Lynne Capozzi, CMO of Acquia, the digital experience platform, was prepping for another Engage conference when I sat down with her in the Hyatt Regency, New Orleans. It’s the sixth annual Acquia Engage, with a mix of customers, prospects and partners attending. I asked what she was excited about.
“I’m excited about being able to share with our customers and partners what’s coming next for us —
a little roadmap glimpse of what we’re focused on for the future —
and expanding our marketing cloud products and offerings. I just like being able to connect with customers and hear more out what they’re doing.”
A new CX survey
Alongside the event, Acquia has launched a new report on customer experience trends, “Deliver the Experience They Expect.” I asked Capozzi about the findings.
“This is our second global study,” she said. “We studied 6,000 consumers and 600 marketers in various regions around the world on how they felt about customer experiences. No surprise, the survey showed us that around 85 percent of marketers think they’re doing a tremendous job, and ten percent of consumers feel like marketers are doing a great job. It’s still a huge gap.”
This certainly shouldn’t be a surprise. Anyone involved in the martech space can compare claims made by vendors for innovative technologies with the bad digital experiences we have as customers all the time. “I think you do have some great personal experiences, but then you expect every brand experience to be that way,” Capozzi explained. “You want everything to be as easy as Netflix or as Amazon. The bar has been raised. And then when you don’t get it, you walk away. Sometimes all it takes is one bad interaction, and people will leave. That’s what the survey tells us.”
The product roadmap
Acquia today will unveil a number of product enhancements. “We’re announcing DevToolkit, a tool kit for developers for Drupal and Acquia, to make the whole process easier for them.” Drupal, it’s important to understand, is a powerful and widely used open source CMS framework, a project initiated by Dries Buytaer in 2000. Seven years later, he launched a company to provide infrastructure, support and services to enterprises using Drupal, and to spur greater adoption. That company was Acquia, where Buytaert is still CTO and chairman, roles he combines with being head of the Drupal project.
“Acquia is the biggest contributor to the Drupal community,” Capozzi explained. “As Drupal grows, Acquia grows. The more the market share of Drupal grows in the CMS space, the more Acquia can grow. We have clear value for anyone using Drupal, because typically people need help with it and support. We’re completely devoted to Drupal.”
Acquia is also adopting the term “marketing cloud” to categorize a number of its offerings, including personalization with Acquia Lift, marketing automation with Mautic, and customer journey mapping with Acquia Journey. What we’re talking about is where we’re going in the future. One of the things we’ll be showing on stage is the integration between Lift and marketing automation. We’re going to make a connection between Drupal, Lift, and Mautic, in terms of what we think the future is going to look like for a great interface, combining them together.”
The aim is to give a similar look and feel to what previously might have been viewed as siloed offerings.
Also on the roadmap, doing some integration between Maestro and Lift. Acquia Maestro (part of the Mautic suite of products) orchestrates multiple marketing automation instances for brands which might have many sub-brands using different MA tools, like Marketo and Pardot. “Maestro is a competitive advantage for us in the marketing automation space,” said Capozzi. “We think there’s a nice niche for Maestro with people who have a multi-use instance.” For example, a car dealership with a huge number of dealers using different marketing automation solutions.
Investment by Vista
One important item of back ground news. In September, Acquia was acquired by Vista Equity Partners through a majority investment. “They’re great in terms of supporting our growth. It’s nice for us to get that big investment because it will allow us to bring more products to market faster, and will help us to scale faster and support more customers. We really think we can learn from them, in terms of best practices for all areas of the business, and so we’re seeing it as a boost in the arm.”
