Acquia Makes Announcements That Will Streamline Efficiency
By Erika Jones
May 22, 2019
Acquia, BigCommerce, Contextual Commerce, Contextual Marketing, Digital Marketing, ecommerce, Elastic Path, marketing, Mautic, open, open source, Third & Grove
It has been an exciting month for Acquia as they have made some big announcements regarding their platforms and services. In this article, we dive into what’s new with Acquia.
Acquia recently announced its acquisition of Mautic the open-source marketing automation platform. The procurement is creating buzz. Acquia, together with Mautic, now form the only open source marketing cloud. Incorporating open source marketing automation will provide Acquia’s customers a broader variation of methods to engage leads.
What exactly does Mautic do? As previously stated, Mautic, is an open-source marketing automation. They provide a software platform for marketing purposes that helps brands to save time, decrease the chance of errors, and increase efficiency by automating repetitive tasks on various channels. Simply put, by prompting site visitors to fill out a form, information can be collected, and they will be marketed to accordingly. Mautic automates these steps and even assigns specific customers points based on their interactions with sent emails or the pages they have viewed. Mautic collects this information and compiles a list of qualified leads.
This merger will allow for customers of Acquia’s Digital Experience Platform to smoothly create impeccable customer experiences across any channel. Mautic adds yet another application to Acquia that customers can integrate into their strategy. The open source foundation allows brands to innovate with new technologies as they come down the line.
I connected with Tom Wentworth, SVP of Product Marketing, to delve further into what this acquisition means, and how it creates value for their customers.
Expanding Acquia’s Open Digital Experience Platform
In Acquia’s press release Dries Buytaert, Co-Founder, CTO, and Chairman, states, "just as Drupal disrupted web content management, we believe Mautic disrupts the marketing automation world with open source, providing our customers faster innovation, more agility, more flexibility, and better integrations.” Is there an intention for Drupal and Mautic to be integrated and used in coordination? If so, what are some of the opportunities that could arise from this merger?
Drupal and Mautic will remain independent open source communities, and we look forward to both collaborating, too. Drupal and Mautic use the same underlying technology (including PHP and Symfony), so it will be easier for developers to work across both open source projects.
There are many opportunities for our customers and partners that come from this merger. Mautic will become a part of Acquia’s Open Digital Experience Platform which will help customers automate, personalize, and measure their entire customer lifecycle — across every channel, at every stage, and at every interaction. Just like everyone needs a website, everyone will need a digital experience platform. Acquia is the only company to provide an open alternative to the closed, expensive, stagnant marketing clouds.
We’re really excited about what this means for our partners. For example, Mautic has a unique product — Maestro — that will be great for our partners. With Maestro, partners can run multiple instances of Mautic for all their clients with a centralized dashboard to track performance and re-use the best performing campaigns. Maestro can even be white-labeled and custom branded.
‘Future-Proof’ Solutions
What is the spectrum of clients that Acquia is hoping to attract with the acquisition of Mautic?
We will continue to target the same global enterprise and mid-market companies that Mautic has been targeting prior to our acquisition. Mautic has a great track record of competing against the legacy marketing cloud providers. With the reach of the Acquia sales and marketing team, we can get Mautic into many more client evaluations.
We’ll win because companies aren’t interested in being locked into proprietary martech stacks that limit freedom. The beauty of an open marketing cloud is that it is future-proof — it allows users to easily integrate with different solutions down the line as needed based on changing objectives and customer needs.
The DXP Marketplace
How do you see competitors in the marketplace making changes that align with Acquia's vision of an open digital experience platform?
While some of our competitors share our digital experience platform vision, we’ve got a competitive moat that simply can’t be crossed; being open. There are lots of vendors to choose from if you are looking for a closed DXP, but only one choice if open is important to you; Acquia. With Mautic, we’ve cemented Acquia as the only open digital experience platform. We don’t worry much about what our competitors are doing. Instead, we’re focused on listening to our customers and delivering on our open vision. We’ve got the most exciting roadmap in Acquia’s history lined up for 2019 and beyond. We can’t wait to share more!
View Acquia’s Mautic acquisition press release here
Contextual Commerce
On top of the Mautic acquisition, Acquia has just unveiled the new Acquia Commerce Framework which is a set of Drupal applications that deliver “seamless, contextual commerce experiences.” Implementation of contextual commerce allows consumers the ability to smoothly complete online purchases in any setting or situation. The aim of this framework is to speed up the purchase process and to eliminate ‘clog points’ that slow down the checkout progression—often killing purchases all together. These points can be account sign in procedures, long info forms, connectivity issues, or even lineups if we consider brick and mortar shops. Acquia believes that making a purchase should be seamless, and with their framework, they are optimizing checkout experiences for consumers.
In Acquia’s recent press release, Senior Vice-President of Product, Matt Kaplan stated, “If an article on cooking or rock climbing gets a customer in a buying mood, they’ll want to transact then and there, not click away and look for the product on another site. Using Acquia Commerce Framework, brands can create a seamless experience for the customer without a lot of heavy lifting. Brands can keep the customer engaged and happy throughout the whole journey, which leads to longer visits, better engagement, and higher conversion rates.”
The framework will integrate more actionable checkouts into eCommerce experiences with Drupal sites. It can be utilized to work with Acquia partners Elastic Path and BigCommerce as well as other eCommerce platforms which will be made easier with the contextual commerce innovation as well. Third & Grove worked closely with BigCommerce on the complex process of building a connector for the Acquia Commerce Framework. Justin Emond, CEO and Co-Founder of Third & Grove said, “it can be a complex process for brands to add commerce experiences quickly to their existing digital experiences” and this integration allows “brands to add commerce experiences to their sites in days and hours, not weeks and months.”
According to Harry Chemko, CEO of Elastic Path, this innovation aims to “make it easy to embed commerce everywhere” and consumers will start seeing more streamlined checkout layouts. There is talk of voice command commerce and virtual reality (VR) commerce beginning to become a reality. For now, Acquia’s new contextual commerce modules will begin providing flexible and seamless shopping experiences.
View Acquia’s Contextual Commerce Announcement here
Acquia Lightning
On May 20th, Acquia released an updated version of Acquia Lightning, the Drupal site builder application. Acquia Lightning allows customers to build and maintain their Drupal sites quickly and efficiently.
“By bringing together modules and capabilities enterprise applications demand most, Acquia Lightning speeds up Drupal development time by 30 percent or more and helps organizations get to market faster and maintain Drupal sites more easily, while delivering more engaging experiences,” says Acquia co-founder and CTO, Dries Buytaert. "Acquia Lightning is the best place to start a new Drupal 8 project, particularly on Acquia Cloud."
The announcement outlines the new capabilities supported and enhanced by the release of this latest version.
View the Acquia Lightning announcement here
Clearly, Acquia has been working very hard and if this past month is any indication of what’s to come… we can’t wait to see what comes next.
Erika Jones
Erika Jones is a Tech Reporter and Content Marketer with CMSC Media. Erika enjoys combining her creativity with her technical skills through graphic design. She has a background in communications and marketing and has a flair for social media and content creation. Erika is an avid traveller and enjoys seeing firsthand how technology connects us all in business and pleasure.