The Forrester Wave- Digital Experience Platforms, Q4 2015

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The Forrester Wave™: Digital ExperiencePlatforms, Q4 2015

The 10 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up

by Mark Grannan, Ted Schadler, and Stephen Powers

October 22, 2015

FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY PROFESSIONALS

FORRESTER.COM

Key Takeaways

The Digital Experience Platform Market Is

Coming Into Focus, Particularly In The CloudWe found three big changes since last year:

rationalized products instead of newly acquired

properties; a loving embrace of platform-as-

a-service; and a strong core forming around

content-driven marketing and commerce

experiences.

Portfolio Integration, Strong Point Solutions,

And Strategy Are The Biggest Differentiators

No vendor can lead without having strong

content, commerce, marketing, and analytics

solutions. But practitioner simplicity and power,

deployment rationalization, and integration are

also critical. Each vendor’s strategy determines

its success.

Adobe Edges Into Leader Territory Amidst A

Competitive Market

Adobe’s integration efforts stand out; Cloud

strategies for Acquia, Demandware and

Salesforce shine; EPiServer, IBM, Oracle, andSAP hybris are rationalizing their portfolios;

Sitecore deepens homegrown functionality; and

SDL starts to regain momentum.

Why Read This Report

In Forrester’s 40-criteria evaluation of digital

experience platform vendors, we identified the10 most significant software providers — Acquia,

Adobe, Demandware, EPiServer, IBM, Oracle,

SAP hybris, Salesforce, SDL, and Sitecore — in

the category and researched, analyzed, and

scored them. This report details our findings

about how well each vendor fulfills our criteria

and where they stand in relation to each other

to help application development and delivery

(AD&D) professionals select the right partner for

their digital experience platform needs.

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© 2015 Forrester Research, Inc. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester®,Technographics®, Forrester Wave, RoleView, TechRadar, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester

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distributing is a violation of copyright law. [email protected] or +1 866-367-7378

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Table Of Contents

Digital Experience Platforms Anchor Your

Digital Presence

Digital Experience Platforms Must Meet Six

Key Needs

The Technology Landscape Vying To Meet DX

Platform Demands Attention

Digital Experience Platform Market

Evaluation Overview

We Evaluated The Best And Biggest Vendors

In The Market

Digital Experience Platforms Are Rapidly

Evolving

Vendor Profiles

Leaders

Strong Performers

Contenders

Lessons Learned From Customer Interviews

Other Vendors Worthy Of Consideration

Supplemental Material

Notes & Resources

Forrester conducted product evaluations in

August 2015 and interviewed 9 vendors and 27

customer references.

Related Research Documents

Digital Experience Technology Integration: Go

Beyond Just A Basket Of Solutions

The Forrester Wave™: Mobile Infrastructure

Services, Q3 2015

Market Overview: Digital Customer Experience

Delivery Platforms Why Read This Report


The Forrester Wave™: Digital Experience Platforms, Q4 2015


by Mark Grannan, Ted Schadler, and Stephen Powers

with Peter Sheldon, Anjali Yakkundi, Rusty Warner, Dominique Whittaker, Kevin Driscoll, and TylerThurston

October 22, 2015

http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES87841http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES87841http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES119902http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES119902http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES104302http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES104302http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=BIO2792http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=BIO1707http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=BIO1252http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=BIO2684http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=BIO2773http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=BIO7824http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=BIO7824http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=BIO2773http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=BIO2684http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=BIO1252http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=BIO1707http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=BIO2792http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES104302http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES104302http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES119902http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES119902http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES87841http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES87841


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© 2015 Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law.

[email protected] or +1 866-367-7378

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Digital Experience Platforms Anchor Your Digital Presence

Today, the proliferation of customer touchpoints, applications, and digital interactions demands a

new technology architecture. We call this architecture a digital experience platform. For most largeorganizations, digital experience platforms include web and mobile touchpoints today, though

advanced firms are expanding their digital presence, with retailers implementing digital walls or

manufacturers empowering customers with mobile apps, for example. For those firms embracing the

business technology (BT) agenda — technology designed to win, serve, and retain customers — the

broader picture is not technology at all, it’s the customer life cycle. And so Forrester defines digital

experience platforms broadly as:

Software to manage, deliver, and optimize experiences consistently across every digital

touchpoint.

While each organization must build its own business case, one large retailer told us that mobilecustomers triggered its multiyear digital experience initiative. Looking at three years of double-digit

annual growth in mobile traffic, it became a business-critical challenge to realign digital experience

technology with this always-on digital customer. In the next 18 months, this retailer is stitching together

marketing, commerce, and customer service to better serve the customer across the life cycle. It’s the

biggest technology program the company has ever tackled.

