:
How do the new AI-powered features within Acquia DAM, such as Video Transcription and Automated Color Filtering, specifically help digital teams improve the customer experience across channels?
- AI-powered voices, subtitling, transcription and translation help streamline and automate video creation. Instead of starting from scratch, AI helps make it more cost-effective to create original content and variations, as well as improve the accessibility of videos via subtitling.
- Automated Color Filtering helps designers and content creators quickly find assets based on asset colors and by HEX values. It’s also helpful to track down assets with outdated colors to update with new branding.
With the introduction of Acquia Video Creator, what types of digital content workflows have you seen improved the most, and how does the integration of AI into video creation accelerate speed to market for content-driven teams?
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A few important content workflows Acquia Video Creator supports:
- Training: Use video to teach how to do a job, use a product or perform an action. Trainers don’t need to be video editing experts to enrich training materials with on-brand videos.
- Localization: Expand global reach with templating and multilingual video capabilities for local teams. Start with a template or final video, then auto-translate the audio and transcript, swap in culturally relevant images, and local information.
- Content Enrichment: Add video to blogs, webpages or social posts to convey complex ideas or provide an alternate form of consumption.
AI can help throughout the video creation process via:
- Write a script based on your prompt or an existing written piece of content.
- Search the DAM and select media to go along with the script.
- Generate the audio for the voiceover of the script.
For large enterprises managing vast content libraries, how do the new AI tools ensure brand compliance and consistency while also enabling more efficient collaboration across marketing and creative teams?
- Acquia Video Creator pairs brand templates, approved assets from Acquia DAM and generative AI to democratize video creation. Video professionals create animations and templates that any marketer, trainer or other employee can use. The user pulls compliant images, audio and video from the DAM. And if the user doesn’t know where to start, there’s AI assistance to work through the processes step by step.
- What sets Acquia Video Creator apart from other generative AI tools is the ability to edit the video project using drag-and-drop tools, instead of editing the output via prompts.
Related Article: Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs): What to Know in 2024
What’s Acquia’s Current and Future Software Roadmap Look Like?
What else is going on inside the Acquia digital experience ecosystem?
A Path Toward AI-Driven Optimization
While Acquia has historically differentiated itself with HIPAA compliance and security features, it’s worth noting that other digital experience platforms have caught up in this regard, according to Jorgenson of Phase2. To stay competitive, Acquia is now exploring new areas of innovation, such as AI-driven optimization tools and enhancements to Acquia DAM, he added.
“The integration of the Acquia Optimize (formerly Monsido) web optimization platform is also a development we’re closely watching,” Jorgenson said. “For those that prioritize accessibility and inclusive design, Acquia Optimize’s capabilities — coupled with Acquia’s plans for multi-language support — reflects Acquia’s commitment to supporting organizations in creating inclusive digital experiences.”
Buzz Around Drupal CMS and New SaaS Offering
David San Filippo, senior vice president, digital content & experience for Acquia partner Altudo, told CMSWire he’s looking forward to seeing the new Drupal CMS (Starshot) and Acquia's new SaaS offering. He also wants to see where Acquia takes its optimization offerings, rebranding Monsido to Acquia Optimize.
“Together with Acquia SEO (Conductor),” San Filippo added, “their offerings around providing ongoing improvements to your site are pretty strong. Acquia has been playing to their strengths by focusing on content and optimization, and there is a lot of good across their DXP offerings, and where there are gaps, strong partnerships with VWO and Conductor do well to create a strong offering.”
Does Acquia Have a Headless Path?
San Filippo said the only thing he doesn’t think Acquia’s focused on is support for headless architecture — ”though I can understand why,” he added. “Adoption in the Drupal ecosystem has been minimal and the authoring experience for headless on Drupal has not been as robust as other platforms. Headless's promise to optimize website performance has been less impactful as it's not as challenging to optimize Google lighthouse scores as compared to other monolithic DXP platforms. Given that, focusing on their customer experience, marketing operations, Site Studio, SaaS and ongoing optimization makes a ton of sense.
According to the CMSWire DXP Market Guide, developer tools for Acquia’s DXP include APIs to support headless publishing and composable architecture. The Drupal CMS can support traditional, hybrid, headless or decoupled applications depending on the needs of the customer. Acquia supports customers’ Drupal apps and provides Node.js hosting for additional decoupled application support. Drupal offers full API support, including GraphQL. It is also positioned to be able to work within a “fully composable architecture.”
