Last month, Forrester Research released its latest Wave for Web CMS. We’re excited to be included in this year’s report: It’s a first for CoreMedia Content Cloud, and that’s reason to celebrate.
We think it’s great that our strategy to deliver “The Best CMS for Commerce” is finally making an impact on the broader analyst community. But we believe that CoreMedia became the market leader for luxury e-commerce platforms some time ago. Leading fashion brands can orchestrate iconic experiences for more global drops at a faster rate and a larger scale than ever before with CoreMedia Content Cloud.
The same can be said about our cloud offering. We’ve seen strong adoption of CoreMedia Content Cloud over the last six months, with customers now able to handle global rollouts easily across dozens of markets. As analysts like Forrester have emphasized, the speed and agility of cloud-based services provide leaders in all industries with significant strategic benefits. With this in mind, we aim to double down on our strategy now to provide “The Best CMS for Commerce in the Cloud.”
In keeping with our strategy of openness, we’re pushing hard to help customers leverage existing infrastructure and integrate more best-of-breed components. Our open APIs and our ability to deliver microexperiences to a broad range of channels has always been a key pillar of CoreMedia’s success. Many of our global brand customers look to deliver iconic and personalized experiences in more than 30 languages and 100 countries, but the complexity of drops at this scale is staggering.
With that in mind, we believe there are two crucial capabilities many analysts don’t pay enough attention to.
1) A Business logic layer to integrate content, context & commerce
To build iconic personalized experiences, companies need to integrate content dynamically, from a wide variety of context sources and with a wide range of transactional capabilities. The shift towards “headless” commerce and microservice architectures provides increased flexibility but also introduces new challenges. Companies need to avoid redundant business logic in order to deliver fast and consistent multi-touchpoint experiences. That’s why CoreMedia empowers customers with both a configurable business logic layer and an object-oriented management model.
The keys to success in the competitive world of e-commerce are immediacy and relevance, but often at an astonishingly granular level. And the stakes get higher every day. To make a sale, you need the ability to deliver exactly the right content at the right time; for example, displaying the right image with the right crop for a French speaker in Indonesia using an iPhone XS Max on a rainy day.
This level of complexity is still not fully appreciated by brands. And most content management solutions – including headless providers – don’t offer support here at all. But this is where CoreMedia shines.
2) Experience orchestration for practitioners to master the complexity of global experiences
The second area where CoreMedia provides a differentiator is our ability to let marketers and merchandisers create, preview, and orchestrate personalized experiences at a global scale without relying on IT or external agencies. Surprisingly, this capability hasn’t received much attention yet from analysts. But based on the feedback we’ve been getting from customers and prospects, that’s about to change.
We believe a user interface that includes advanced experience orchestration and preview capabilities is critical for marketing departments to achieve the level of control they need. And headless architectures make this requirement even more pressing. Because without the ability to instantly access content and data from multiple sources and preview global experiences in real-time (for different markets, devices, segments, times of day, or even at any time in the future), marketers will fail to deliver the iconic experiences they’re aiming for.
But the future of content management is about much more than just web content. It’s about the ability to deliver iconic personalized experiences at scale in an open, ever-evolving ecosystem. And that’s what the team at CoreMedia is developing. Which makes having the right content management tools more important than ever.
In other words: Content matters. It’s all about the experience. So be iconic.
[1] Forrester Research, Inc., “The Forrester WaveTM: Web Content Management Systems, Q4 2018,” by Mark Grannan, November 15, 2018.