Digital Experience Platforms Must Meet Six Key Needs

With the customer at the center, a digital experience platform architecture will help to align strategies,

teams, processes, and technology to meet this integration imperative with six primary themes (see

Figure 1):

1. Coordinate content, customer data, and core services to drive reuse and quality.

2. Unify marketing, commerce, and service processes to improve practitioner workflows.

3. Deliver contextually and share targeting rules to unify the “glass.”

4. Share front-end code across digital touchpoints to manage a common user experience.

5. Link data and analytics to add insight and drive action.

6. Manage code and extensions for maximum reuse while avoiding over-customization.


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FIGURE 1 Forrester’s Digital Experience Platform Architecture

The Technology Landscape Vying To Meet DX Platform Demands Attention

Digital experience vendors recognize the need for a broad, well-integrated set of capabilities and have

gone on a spending spree to either buy or build this out. Vendors hope to expand their relationships

within an account and become “sticky” to stakeholders across technology, marketing, and business

roles. Despite Forrester’s belief that 1) vendors still have a long way to go on integration, and 2) an

“all-in-one” platform is almost never practical given ever-present legacy technology constraints,

organizational politics, and limited budgets, we firmly believe core capabilities and solid integration

chops matter.1

Forrester maintains that platform promises — common tooling, reusable assets, shared data models,short implementation times, and limited training — need not be limited to a single-vendor strategy. And

yet, if your organization has existing investments with a technology vendor, it’s likely they can make

a good case to sell you additional products to extend your capabilities. It’s now imperative to ask the

following questions: How well integrated is the portfolio? How deep are the native capabilities? How

much weight should prebuilt integration be given?

Analyticsand

insights

Touchpoints

Contextual delivery at “the glass”

Marketing Commerce Service

Customer data Content

Otherservices

Extensions

and custom

code


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Digital Experience Platform Market Evaluation Overview

After examining past research, user need assessments, and vendor and expert interviews, we

developed a comprehensive set of evaluation criteria. We evaluated vendors against 40 criteria, whichwe grouped into three high-level buckets:

› Current offering. We evaluated on core

capabilities, including content, commerce,

analytics, marketing, service, and customer

data; supporting capabilities, including digital

asset management, search, social depth,

testing and optimization, product information

management, portal, global/localization, and

mobile app platform; platform quality and

consistency, including platform integration,

practitioner toolkit, developer toolkit, security and permissions, multichannel delivery, codebase

consistency, customer data management, dashboards and reporting, content integration, technical

operations, extensions and components, and APIs.

› Strategy. We evaluated each vendor’s strategy on vision, rationalization strategy, commercial

terms, account services, upgrade and release management, cloud deployment model, services

partners, technology partners, and reference customer assessment.

› Market presence. We evaluated market presence based on customer base, product revenue,

product revenue growth, and global presence.

We Evaluated The Best And Biggest Vendors In The Market

Forrester included 10 vendors in our digital experience platform assessment: Acquia, Adobe,

Demandware, EPiServer, IBM, Oracle, SAP hybris, Salesforce, SDL, and Sitecore. Demandware chose

not to fully participate in the process, so we placed their solution in the Forrester Wave based on our

knowledge from past analysis and publicly available information. Each vendor has (see Figure 2):

› A portfolio of strong products comprising digital experience platforms. We evaluated

vendors with at least three strong products from the core of a digital experience platform: content,

marketing, commerce, service, analytics, or customer data.

› A go-to-market strategy that solves for digital experience challenges. Each platform or

portfolio of products works across multiple core areas within the digital experience landscape.

› Prebuilt integration between owned products. Owned and third-party products must

communicate. Each platform has a minimum level of open standards support to enable integration

with legacy systems and other digital experience delivery solutions.

Most vendors have embracedthe cloud as a primarydeployment option . . .particularly platform-as-a-service.


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› Reference customers with at least $1 billion in revenue. Each vendor must be able to provide

enterprise customer references to attest to the platform’s capabilities and viability.

› Mindshare among Forrester’s enterprise customers. The vendors we evaluated are frequentlymentioned in Forrester client inquiries, shortlists, consulting projects, and case studies.

Digital Experience Platforms Are Rapidly Evolving

We have changed our evaluation criteria and weightings to reflect our enterprise customers’ evolving

needs. We assessed the core and supporting capabilities that anchor a digital experience platform

and increased the contribution of integration, extensibility, APIs, and connector frameworks in order

to evaluate the strength of the broader portfolio (see Figure 3). We found substantial changes in the

products and market since our last evaluation in 2014:

› The outlines of the platform are coming into clearer focus. Every vendor in this evaluation

has at least three of the six building blocks we deem important to a digital experience platform:

content, commerce, marketing, service, analytics, and customer data.2 But most vendors anchor

their platform with content, marketing or commerce, and customer data management.

› Some vendors joined and some left the list of digital experience platforms. We removed

vendors that have strengths in individual areas but not across our definition, and added EPiServer

because of its efficacy and platform breadth. This market is still very much a work in progress, with

no vendor showing clear leadership in the evaluation.

