News
The Gist
- AI-first expansion. Optimizely’s latest announcements include Opal enhancements and new AI agents for marketers.
- Industry-specific solutions. The company is introducing Optimizely One into sectors like manufacturing and healthcare.
- Balancing SaaS and flexibility. The strategy focuses on customer choice rather than a forced SaaS migration.
SAN ANTONIO — Optimizely, a provider of digital customer experience software, has taken center stage at its annual user conference, Opticon, at the JW Marriott in San Antonio this week to unveil a suite of new advancements poised to bolster its digital experience platform (DXP). These include AI-powered features embedded in Opal, its co-pilot for marketers and a strategic expansion into vertical markets such as manufacturing and healthcare.
The New York City-based company also announced it has delivered on a promised SaaS-based content management system (CMS) offering, emphasizing flexibility and innovation that combines the best of both worlds: composability and developer friendliness of the actual repository of the CMS.
What Is Optimizely Announcing?
The big reveal? New features for Opal, its embedded AI assistant across Optimizely One, its marketing operations system announced at its 2023 industry conference. Its AI capabilities are embedded natively across the entire marketing workflow.
Here's where specifically the Opal updates will live:
- Campaign brief ideation: Opal references past performance data to suggest topics and define objectives.
- Auto-task generation: Opal anticipates tasks to be completed unique to each campaign.
- Branded content generation: Opal is aware of unique guidelines, tone of voice and any other instructions provided.
- Brief-based asset generation: Opal generates campaign-specific assets, images, social posts and more using context from the brief, accelerating content creation workflows.
- Suggested segments: Opal will recommend and/or generate segments for targeting.
AI-Powered Agents, Enhanced Personalization and SaaS CMS
Kevin Li, SVP, product strategy & operations, for Optimizely, told CMSWire in an interview ahead of Opticon his company is focusing its roadmap on AI, a SaaS-based CMS offering, industry-specific innovations and bringing recent acquisitions to life.
Particularly, he cited:
- AI-powered agents: Optimizely is focusing on AI enhancements with Opal and autonomous AI agents capable of task execution, enriched with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and function calling.
- Industry-specific solutions: The company is expanding into industry-specific verticals like manufacturing and healthcare, featuring HIPAA readiness and other tailored capabilities within Optimizely One.
- SaaS-based headless CMS: Optimizely’s new SaaS-based headless CMS includes a visual builder, providing a blend of composability, developer-friendly features and marketer usability.
- Enhanced personalization offering: The latest personalization product emphasizes collaboration, templates and edge delivery.
- Netspring acquisition and warehouse analytics: Optimizely's acquisition of Netspring in September enables deeper analytics by linking experimentation to critical business metrics stored in data warehouses.
"Last year we said we would have a SaaS CMS, and we delivered on that," Li said. "This year you'll definitely hear now it's actually here. Headless by design and Visual Builder is a big part of it. So how do you get the best of both worlds: the composability and the developer friendliness of the actual repository of the CMS, plus Graph. And then Visual Builder for marketers on top of there."
More specifically, Li was referring to components of the Optimizely SaaS CMS:
- Visual Builder: Provides a drag-and-drop interface where you can create and organize content with real-time previews.
- REST API: Lets developers programmatically configure CMS instances, set up content types and manage other resources.
- Optimizely Graph: Facilitates efficient content retrieval across platforms for consistent, structured digital experiences.
The vision: build a "greater embedded experience," bringing in digital asset management, experimentation and personalization into the SaaS CMS in the future and bringing the "Optimizely One story together with the SaaS CMS as being a key thing," according to Li.
Who Is Optimizely?
Let's dial it back for a second beyond this week's product launches and talk about what Optimizely brings into the digital experience platforms (DXP) space. For starters, Gartner sees them, Adobe and Acquia as DXP leaders according to its Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms released in February of this year.
Further, according to CMSWire’s Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) Market Guide, Optimizely is distinguished by its comprehensive approach to digital marketing solutions, offering capabilities across content management, personalization, customer data management and advanced experimentation. The report highlights that Optimizely’s blend of AI-driven tools and composable solutions positions it as a marketing operating system designed to unify and enhance every stage of the marketing lifecycle. This end-to-end focus allows brands to streamline content creation, optimize campaigns and deliver personalized experiences efficiently.
