If you follow the customer experience or marketing technology market with any regularity, you’ll notice platform vendors are always releasing newer versions of their systems. Sometimes those releases are very incremental changes such as small updates or fixes. However, major new features and capabilities are sometimes put into the market that will shake up the competition.
Reason #3: New Features Appearing in the Market That Your System Doesn’t Have (And Should)
Adding newer features and functionalities can certainly stir the pot and make certain vendors feel like they’re falling behind. An even more disruptive scenario is when two vendors merge two platforms with complementary capabilities into a single feature-rich offering.
Here are some examples from recent years:
- Episerver, a content management vendor merged with Optimizely’s optimization platform to create several Optimizely cloud platforms.
- Sitecore acquired Stylelabs to add digital asset management (DAM) and marketing resource management capabilities to the Sitecore Digital Experience Platform (DXP).
- Adobe acquired several companies to build out their DXP and marketing platforms.
- Acquia bought Widen to add DAM capabilities to the Acquia Cloud.
You may look at your current platform and wonder when it will update with those features you craved for several years. If the vendor is small with limited resources, you might have to set your expectations low.
What you should consider
Rather than change your expectations, you could start looking for a new platform instead. While it can be costly to switch platforms, the newer capabilities that you’re missing may make the investment completely worthwhile. We see a lot of companies struggle with managing digital assets and saving time, profits, and frustration may justify switching to the new DXP that includes DAM capabilities.
How should you start the process of looking for that new platform?
You don’t want to chase the “whiz-bang” or clever-sounding features to the exclusion of the core platform. Artificial intelligence (AI) can offer some compelling capabilities, but authors have to enter content into the system and need a good environment for creating content.
You need to start with understanding all the requirements you have now and can anticipate needing them in the future. If you are a large organization looking for a single platform, you’ll want to include all the stakeholders in this effort. Use a critical eye to identify these requirements and only include those that are truly needed. A development manager once told me they previously gathered several requirements and built as many into the system as possible, but when they analyzed how the system was used, only 10-20% of the requirements were ever used. Additionally, you can seek out expert advice on if those new capabilities will be useful to your organization.
How we can help with your platform selection
Perficient’s Platform Selection Jumpstart is designed to guide you through requirements prioritization and vendor evaluation activities in as little as six weeks. These time savings allow you to plan and start implementing the new system before your license runs out. And, stay tuned for our next installation of the reasons to replatform series.
For any other questions, contact our customer experience experts today.