› Vendors lead in some areas and lag in others leading to a bunched overall lineup. No vendor

has best-of-breed offerings in all six core building blocks, which leads to a neck-and-neck race in

some cases. Overcome this by customizing the Wave spreadsheet to reflect your key requirements

so vendors with the products you need bubble up the list.

› Most vendors have embraced the cloud as a primary deployment option. Almost every

vendor already was or is now committed to platform-as-a-service (PaaS). This is a major benefit to

companies looking to move quickly, run the newest cost, and deploy at scale.

› Product rationalization — not acquisition — defined the dynamic in 2015. Every vendor

showed a more unified practitioner, administrative, and development experience. The vendors have

more work to do here, particularly for on-premises deployments.

We also found consistent gaps in what enterprises need from a digital experience platform:

› Mobile app support is still nascent or missing. Every vendor tells a responsive web design

story. But mobile moments need personal, contextual, and immediate support. We saw little

understanding that mobile is more than small web. When it comes to mobile apps, IBM, Oracle,

and SAP lead with mobile infrastructure platforms.3


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› Most lack a rationalized data story. One of the biggest challenges in building a portfolio through

acquisition is rationalizing the core resources — content, data, integration, and security. While we

saw big advances in security and some in content, we saw gaps in the strategy and capabilities to

create a single customer view. However, every vendor is investing here, so the situation next year,

particularly with cloud offerings, will be much better.

› Analytics and content integration is very much a work in progress. Betting on web analytics

is not a strategy. Neither is point-to-point content integration. While some vendors showed solid

analytics or content hub functionality, all vendors have work to do.

› Customer service scenarios are underserved. The customer life cycle is more than discovery

and purchase. Forrester’s customers need to integrate customer care and service. Vendors need to

improve their ability to help.

This evaluation of the digital experience platforms market is intended to be a starting point only.We encourage clients to view detailed product evaluations and adapt criteria weightings to fit their

individual needs through the Forrester Wave Excel-based vendor comparison tool.


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FIGURE 2 Evaluated Vendors: Product Information

Vendor Product(s) evaluatedPlatform components(if sold separately)

Acquia

Adobe

Demandware

EPiServer

IBM

Oracle

Salesforce

Acquia Platform

Adobe Marketing Cloud

Demandware Commerce Cloud

EPiServer Digital Experience Cloud

IBM Digital Experience Suite

Oracle CX Cloud:

-Oracle Commerce-Oracle CPQ Cloud-Oracle Marketing Cloud-Oracle Sales Cloud-Oracle Service Cloud-Oracle Social Cloud-Oracle WebCenter Sites

Salesforce App CloudSalesforce Community CloudSalesforce Marketing CloudSalesforce Sales Cloud

Salesforce Service CloudSalesforce Wave Analytics Cloud

Acquia Cloud Acquia Cloud Site Factory Acquia Content Hub Acquia Lift Acquia Mollom Acquia Search

Adobe Analytics Adobe Campaign Adobe Experience Manager Adobe Social Adobe Target

IBM CampaignIBM CommerceIBM Digital AnalyticsIBM eMessageIBM InteractIBM Marketing OperationsIBM SilverpopIBM TealeafIBM Xtify

Oracle B2B Cross-Channel Marketing

Oracle B2C Cross-Channel MarketingOracle Commerce Experience ManagerOracle Commerce Guided SearchOracle Commerce MerchandisingOracle Commerce PlatformOracle Content MarketingOracle DMOSocial Engagement and Monitoring CloudSocial Marketing Cloud WebCenterSitesSocial Network Cloud


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FIGURE 2 Evaluated Vendors: Product Information (Cont.)

SAP hybris

SDL

Sitecore

hybris Commerce Suitehybris Marketing Suite

SDL Customer Experience Cloud

Sitecore Experience PlatformSitecore Commerce Server

SAP Cloud for CustomerSAP CRMSAP Enterprise PortalSAP Hana Cloud PlatformSAP JamSAP KXEN

SDL CampaignsSDL Customer Journey AnalyticsSDL Digital ExperienceSDL eCommerce OptimizationSDL Knowledge CenterSDL Media Manager

SDL Web

Vendor Product(s) evaluated

Platform components

(if sold separately)


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FIGURE 3 Forrester Wave™: Digital Experience Platforms, Q4 ’15

Challengers Contenders LeadersStrong

Performers

StrategyWeak Strong

Current

offering

Weak

Strong

Go to Forrester.com to

download the Forrester

Wave tool for more

detailed product

evaluations, feature

comparisons, and

customizable rankings.

Adobe

EPiServer

IBM

Oracle

Salesforce

SAP hybris

SDL

Sitecore

AcquiaDemandware

Market presence

Full vendor participation

Incomplete vendor participation


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FIGURE 3 Forrester Wave™: Digital Experience Platforms, Q4 ’15 (Cont.)