Strengths: Unified Data, Pricing and Acquisitions
Optimizely’s position as a leader in Gartner’s 2024 Magic Quadrant highlights several key strengths according to report authors:
- Unified data capabilities: The integration of Optimizely Graph for data access across different platform components, enabling improved AI-driven insights.
- Transparent pricing: A modular, scalable pricing model that eases adoption for businesses of varying sizes.
- Successful acquisitions: The company has effectively woven acquired technologies into its DXP platform without requiring full-scale adoption, enhancing customer experience.
Growth Opportunities: Simplicity, Better DXP and SaaS Stories
However, Gartner also notes areas for improvement:
- Complex product landscape: Optimizely’s broad array of tools can create a learning curve for new users.
- Overemphasis on content and experimentation: This focus might overshadow its DXP capabilities, diluting its overall strategic positioning.
- SaaS transition uncertainty: The move to SaaS may bring transitional challenges for some clients.
Optimizely One Is Optimizely's 'DXP Message'
As for the DXP growth arena, Optimizely's Li said the company has addressed these concerns noted in February by Gartner.
"I think the stress of Optimizely One as an end-to-end, sort of overall solution has really helped," Li said. "Because when we first launched Optimizely One, no one sort of really knew what that means: marketing operating system for marketing, etc."
Optimizely, he added, has in addition to experimentation and content marketing, focused on innovations like Graph, SaaS Visual Builder and other "core DXP" capabilities that tell a better DXP story. Visibility and content management are "big things" for the company, he added. He added that Optimizely One is the DXP message that Optimizely now has.
Related Article: Optimizely Debuts Industry-First Marketing Operating System at Opticon 2023
Move to SaaS: On Par With DXP Market
Optimizely's push into SaaS and headless for their CMS platforms are aligning perfectly with where the market is heading, according to David San Filippo, senior vice president of Digital Content & Experience for Optimizely partner Altudo.
"Moving to SaaS means better performance, fewer headaches for upgrades and faster innovation for everyone," he said. "The headless support (for both PaaS and SaaS), on the other hand, is all about giving companies more flexibility and scalability for their digital experiences. We’ve been working on a headless accelerator that we’ll be showcasing at Opticon, and it’s been great to see how well Optimizely’s roadmap supports those kinds of initiatives."
'True Marketing Operating System'
San Filippo told CMSWire Optimizely’s roadmap has been exciting to follow, especially with the vision of Optimizely One as a "true marketing operating system."
"That idea of bringing everything marketers need into one cohesive system is strong," San Filippo added, "and the addition of Opal, their embedded AI assistant, has the potential to make it even stronger. If Opal can truly weave AI across the platform in a way that enhances workflows, it could be a game-changer in showing how AI can be used not just for isolated tasks but to unify and elevate the entire marketing process."
Can Opal Weave into Web Experimentation and Personalization?
Specifically, San Filippo would love to see how Opal integrates into Web Experimentation and Personalization, which he calls "already standout products in the Optimizely suite." Bringing AI into the mix to help streamline ideation and segmentation, and the execution of campaigns and experiments feels like "the natural next step," added San Filippo, a CMSWire Contributor.
"The opportunity to have AI suggest test ideas, create better audience segments and even automate some of the heavy lifting around campaign setup could take these tools to another level," San Filippo said.
Related Article: 5 Digital Customer Experience Trends for 2024
The Optimizely Promise: AI-Driven Efficiency and Enhanced User Experience
As for the big wins with AI infusions into the Optimizely suite, Li emphasized that the core outcomes of Optimizely's advancements are centered around speed, efficiency and maintaining quality. He highlighted that enterprises face significant governance challenges, such as ensuring adherence to brand guidelines and approval processes.
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AI agents streamline these processes, enabling quicker, brand-consistent outputs. Additionally, AI tools help non-expert data analysts surface key insights, flag important details and simplify workflows. These capabilities not only boost operational throughput but also enhance the overall marketer and employee experience by reducing the need for juggling multiple tools and simplifying onboarding for new team members, according to Li.
"They’ve been very transparent about what’s coming, and I think that’s been a big positive," San Filippo said. "You can see what they’re testing in their betas, and that openness helps build trust and collaboration between Optimizely, their partners and their customers. At the end of the day, Optimizely continues to be a competitive and compelling offering in the market. Their vision, combined with their openness about where they’re headed and the tangible improvements they’re making, shows that they’re serious about staying relevant and valuable to their customers."