Drupal Challenges Amid Strong DXP Vision
Liz Miller, analyst VP and principal analyst at Constellation Research, told CMSWire the challenge with Acquia continues to be cost, value and learning curve to manage and maintain. They have solid tools and have built intentionally easy-to-use-and-understand interfaces that users, once they get it up and running, love, Miller added.
"For the power Drupal user, they love the flexibility and modularity of content and architecture," Miller said. "But for large enterprises or agencies managing multiple code bases, Acquia can feel limited when not all sites run on Drupal. I have heard increasing concerns about long-term vision and viability as the impact of being owned by a venture firm has likely lead to the recent austerity demands. Gotta turn a profit."
All in all, Miller added, customers who are up and running on Acquia love their capabilities, according to Miller.
"I especially appreciate that their vision of what a DXP should be is actually complete and includes a CDP and DAM (that includes a PIM)," she said. "It is a comprehensive conversation unlike what others in the market do — specifically those competitors who only offer engagement or messaging on top of a headless CMS. That is not enough to really be a DXP."
Strong Support Infrastructure, Economic Challenges
Said El Fazni, a freelance Drupal developer who has worked with several large companies that have been using Acquia since its early versions, many of whom use Acquia Cloud Next, told CMSWire that one of the key benefits of Acquia is the strong support infrastructure it provides, which takes care of many system-level concerns.
“However, there are some limitations, and we’ve seen clients opting to migrate to AWS, mainly due to the high costs compared to AWS's offerings,” El Fazni said.
In terms of Acquia's roadmap, the impact of AI within Acquia has yet to significantly influence the Drupal ecosystem, he added.
“But the economic challenges, especially post-COVID, are more concerning, particularly here in Europe,” El Fazni said. “The job market, not just for Drupal professionals but across other industries, has been challenging.”
Acquia Layoffs and the Path Forward
Certainly, it’s been another challenging economic year in tech, with 476 companies seeing layoffs affecting more than 141,000 employees.
Several posts on LinkedIn in recent weeks — and some earlier in the year — touched on Acquia layoffs:
- “The widespread layoffs announced at Acquia earlier this week included many of my talented colleagues as well as my role as a SaaS Implementation Consultant for DAM (Digital Asset Management).”
- “This week, I was one of many colleagues and team members who found out our roles at Acquia are being eliminated.”
- “Recently affected by Acquia's layoffs, I'm saddened to part ways with an incredible team and company. My time at Acquia was filled with valuable learning experiences, meaningful connections, and unforgettable moments.”
San Filippo, in his interview with CMSWire, said, “As far as the layoffs go, I've heard they are refocusing on R&D, so it will be interesting to see how their offerings evolve over the next year.”
El Fazni told CMSWire, “Regarding the recent layoffs at Acquia, it has indeed raised questions among clients, creating some confusion and concern.”
Whether Acquia's financial news impacts its software roadmap… we’ll see. Acquia does have private equity ownership to the tune of $1 billion from Vista Equity Partners, so there’s always potential for corporate change. Private equity's paying a lot of attention to generative AI, for one thing.
As for Acquia, Engage certainly suggests innovation's not sleeping — just like the city in which the Acquia tour takes a pit stop.
Acquia CEO: 'Redeployment of Resources for Innovation'
Editor's note: This section was added to the article post-publication on Thursday, Oct. 24.
CMSWire caught up with Acquia CEO Stephen Reny at the Dotdash Meredith Event Center in New York City Thursday morning, Oct. 24 to discuss the layoff posts.
Addressing potential customer concerns, Reny told CMSWire, "The restructuring actions that we took are ones that we actually did notify all of our customers and partners about and gave them the strategic rationale behind why we did it, which was very focused on, how do we allocate our resources in a way that we feel is most productive? Which specifically involves, how do we get more resources allocated toward innovation as we think about 2025 and beyond. It's probably the largest percentage of our roadmap that's being dedicated to innovation relative to almost any year I can think of for the company."
Reny went on to call it a "redeployment of resources for innovation."
"How do we accelerate innovation?" he added. "And we were pretty transparent with all of our customers and partners about that."
Acquia saw a "strategic organizational change to get resources focused in the right places." None of it, Reny added, was about saving a dollar. "That's not what it's about," he said. "How do we get the company structured in the right way, focus on innovation, double down on getting innovation and adding experience improvements and enhancements for customers."
Innovation excites the company, he added. He called artificial intelligence an enabler for which brands can't fall behind.
"If you're not in front of it, you're going to be behind," Reny added. "We are on it. And for us, it is a priority. It's something that I think we've done a really good job, putting the right structure around, getting the right cultural mindset around, and having roadmaps, not just within our product portfolio, but across the entire company. Every organization in our company has an AI roadmap."