Vendor Profiles

Leaders

› Adobe’s integrated platform leads the market, but mostly supports marketing. San Jose,

California-based Adobe has established a platform of best-of-breed technologies that support

marketing activities. This portfolio includes web content management (WCM), testing andoptimization, analytics, audience management, social publishing, and campaign management.

Beyond the scope of this research, its portfolio also includes ad-serving and video broadcast

technologies. Adobe’s core services strategy standardizes some product engineering and user

interface (UI) efforts. Adobe’s biggest gaps in support of customer acquisition are a strong focus

on business-to-consumer (B2C) markets and a lack of commerce offering; it continues to rely on

partnerships. Adobe also has little in terms of a customer service offering.

CURRENT OFFERING

Core capabilities

Supporting capabilities

Platform quality and consistency

STRATEGY

Vision

Rationalization strategy

Commercial terms

Account services

Upgrade and release management

Cloud deployment model

Services partners

Technology partners

Reference customer assessment

MARKET PRESENCE

Customer base

Product revenue

Product revenue growth

Global presence

F o r r e s t e r

’ s

W e i g h t i n g

50%

40%

15%

45%

50%

15%

10%

5%

10%

5%

15%

10%

10%

20%

0%

30%

25%

25%

20%

2.57

1.85

1.80

3.47

3.65

2.00

4.00

3.00

4.00

3.00

5.00

3.00

4.00

4.00

2.05

2.00

1.00

4.00

1.00

3.52

3.55

3.45

3.51

3.50

2.00

4.00

2.00

3.00

3.00

3.00

5.00

5.00

4.00

3.50

3.00

4.00

4.00

3.00

2.20

1.90

1.60

2.66

2.90

2.00

3.00

2.00

3.00

3.00

3.00

2.00

3.00

4.00

2.30

3.00

1.00

3.00

2.00

2.86

3.75

2.35

2.23

3.00

3.00

2.00

1.00

3.001.00

3.00

4.00

5.00

3.00

2.65

3.00

0.00

3.00

5.00

3.31

4.25

3.70

2.35

3.00

4.00

3.00

2.00

3.001.00

3.00

3.00

5.00

2.00

3.35

2.00

3.00

4.00

5.00

2.90

3.00

2.05

3.09

3.45

4.00

2.00

1.00

3.003.00

5.00

3.00

5.00

3.00

3.55

4.00

3.00

4.00

3.00

3.04

3.40

3.35

2.61

3.15

4.00

3.00

1.00

2.003.00

1.00

4.00

5.00

4.00

3.10

2.00

2.00

4.00

5.00

2.40

2.10

2.00

2.81

2.80

2.00

3.00

4.00

3.00

3.00

3.00

3.00

2.00

3.00

1.85

1.00

1.00

2.00

4.00

2.98

2.60

1.90

3.67

3.05

2.00

3.00

3.00

4.00

3.00

3.00

4.00

3.00

3.00

2.30

3.00

1.00

3.00

2.00

All scores are based on a scale of 0 (weak) to 5 (strong).

A c q u i a

A d o b e

E P i S e r v e

r

I B M

O r a c l e

S a l e s f o r c

e

S A P h y b r i s

S D L

S i t e c o r e


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Adobe’s strategy matches its offerings: heavy on marketing-related technology, such as targeting,

mobile, and campaigns, but light on customer service. Adobe states that its main investment in the

next 18 months will be an initiative to consolidate all customer data into a unified data platform with

a singular runtime and computation environment on top of the data. Adobe outshines the other

evaluated vendors when it comes to services partners, though some of these partners have begun

to complain about Adobe’s cost and complexity, leaving potential openings for competitors.

Adobe remains a fit for companies with sophisticated marketing needs that require best-of-breed

solutions — and with the budget to support them.

Strong Performers

› Salesforce offers a sales, service, and marketing platform, but needs more integration. San

Francisco-based Salesforce leverages much of its ExactTarget acquisition to tell a DX story, but

is starting to piece together a much broader narrative. Salesforce remains the odd duck in this

evaluation, as it does not have its own delivery tier in the form of a WCM or eCommerce engine.

While Salesforce remains a powerhouse on sales and service, and the Marketing Cloud has many

loyal customers, the integration between these clouds and marketing is not fully executed —

lacking common tooling, architecture, or code base. Fortunately, as a native cloud platform, the

robust APIs and extensions owned by the sales and service clouds overcome some challenges, but

even this approach is not shared across the portfolio today.

We view Salesforce’s vision as one of the most likely to provide large organizations with the tool

set to realize digital transformation goals. However, as a PaaS platform with a healthy technology

partner ecosystem, Salesforce shows its true strategic strength. Among this field of competitors,

Salesforce is the closest to true PaaS, limited by its proprietary code development strategy. This

strategy enables confident expansion into areas like mobile and platform that others have be

unable to tame. However, with a hodgepodge of commercial terms and product strategies, the

broader portfolio is hard to wrap your arms around.

