David Aponovich Talks Digital Experience, His New Role With Acquia

If you follow web content management and digital experience regularly then you know David Aponovich. He was a senior analyst at Forrester researching web content management and digital experience, and he understands the market very well.

Aponovich recently took on the role of Senior Director, Digital Experience, for Acquia at the end of June and while he may still be getting his feet wet, he understands well the opportunity for Acquia and the Drupal WCM in this constantly evolving market.

I had the opportunity to talk with Aponovich about the WCM and the digital experience market, and, of course, about Acquia.

First, a Little Background on David

I only knew Aponovich from his work at Forrester, but he’s actually been in the industry for quite a while in a number of different roles. From 2003 to 2006 he was Marketing Director at Ektron, a time when organizations were just starting to get their feet into web content management (what Aponovich called 1.0). After that he worked for six years at iSite Design in Boston. iSite is a full service digital agency doing strategy, design, technology implementation. During his time there as a WCM consultant, WCM was getting more mature (2.0) and he was starting to work with marketers and digital strategists, not just IT.

For the last two years, Aponovich worked for Forrester, something he completely enjoyed and said only great things about the research firm. He said it was a time to learn and see what was changing in this market, to understand what buyers and customers really want and what vendors are doing. This is 3.0 – deeply engaging customer experiences. Aponovich said that now, the idea is that the web is highly interactive and we are in the age of the customer. If the customer is not at the center of your business strategy and your digital engagement efforts, you’re in trouble.

Much of Aponovich’s research at Forrester focused on vendors in the space (of which Acquia is one). The last few years have seen acquisitions, integrations, the rise of marketing clouds and digital experience platforms. He also looked at how companies were actually using these technologies and what he found was that it was still a very hybrid approach to technology, and it’s dominated by marketing type technology.

Aponovich said that marketers have the budget, more influence, and business people have more say in digital strategy. Forrester looked at what organizations need to do to succeed in the age of the customer and how business technology and the business work together to make it happen. “Some orgs get it, others are early in their transition.”

The fun part was talking to real brands, real people doing real work and finding out what’s driving them to succeed, what’s preventing that success. Often it was organization stuff – not technology – how to get IT and business outside their silos and work together.”

Aponovich saw the sea change happening, saw that we are entering the next-generation of digital engagement – that’s what brought him to Acquia.

Open, Extensible Digital Platforms

Aponovich is seeing the confluence of a few things. A massive push towards better digital experiences built on platforms that are open, extensible, easily integratable and tuned to the business. These are platforms that won’t disrupt future plans for digital growth.

This is what he sees happening in Acquia. According to Aponovich, there are many vendors trying to make this happen, but for him, it was the acceptance of open source and the flexibility it brings. The opportunity to put the effort into a single company and see the immediate and long term impact on what he could add prompted his decision to leave Forrester and join Acquia.

During his time with Acquia so far Aponovich sees even more closely the change this company and an open source platform like Drupal is bringing to the market.

His role at Acquia is Senior Director, Digital Experience, and it means he does a few things:

1. Bring clarity to what Drupal is and what it does for enterprises; why it’s readily acceptable to use Drupal for their next generation digital experience platform.
2. Demonstrate how Acquia is adding tools that leverage the goodness of Drupal, providing that he calls a bullet proof way to bring Drupal innovations into the organization with some additive benefits to it. Aponovich said that organizations are rethinking what’s going on inside for the digital platforms they use today, and he’s seeing that they are much more open to open source as a foundational platform for their business. Drupal, he said, can be that foundation and on top of it they can still bring in best of breed tools, use the tools they already have, or get them through Acquia or Drupal modules.

“This whole idea of openness, of community, of contributing to the greater good of the platform. In this role I will be showing how this is evolving in a way that the market can now consume – that the market is looking for this. Acquia has something that can address their needs, so how do we communicate best to the market how Acquia can do this for the next generation of digital transformation/digital enterprise?”

In his experience, very few companies are buying singular packages from one company, “it’s very much an ecosystem.” Most companies already have technology already in use and they aren’t going to throw it all away, because it’s not just the technology, it’s the teams, the expertise, the centers of excellence. What many are looking for is a foundation to replace or improve what they have.

Web content management, said Aponovich, is in the foundation category. You can build upon your WCM platform or integrate other technologies that end up running the enterprise from a digital perspective (note that he also places e-commerce in this foundational platform category).

Acquia, he said, has this WCM mindset.

Acquia’s Bid for the Enterprise

Acquia has the Drupal platform – the foundation which offers web content management, commerce and community, and to it adds tools such as Lift, TruCentric and SiteFactory.

SiteFactory itself is very interesting to Aponovich. It addresses both business and IT mindsets and helps answer questions like ‘what does it mean to run a digital platform that will grow with my business?’

“Running hundreds of websites on a single platform in a single centralized way – industrializing the process of creating and running/managing websites is something companies are having to grapple with.” With SiteFactory, Acquia is answering a real market need, and it has business/tech benefit, said Aponovich.

Organizational views on open source is definitely changing. But there are still many that are not actively looking at open source solutions. Aponovich said there is a long history of fear and uncertainly around open source- it won’t scale, it isn’t secure – but these are cliches that CIOs might have considered in the past.

Today, these issues have been resolved. Aponovich said that the Drupal community has done this, and Acquia is right there too. Both Drupal and Acquia are growing, there’s a lot of education happening and Aponovich hopes to bring Drupal to a market that hasn’t thought about open source as a viable option. He says its enterprise nature will surprise people – it is secure and scalable. It is foundational to a vast array of digital experience strategies and Acquia adds services, products and expertise that make it “bullet proof.”

“Change is happening across the software market, not just this market. The notion that proprietary, big, legacy vendors are the safer bet has to be rethought by enterprises that want to be responsive, adaptive and answer to their customers in the age of the customers.”

Of course Aponovich knows that what he says could now be perceived as biased considering who he works for, but he points to the market itself and what’s happening. The number of open source products and platforms making their way into the enterprise (business analytics, databases, etc..) tells the story clearly.

“Drupal is massively used, has massive marketing penetration on the web, has a massive user base and it fits the needs of enterprise in a way that many companies don’t expect.” Aponovich said Drupal is for the enterprise and Acquia has a play in that – the services, products and capabilities it sells on top of Drupal make it that much more “enterprise safe.”

But it’s more than safe, Aponovich corrected. If you are going to rebuild your business for digital and tune your processes for the next generation of digital activity, you have to think about where you will find innovation, growth potential. It’s the right combination of solution, flexibility, integration, and that, he said, you can find in Acquia.

The Next Generation is a Transformation

The opportunity to be where it’s all really happening drove Aponovich to Acquia. He said it’s a fun business and a fun time – companies are looking at themselves and asking ‘what do we want to be when we grow up on the Web?.’

Traditional IT is giving way to business technology – technology people and products that can think from both sides. These people, Aponovich said, are thinking about the next generation platform, thinking outside the box for what it means to source a new technology platform. “Digital is causing disruption everywhere including in this very industry.”

Business needs new technology to make this digital vision come to life, but very few are doing something, most are still talking. We’re still at the beginning of transformation – it’s a big opportunity in the next few years.

Aponovich offers another theory. He says it’s great that vendors have bought or are building marketing cloud platforms, that they have brought everything under one roof. But he said it’s their vision, it’s a step ahead of where the products really are today, which is a step ahead of where companies are actually able to execute.

No one, Aponovich said, will start from scratch, which is why the foundation is so important.

 

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