DNN, WordPress, Salesforce, ECM Market & More

As we near the end of the year, a few news stories still managed to hit the headlines, and Venus took a predictive look at what 2017 will hold for the ECM market. Read on for my brief recap on each story we put out this week, as well as my commentary on a few that caught my attention. 

DNN Moves to Decoupled CMS with the Release of Evoq 9

To kick off the week, we discussed DNN, the enterprise content management system provider, moving to a microservices, cloud-based, ‘features as a service’ architecture with the availability of Evoq 9. The most exciting item, their new Liquid Content feature is most eloquently described by DNN’s President and CEO, Navin Nagiah: “Liquid takes the shape of the objects it’s placed in and flows around barriers and obstacles. Our vision with Evoq 9 is to transform your content into liquid. Your content becomes fluid and adaptable, and can easily be published to any channel.”

Venus goes into great detail about all the other new exciting features, but her biggest nod to the achievement by DNN, is when she ties it to comments from Gartner and Forrester and states: “In the light of these two very prominent publications’ comments on the future of WCM and the role of microservices in there, it is safe to say DNN is heading the right direction by converting its platform from a traditional, monolithic architecture to one that is cloud-first, based on containers and microservices.”

Read the full article here.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 Simplifies OpenStack

Red Hat was in the news, with the official release of its cloud IaaS solution, OpenStack Platform 10, designed in an effort to address the challenge of deployment complexity. In a quote from Radhesh Balakrishman, General Manager for OpenStack at Red Hat, he let us know that they had essentially listened to the feedback from hundreds of customers and have worked to improve the usability and scalability with this release, and will continue with great focus to improve those and the reliability of Red Hat OpenStack Platform moving forward.

There are numerous other enhancements listed in the article, far more than I can list here, but overall, they’ve made great strides in easing the complexities of their system, enhancing their stability as mentioned with the new support model, and turning the tides on their previously thought to be ‘hard-to-deploy’ cloud platform.  

Read the full article here. 

WordPress Now Supports Embedded Virtual Reality Media

Wordpress announced this week that they would be joining the world of VR by making it possible for users to publish and view virtual reality content on any WordPress.com site. This is huge as WordPress powers over 26% of the web, with major sites like CNN using it, making it the most popular online publishing platform in the world. 

This opens up a whole new capacity for content, but it, like any other emerging trend always begs the question, will it stick? Venus addresses this in her article, discussing a highly futuristic feature we may see come from iPhone in the next year, and brings up the point that even though there are many skeptics, there may be just as many investors and innovators putting energy and resources into expanding this technology.

VR is already present in our lives recently with the 360-degree Youtube and Facebook player, and has been for years with Google’s Street View App, so I think with it now being natively supported by WordPress, we will see content creators utilize it more often in 2017 and beyond. 

Read the full article here. 

Salesforce Bolsters Marketing Cloud after Krux Acquisition 

In October, Salesforce acquired the data management platform Krux, in an effort to enable its customers to process more data in their CRM systems. It didn’t take long for that acquisition to be put to work as this week, Salesforce announced new enhancements to its Salesforce Marketing Cloud utilizing Krux and its AI software Einstein. 

The purpose of enabling marketers to collect and manage date across channels and devices, so they can better streamline and optimize their messaging sounds easy enough, but in reality, that achievement is quite hard to come by. 

The three major enhancements: cross-channel ad delivery management, the ability to target digital advertising activity and the Einstein Journey Insights dashboard are all detailed in the article well, but what stuck out to me, was how Krux itself is different from other data management platforms. Their difference lies in its analysis and measurement of customer engagement, in order to make recommendations to marketers, instead of the cookie association with audience segments of the more traditional data management platforms. 

Salesforce combining these two powerhouses into one offering is sure to stir up some dust in terms of what is capable for the average marketer, but what I think is most impactful, which is the same with many of the AI enhancements, is the ability for tasks to be better allocated between the humans and the machines so to speak. To put this into context with this particular offering, this type of technology could allow sales teams to focus more on captivating relationships with their customers, rather than spending time on sorting and qualifying leads. 

Read the full article here. 

What Will Drive the ECM Market in 2017?

In January of 2016, Venus wrote an article on the ECM Market and throughout the year, it has grown to be a very popular topic among our readers. To satiate the obvious interest, she is ending the year with an article to predict what we will see from that particular market in 2017, based and the trends that have emerged this year. 

In reading it, one theme seems to stick out to me, and that is of consistency. Omnichannel means a consistent engagement for customers across channels, cloud is a reliable access to content no matter where you are. Personalization brings to mind a cohesive sense for customers across touchpoints, never snapping them out of their experience. Digital integration offers the insight to facilitate the consistency and finally, globalization ensures, customers are going to get the same message, in their native language, no matter where they are in the world. 

Standing tall to take in the big picture of what 2017 could be, I see there is also big push for those engaging in an experience, to never have to see the nuts and bolts of the practice that makes it all happen. 

Read the full article here. 

With only one more week left in 2016, I am interested to see what we can share with our CMS-Connected audience next week, to cap off an eventful year in the CMS industry.