But even without the connection to the PaaS offering, ultimately Salesforce owns important,

industry-leading solutions for sales, service, and marketing that support digital experiences.

› Oracle’s integration across commerce, content, and campaigns hinges on cloud. Redwood

Shores, California-based Oracle has continued its aggressive acquisition streak for its digital

experience delivery platform. Last year we cited Oracle’s eCommerce strength, but after this

past year’s investments — including BlueKai and Maxymizer— they now boast one of the largest

marketing capabilities portfolios. Oracle’s work to leverage all its acquisitions in an integrated

fashion is patchy at best, but the bright spots are unmistakably in its cloud products where it

has unified API management, UI, permissions, and technical tooling. Unfortunately, most cloud

functionality is new (not yet to beta) and doesn’t include the entire portfolio — currently missing is

the WebCenter Sites product line.4


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Oracle’s acquisition strategy has a history of underinvesting in the acquired product; but in this

evaluation we’re starting see glimpses of the turnaround strategy, and it is cloud. Oracle’s cloud

product strategy appears to have good technical bones and the “CX cloud” management has the

influence to push architectural changes to each product team. Conversely, the licensed products

demand heavy investment with services partners and while Oracle boasts a number of traditional

systems integrators (SIs), clients tell us that they struggle to find consistent quality in its services

partners.

While legacy, enterprise scenarios remain valid for complex CRM and portal products, Oracle’s CX

Cloud strategy is still currently a best fit for organizations focused on commerce-driven use cases.

In parallel, marketing automation, customer data management, and targeting are rapidly pushing

Oracle into marketing discussions.

› Demandware’s cloud and partner strategies are strong, but pricing limits relevance.

Burlington, Massachusetts-based Demandware has a 10-year track record as an enterprise

B2C eCommerce solution. Demandware’s pure software-as-a-service (SaaS) strategy provides a

common data layer, common user interface, and common API set. Demandware’s developer and

API strategy is strong, if somewhat rigid. Demandware’s extension strategy has paid off with a

robust marketplace, supported by Demandware’s technology partner certification process. This

marketplace strategy is increasingly critical to customer’s broader DX success.

Demandware continues to invest deeper into commerce as it moves into the store. These

technologies combine with its SaaS delivery model and revenue-sharing-only commercial model

to form the most laser-focused strategy in our evaluation, limiting relevance to B2C commerce.

Beyond this, Demandware’s multichannel delivery relies heavily on its Link technology marketplace

to extend its functionality. Demandware’s services partner network (Link solution partners) include

some global players, such as Accenture, Cognizant, Razorfish, and SapientNitro.

Demandware is most relevant to those in the retail space who want to build out their broader

digital experience delivery capabilities centered on commerce, as opposed to a broader platform

supporting more of the customer life cycle. Note that Demandware did not participate in the

research for this report, so Forrester based its findings on past briefings, products demos, and

customer reference interviews.

› Acquia’s cloud-first, open source platform lacks breadth but emphasizes integration.

Boston-based Acquia extends the open source Drupal product to digital experience platform with

cloud deployments, enterprise-scale support, and some additional products. Its strengths are in

the areas of WCM and social depth tools. However, little of the rest of Acquia’s functionality —

such as commerce, optimization, or mobile in particular — is on par with the other solutions we

evaluated. But Acquia emphasizes integrations with third-party products to meet digital experience

challenges. And with solid partner support and a horde of Drupal developers available, it’s a viable

plan. Unlike our 2014 evaluation, customers report using Acquia as the center of their platform,

with integrations in place.


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Acquia’s stated vision is being an open, cloud-first, integration-centric platform. This is appealing

for companies looking to anchor digital experiences with content and community, but extend it out

to commerce and service though integration. Acquia is cloud-first and offers the product as PaaS

for more than 800 customers and a SaaS service for more than 3,000 customers. Acquia’s biggest

strategy gap is a lack of focus on the complete customer life cycle, particularly for customer

service. Given its lower price point, cloud options, and rapid growth, Acquia has the potential to

play a significant role in the digital experience platform market, particularly for companies with

hundreds or thousands of sites.

Acquia is best suited for companies looking for a digital experience platform they can utilize in a

land-and-expand strategy.

› SAP hybris branches out into marketing with a raft of not-yet-mature products. Munich,

Germany-based SAP hybris has traditionally played in the eCommerce space with a best-of-breed

offering, but is now expanding into marketing. Launched in February 2015, SAP hybris Marketing

brings a customer data-centric approach to personalizing content, but lacks some email, social

and automation capabilities when compared with competing marketing products, nor does it share

common code or UI with the core platform. SAP hybris has also continued to invest in platform

extensibility and integration via a data hub to connect to various back ends and this makes it a logical

choice for many B2B manufacturers currently leveraging SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP).

