BloomReach Employee Expansion and SAP Solution
In our recent installments of our Movers and Shakers articles, there was a certain company who peaked my interest and was popping up a few times so I decided to do a bit of investigating on BloomReach and what they’ve been up to recently.
Just this past month, BloomReach announced the expansion of their India presence with their new hire, Aditya Singh as a General Manager.
The BloomReach India office is located in Bangalore and is known for their strategic, critical innovation and growth with several cross-functional teams managing product, engineering, support, services and analytics to the company. It’s also said that Several BloomReach product lines are being entirely developed by the India team.
Singh commented on the news when asked why he was excited about joining BloomReach: “I’m thrilled to join BloomReach as it is the market leader in the digital experience space. I’m very passionate about this industry and excited to work with the talented people at BloomReach to execute on an amazing and innovative digital experience vision. Somebody has to help brands stand up against the dominance of big online marketplaces and no company is better suited for that than BloomReach.”
Raj De Datta, CEO and co-founder of BloomReach also commented on the news to say: “I couldn’t think of anyone more capable of steering our Indian business than Aditya. With his broad experience gathered at companies like Intuit, Open Table and Unbxd and his passion for the personalization business he is the perfect candidate to further build out our India presence which is strategic to the innovation within our company.”
Singh’s role will be to join the leadership team of Aarti Iyer (People Lead) and Ashok Sathyanarayan (Director of Engineering) in the management of the Bangalore office. Singh will provide overall BloomReach business and customer strategy including business and financial objectives, product strategy and customer acquisition. He will lead the Product Management, Business Analyst and Quality teams and will also oversee the daily functions of the Professional Services & Support team located in Bangalore.
BloomReach has also welcomed a new face to their board of directors, Hilarie Koplow-McAdams. Koplow-McAdams' position will be to primarily build on 100%+ bookings growth in its Digital Experience Platform business. Koplow-McAdams brings with her a wealth of knowledge and a track record of accomplishments. Why I say this is because her accomplishments hold truth to this.
Her 18 years of driving sales at Oracle in the past of the relational data base, sales leadership at Intuit, 5+ years at Salesforce which included being President of Global Sales during an era when the company grew from $700M to greater than $3bn, and as a CRO of New Relic. Those are some pretty amazing achievements.
Koplow-McAdams has also served on some of the most important enterprise technology boards including Tableau, Zendesk, Informatica, also the University of Chicago and the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network.
BloomReach Experience and Personalization Solution Now Available on SAP App Center
We had published a piece earlier last year entitled Exclusive: Discussing WCM Landscape with Industry Veterans and we actually had the chance to interview Tjeerd Brenninkmeijer, Executive Vice President of BloomReach. Brenninkmeijer elaborated on AI, Cloud and agreed that the main focus of most WCM vendors has been finding a way to leverage the possibilities of AI within their product, especially since last year.
Brenninkmeijer also went into detail about their DXP approach where he predicted: “In the coming months we will see a lot of innovation within content & commerce as this combination will become increasingly important for brands to build up a relationship with their audience. API-first commerce will allow a flexible architecture that caters exactly to the needs of the business and allows great flexibility. This includes adopting new technologies like voice and chatbots.”
He circled back to his first statement about the shift from WCM to DXP and added: “Of course, this all ties into the DXP philosophy.” Therefore, he believes that the primary focus of the WCM software vendors in 2018 will be “understanding AI and how to leverage it and also creating a connected customer journey that goes beyond customer acquisition and also contains customer loyalty, after sales and retention. This is where the DXP approach comes in.”
Why I mention this is because their DXP approach is actually BloomReach’s solution for SAP Hybris Commerce which is built on top of the BloomReach Digital Experience Platform (DXP) and integrates with the SAP Hybris Commerce environment. So, to say the least, a majority of his predictions were correct given the news.
This integration of Experience and Personalization with SAP Hybris Commerce also allows businesses to leverage the industry leading BloomReach Experience content management system to create unique and relevant digital experiences for their customers across any touchpoint.
To give a little bit of an overview of how it works, BloomReach’s Personalization machine learning capabilities provide semantic intelligence on top of sites and catalogs running on SAP Hybris Commerce to deliver personalized site search, navigation and product grids. So what happens is a BloomReach pixel collects all the user data from the customers’ website they are navigating to train the recommendation algorithm and serve out relevant content to the visitor.
Raj De Datta, CEO and co-founder of BloomReach personally commented on the news and said: “The availability of an Experience and Personalization solution for customers using both BloomReach and SAP Hybris Commerce will help brands to up their game when it comes to real engagement with their audience.
By combining engaging content and truly personalized commerce, businesses will be able to build a personal relationship with their customers that can result in an uplift in revenue and customer retention.”
Paul Lynch, managing director and AVP of LiveArea EMEA is a SAP Hybris Gold Certified partner that helped BloomReach actually develop the extension for SAP Hybris Commerce. He added: "With this solution, customers using SAP Hybris Commerce will be able to take advantage of BloomReach's industry leading Experience and Personalization offering in an accelerated fashion. We're excited to help launch BloomReach's extension on the SAP App Center," said Lynch.
BloomReach was also a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management in 2017 and were also named a visionary in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms for 2018.
Ending Notes
It’s great to see companies like this expanding and growing their executive teams. As BloomReach was a newcomer that was added to the Leader Quadrant in 2017, I’m interested to see if they will be able to hold onto their position for 2018. As a matter of fact, they were also a newcomer to the WCM market thanks to its acquisition of Amsterdam-based open-source Hippo CMS which already made a significant move from the Niche Players to the Visionaries quadrant in the Gartner’s Magic Quadrant in 2016.
Be sure to stay tuned, right here on CMS-Connected, as I will be conducting an overview of the Gartner Leader Quadrant reports in the months to come.
Gabriella Pirrone
Gabriella is the Digital Marketing Assistant for CMSC Media. She brings a wealth of knowledge from not only a CMS perspective but also content, SEO and eCommerce. She enjoys everything social media and staying ontop of the latest trends in the digital marketing world.