SDL Moves Its Customer Experience Platform into the Cloud

A new year traditionally brings big changes with many organizations and this year marks some good changes for SDL. It announced a restructuring of its organization and a new cloud-based offering that will keep it competitive with the likes of Adobe, Salesforce and Oracle.

The SDL Restructure

SDL now has two divisions: Languages Solutions and Customer Experience Solutions. It has made a number of acquisitions that help it align with these two divisions, especially in the areas of marketing campaigns, social intelligence (Alterian), content management (Tridion), mobility (bemoko) and e-commerce (Fredhopper) – I’ve only mentioned a few of the acquisitions here. Getting all these different technologies to work well together would be a challenge for any vendor.

Along with the acquisitions, SDL has made a number of big hires which you can read about here. The most recent one, that impacts the company greatly, is the hiring of Jan Wiersman as VP of Cloud Operations. This hire is key because SDL has now put all its CXM solution in the cloud: SDL Customer Experience Cloud.

The SDL Customer Experience Cloud

There are a number of components in the Customer Experience Cloud (CXC), including analytics, campaigns, e-commerce, content management, social, documentation and language. The key to SDL’s cloud is that it supports the full customer lifecycle from marketing to customer support.

The CXC offers a single marketing user experience across all customer experience products and all products are now available in a SaaS model. It doesn’t seem that there’s new functionality with this cloud announcement, but SDL is committing to some regular updates throughout the year, so we’ll see what the focus will be on during the year.

Here’s a look at the new UI:

 

Best of Need vs Suite vs A Solid Combination of Both

As the year pushes forward I suspect we will talk more about the “best of breed” (or best of need is how I prefer to say it) vs “suite” debate. On the one side you have vendors like SDL, Sitecore and Adobe aiming to offer everything in a single solution, while you have others who will specialize and make great efforts to integrate easily with complementary solutions.

Even more important though is that even if a vendor does offer all – or as much of — the capabilities needed to carry out a customer experience strategy, they will also need to build their platform in such as way as to allow integration of other solutions.

As Sitecore CSO, Darren Guarnaccia, clearly pointed out in a recent interview, it’s not realistic to think an organization will only use one vendor. In some circumstances that’s true, but for the most part, investments in different tools will already be in place, and no one wants to tell the CEO that they need to throw out the effort and money spent on getting a solution in place just to get another solution. It’s never that simple.

SDL has some great products. SM2 is one of the best analytics platforms I’ve seen on the market, and the Tridion content management platform offers a lot of great functionality in an easy to use interface. But is SDL developing its products only for its own platform? Can you integrate different products with SDL’s products? This is what will be the ultimate test for SDL, and any other vendor who wants to be competitive in 2014 and beyond.

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