SAP hybris’s vision focuses on adding marketing and microservices to extend to be a full front-

office platform. SAP hybris-as-a-service (YaaS) will be a cloud-based extension environment to

lighten up the core product for faster iteration. SAP hybris Profile will roll out on YaaS to improve

the platform’s data management capabilities for better personalization and targeting. Outside of

YaaS, SAP hybris’ cloud strategy has not kept pace against the competition’s PaaS and SaaS

strategies due to a lack of autoscaling, on-demand deployment, and seamless upgrades.

But given its backing from some of the biggest, global agencies and SIs, SAP hybris remains a

solid choice for large, product-centric organizations who want to enable omnichannel strategies.

› Sitecore touts a flexible platform, but commerce is not yet battle tested. Copenhagen-based

Sitecore offers a platform that combines its WCM, digital marketing, and commerce solutions.

Sitecore focuses on technologies supporting customer acquisition, as opposed to supporting later

stages of the customer life cycle, such as service. Its WCM offering is best-of-breed, while adjacent

functionality such as email campaign management, personalization, testing/optimization, and

social capabilities is midlevel. The investment in a scalable data architecture is paying off by adding

credibility to data-driven-marketing scenarios, while other areas like the mobile software development

kit (SDK) strategy fail to push the envelope. But unlike others in this evaluation, all of these offerings

— with the exception of commerce — were designed and built (or OEMed) to work together.

Sitecore’s marketing-centric vision aims to leverage data from all Sitecore-supported customer

touchpoints in order to build a customer view. Sitecore has begun to talk about more predictive


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functionality in its strategy, with suggested next best actions in some of its marketing tools.

Its hybrid cloud strategy focuses on Azure, but the software doesn’t take full advantage of the

platform yet, and support for multitenant SaaS is at least several years away. Its content-and-

commerce story is nascent; one customer reference expressed their fears of “being a guinea pig”

when considering using both products together. Sitecore doesn’t have much of a story around

third-party integration, either. But customer references in general are very strong, and Sitecore also

has an extensive service partner network, second only to Adobe’s.

Sitecore is a fit for companies looking for an all-in-one package as opposed to those looking to bolt

on their own best-of-breed components to a content or commerce offering.

› IBM’s portfolio rationalization slowly accelerates via cloud, but lacks shared urgency.

Armonk, NY-based IBM is now rationalizing the acquisitions it has made over the past several

years. It is simplifying and linking the products and commercial terms, implementing mobile apps,

adopting the cloud and a continuous delivery release model, and building a content integration

hub. Customers building a complex B2C or B2B experience or employee or partner portal will find

much of what they need in IBM’s portfolio. IBM has made strides since our last evaluation in its

cloud version with better mobility, simpler practitioner tools, tighter security, and stronger content

integration. The on-premises implementations are still a collection, however, requiring WebSphere,

security, and integration skills. IBM needs to continue to implement customer profiles and complete

the content hub.

IBM defines digital experience platforms much more broadly than most of the vendors in this

evaluation, emphasizing consumer, business customer, partner, and employee experiences across

the customer life cycle. It also embraces the cloud for most products, running as PaaS IBM

Bluemix Cloud. Another part of IBM’s strategy is its services for strategy, design, development, and

implementation. IBM must continue to rationalize its tool sets, particularly on-premises, and build

relationships and connections to third-party tools. It should also invest more in agency partnerships

outside of IBM Interactive Experience and OgilvyOne — though it seems disinclined to do so.

IBM is best fit for companies that have existing IBM relationships and products and that look to

expand digital strategies beyond marketing and commerce.

Contenders

› SDL makes strides with the cloud but is small with only recently revitalized growth. UK-based

SDL is winning new business, particularly in travel and hospitality, with its SDL web product — an

integration of a series of acquisitions hosted by SDL as a PaaS. SDL has strong WCM tools and

its BluePrinting and language translation capabilities are best-of-breed. The company has also

invested in analytics, social listening, marketing, and content integration. However, SDL does

not go far beyond its core marketing and content roots. SDL must build stronger commerce and

customer service integrations as well as customer data management and on-premises product

rationalization.


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SDL’s strategy focuses on cloud deployments, global customers, and a refined list of industries,

including travel and hospitality, manufacturing, and automotive. This builds on the company’s best-

of-breed language translation capabilities. The company’s executive leadership is in transition,

though Forrester believes the company will maintain its consolidated product organization with a

revitalized focus on North America to complement its European installed base. SDL still has work to

repair its partner ecosystem — it lacks established partnerships and integrations with many best-

of-breed technology vendors and service providers.

SDL is a best fit for organizations looking to support global, non-transactional digital experience

delivery initiatives with heavy localization needs

› EPiServer supports low-complexity scenarios, but won’t hit next gear until 2016. Stockholm-

and Nashua, New Hampshire-based EPiServer, which is now the combination of EPiServer and

Ektron, is a new entrant in our evaluation this year. The company has a solid .NET offering that is

comprised of good WCM and basic marketing and commerce that is well-suited for customers

with midlevel needs. Product strengths include content, APIs, and developer tools. The company

rightfully avoids complex enterprise scenarios but could still improve its offering with better mobile

support, analytics, and customer data management as well as prebuilt integrations with marketing,

search, and commerce.

