What Makes Kentico Cloud Distinctive?
Last week Kentico, a content management and digital experience platform provider, announced the Kentico Cloud, an "API-first," multi-tenant Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering, at its annual 404 Conference, where CMS-Connected was a media sponsor.
On the last day of the three-day event, before recording the CMS-Connected Show with a live audience at the conference, our host Tyler Pyburn had a chance to sit down with Karol Jarkovsky, Director of Product at Kentico, to encapsulate the components and advantages of Kentico’s new cloud-first digital experience platform.
According to Kentico, it is currently the only digital experience vendor in the market providing such a complete platform in the true multi-tenant Software as a Service (SaaS) model. The platform consists of three main services:
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Kentico Draft allows marketers to manage structured content for multi-channel delivery at one place in the Cloud. “It was incredibly easy for us to pull content from Draft into a CMS. Once the content was proofread and approved by the client, we were able to upload all 600 pages in one day. This won us three extra weeks that we were able to put into a better product,” said Hillary Long, Director of Online Marketing at 3Seed Marketing, Design & Interactive.
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Kentico Deliver enhances Kentico Draft with the ability to publish that content to any website or device. It’s designed to combine an easy-to-use content management interface for editors and a “super-fast” API for developers to display the content on almost any channel you can think of.
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Kentico Engage enables personalization of the digital experience on any channel. It tracks customers on your website and personalizes their experience based on the data it collects. It can tell you which pages the customer visited, which forms they submitted, and what they bought. Kentico Engage creates profiles of individual users with a complete history of their activities. You can then export this information to other systems or use it to personalize the content on your website.
During the interview, Karol Jarkovsky stressed that the platform is built as a native cloud solution, meaning that it provides not only all the benefits that come with the cloud technology but also the benefits that come with an API-first CMS. So how does it differ from the other headless CMS and cloud CMS solutions? He addressed this question by explaining how the other vendors develop their platform versus how Kentico developed its API-first, multi-tenant Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering: “The other vendors deploy the cloud and build a manage hosting service around their existing product, and they offer it as a cloud CMS or headless CMS. However, Kentico built the Kentico Cloud from the ground up. The platform is built on the top of the modern microservices architecture.”
When an organization evaluates to adopt a new technology, one of the first challenges to come to mind is an overwhelming workload that comes with implementation. Therefore, Karol Jarkovsky specifically emphasized that the platform is designed to free the customers from the burden of server maintenance, software upgrades, hotfixes, backups, rewriting code and managing plugins, as they will be taken care of by Kentico, allowing organizations to achieve the highest level of agility.
Kentico saw a need for creating new content projects more frequently and quickly in the web content management space which developed into the idea behind this “comprehensive cloud-first CMS and digital experience platform.” Karol Jarkovsky also elaborated on how the new platform makes it happen: “Once developers have static prototype ready, they want to deploy it. Unlike traditional CMS, they don’t need to transfer static elements to CMS as with the Kentico Cloud. Developers take the prototype they have and replace a small fraction of static codes with codes to API that brings dynamic content to the website, then they go live immediately. It means that the platform allows them to shorten the time-to-market.”
Another great pain point discussed was how the Kentico Cloud allows developers to use any technology they want and any kind of development strategy they prefer. What makes it possible is the fact that the platform is designed as a complete technology agnostic.
Kentico EMS
Kentico will continue to provide Kentico EMS which includes Web Analytics, Campaign Management, Email Marketing, A/B and MVT testing, Contact Management, Lead Scoring, Personalization, Segmentation, and Marketing Automation. The platform is hosted on-premises or in a cloud and managed by users. According to Karol Jarkovsky, Kentico EMS is an optimal solution for those who have more complex, company-wide initiatives as they can benefit from the broad feature set that EMS has to offer.
The company is getting ready to release the new version of the platform which will be called Kentico 10, which is a substantial technology upgrade, with a huge focus on productivity, allowing users to achieve “more, in less time.” During the 404 Conference, it was announced that Kentico 10 would be available by the end of November. However, Karol Jarkovsky told us that they have already started to work on the strategy of Kentico 11 which will be released around the same time next year. As you may recall, our Media Reporter Laura Myers interviewed with Kentico’s CEO Petr Palas a couple of weeks ago to talk about the new release of Kentico 10, their recent partnership and resulting expansion into Japan, the 404 Conference, and more. If you have missed that piece, you can catch the full interview here.
I guess, it’s safe to say that 2016 has been treating Kentico very well. The 12-year-old Brno, Czech Republic company, just this year for the first time, made the cut and entered the 2016 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management report, being named a ‘Challenger’. Prior to that, near the end of August, Kentico announced a partnership with Nextscape, Inc., an IT solutions provider based in Tokyo, to gain a more broad experience of the Asia Pacific market. Besides these, with the API-first approach, I believe the company proved that they are on top of the industry trends. It’s great to see that Kentico’s hard work is paying off, and I’m excited to cover more on their new innovations here as they evolve on CMS-Connected.
Venus Tamturk
Venus is the Media Reporter for CMS-Connected, with one of her tasks to write thorough articles by creating the most up-to-date and engaging content using B2B digital marketing. She enjoys increasing brand equity and conversion through the strategic use of social media channels and integrated media marketing plans.