The firm’s strategy is centered on the cloud, increasingly running as a PaaS on Microsoft Azure.

The cloud version benefits from continuous delivery. The company has a strong partner strategy

to sell and serve customers in 30 countries, as well as more than 25,000 developers registered in

its network. We are increasingly optimistic that the company is navigating the tough merger and

leadership transitions gracefully, though the product rationalization is a work in progress. The next

two releases in Q4 2015 and Q1 2016 will determine the success of this effort.

Companies with well-defined, content-rich scenarios without advanced marketing or deep

commerce needs should look at EPiServer, and look again next year.

Lessons Learned From Customer Interviews

When it comes to vendor satisfaction among its customers, we found reoccurring themes that served

as a cautionary tale:

› Integration is more difficult than the vendors claim. Customers found that integration amongcustomer-facing engagement applications and to back-end systems of record was more

challenging than anticipated. One reference stated that the cost to integrate the vendor’s product

with existing third-party solutions was cost-prohibitive to address. Another reference mentioned

that trying to integrate the vendor’s own products with one another was causing problems, to their

surprise. As one reference put it, “The integration is only as good as the team that implements it.”


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› Service partners, not vendor professional services, are vital to successful integration. The

message from customer references was loud and clear: They regard service partners such as

Accenture and Razorfish Global as instrumental partners throughout the integration process. The

service partners knew their needs better than the platform vendors did. References also noted that

vendors’ professional services fell short in their expectations for two main reasons: lack of available

support technicians and online libraries/user support groups that vendors infrequently maintain.

› Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Customers that found themselves buying into a

platform’s suite of products believed they bit off more than they could chew. Running into

integration issues, slower-than-expected feature rollouts, and in some cases realizing a product did

not run as advertised caused customers to rethink the use of additional products. One reference

told us, “Sadly it isn’t what we expected it to be. We thought it was going to support [our systems]

more fully.” A number of references told us unfortunately, they were paying for features they weren’t

using.

› Aggressive sales teams are off-putting. No romantic partner wants to rush into a long-term

commitment weeks in a relationship. Similarly, customers don’t want to constantly “be sold” new

products at every opportunity. Their opinion of a vendor changed when sales teams aggressively

pushed new products on them before rolling out the ones they purchased. One customer put it

bluntly, “When we talk with our account managers they’re always trying to sell us something new.

We’re happy to talk with them and go out to dinner, but we don’t want an iPad shoved in our face

while we’re eating.”

Other Vendors Worthy Of ConsiderationThe digital experience platform market is multidimensional with vendors focused on every industry,

capability, and stage in the customer life cycle. We track hundreds of vendors, including those with

point solutions to augment a platform, like Qubit’s or Persado’s; established vendors in specialized

markets like portal vendors Backbase and Liferay; 25 other WCM vendors including Crownpeak,

Hippo, and Magnolia; and vendors with strong products that AD&D professionals may wish to consider,

including some vendors we evaluated in last year’s Wave:

› Digital River. Minnetonka, Minnesota-based Digital River has been in the eCommerce space for 20

years, differentiating from its competition by acting as the merchant of record on behalf of clients.

Given the limited scope of the Digital River platform — combined with the fact that the solution is100% SaaS — the core traits are strong: a common UI, data layer, reporting/analytics, and release

cycle. However, while touting broad global commerce support, Digital River’s services partner

relationships are currently limited, weakening the chances for the largest customers, with large SKU

counts. Two recent moves suggest Digital River is trying to invigorate growth: Digital River both

went private and partnered with Adobe Experience Manager in early 2015. While those pan out,

Digital River remains a good fit for organizations who need a tightly focused commerce solution —

often for digital or high-tech goods— to complement their broader digital presence.


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› Hewlett Packard. Hewlett Packard Enterprise inherited the Autonomy knowledge management

assets, while TeamSite and the other HP Marketing Optimization products went to HP Inc. While

the individual products are strong, it’s not clear how PC- and printer-centric HP Inc. will approach

enterprise digital experience customers or partners. However, the company continues to invest in

the products with improved practitioner tools, mobile support, and integration with its marketing

software. The HP digital experience product set today is best suited to existing HP customers or

content-centric enterprises with large, complex requirements that demand heavy customization.

› Intershop. A stalwart in the eCommerce space, the Jena, Germany-based company complements

a top-of-the-line commerce platform with relatively rudimentary marketing tools. WCM, campaign

management, product information management (PIM), digital asset management (DAM), testing,

and social capabilities are native to the Intershop platform, but in recognition of the industry

demands, Intershop partnered with Adobe Experience Manager in 2014. As a single-solution

offering, Intershop stands out through a consistent user interface across nearly all of its platformcomponents, and embedded capabilities for both personalization and analytics that are necessities

for data-driven marketers. Limited North American market share works against Intershop, but its

relatively low price point is a bright spot.

› OpenText. Waterloo, Ontario-based OpenText has more than 20 years’ experience in the enterprise

information, content, and process management software markets. OpenText’s platform spans

functionality across WCM, DAM, campaign management, social depth, and via a partnership with

SAP, PIM technology. The company’s strengths are in its core business process management and

content management capabilities and potential to work in secure portals for employees, partners,

and B2B customers. OpenText is a good fit for portals and B2B organizations where technology

management groups are leading the charge and have established OpenText relationships due toheavy content and process needs.


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Supplemental Material

Online Resource

The online version of Figure 3 is an Excel-based vendor comparison tool that provides detailed product

evaluations and customizable rankings.

Data Sources Used In This Forrester Wave

To validate product and vendor qualifications, Forrester conducted reference calls with 3 of each

vendor’s current customers.

The Forrester Wave Methodology

We conduct primary research to develop a list of vendors that meet our criteria to be evaluated in thismarket. From that initial pool of vendors, we then narrow our final list. We choose these vendors based

on: 1) product fit; 2) customer success; and 3) Forrester client demand. We eliminate vendors that have

limited customer references and products that don’t fit the scope of our evaluation.

Engage With An AnalystGain greater confidence in your decisions by working with Forrester thought leaders to apply our

research to your specific business and technology initiatives.

Analyst Inquiry

Ask a question related to our research; a

Forrester analyst will help you put it into

practice and take the next step. Schedule

a 30-minute phone session with the analyst

or opt for a response via email.

Learn more about inquiry, including tips for

getting the most out of your discussion.

Analyst Advisory

Put research into practice with in-depth

analysis of your specific business and

technology challenges. Engagements

include custom advisory calls, strategy

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After examining past research, user need assessments, and vendor and expert interviews, we develop

the initial evaluation criteria. To evaluate the vendors and their products against our set of criteria,

we gather details of product qualifications through a combination of lab evaluations, questionnaires,

demos, and/or discussions with client references. We send evaluations to the vendors for their review,

and we adjust the evaluations to provide the most accurate view of vendor offerings and strategies.

We set default weightings to reflect our analysis of the needs of large user companies — and/or other

scenarios as outlined in the Forrester Wave document — and then score the vendors based on a

clearly defined scale. These default weightings are intended only as a starting point, and we encourage

readers to adapt the weightings to fit their individual needs through the Excel-based tool. The final

scores generate the graphical depiction of the market based on current offering, strategy, and market

presence. Forrester intends to update vendor evaluations regularly as product capabilities and vendor

strategies evolve. For more information on the methodology that every Forrester Wave follows, go to

http://www.forrester.com/marketing/policies/forrester-wave-methodology.html.

Integrity Policy

All of Forrester’s research, including Forrester Wave evaluations, is conducted according to our Integrity

Policy. For more information, go to http://www.forrester.com/marketing/policies/integrity-policy.html.

Endnotes1 Technical integration is a major pain point for AD&D professionals supporting DX. While vendor platforms increasingly

want to tell an end-to-end story to support unified experiences, organizations will almost never be able to or willing

to adopt a single-vendor solution set. Instead, they must own their digital experience architecture and strategy.This strategy must flex and adjust over time, shaping an entire road map of investments into digital experience

technologies for customer experiences. AD&D professionals must develop this technology integration strategy to

connect content, data, and systems to unify workflows that drive unified customer experience over time and across

touchpoints. See the “Digital Experience Technology Integration: Go Beyond Just A Basket Of Solutions” Forrester

report.

2 AD&D professionals must evaluate, implement, integrate and build front-end experiences on-top of this fragmented

landscape. Technology vendors try to help by bringing more complete digital customer experience portfolios to the

market, although hopes for a homogenous environment are unrealistic at this point. In this report, we define the

emerging digital customer experience delivery platform, explore the vendors delivering these solutions, and provide

insight into the approaches these vendors take to integrate with the technologies in which their customers have

already invested. See the “Market Overview: Digital Customer Experience Delivery Platforms” Forrester report.

3 In Forrester’s 112-criteria evaluation of mobile infrastructure service vendors, we identified 10 significant software andservice providers — AnyPresence, Appcelerator, IBM, Kinvey, Kony, Microsoft, MobileSmith, Oracle, Red Hat, and SAP

— in the category and researched, analyzed, and scored them. This report details our findings about how well each

vendor fulfills our criteria and where they stand in relation to each other to help application development and delivery

(AD&D) professionals select the right partner for their mobile infrastructure services needs. See the “The Forrester

Wave™: Mobile Infrastructure Services, Q3 2015” Forrester report.

4 Oracle tells Forrester that they plan to release “Oracle Sites Cloud Service” by the end of calendar year, 2015.

http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES87841http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES104302http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES119902http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES119902http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES119902http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES119902http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES104302http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES87841


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