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Vivek Agarwal is our CTO and VP of the Digital Experience Solutionspractice at XTIVIA. Vivek and his team have implemented hundreds ofsuccessful Portal and CMS technology solutions at enterprise and mid-sized clients since the year 2000, and he is considered a thought-leader inthe digital experience space.

His team provides consulting, architecture, implementation, and supportservices around digital experience platforms, portals, content management,collaboration, integration, and other enterprise software.

Prior to his current responsibilities, Vivek served as a Systems Architect,delivering multiple global projects using Enterprise Java, Portal, andCMS technologies. He was also a member of the prestigious IBM GoldConsultant program.

About the Author

4

Digital Experience Platforms or DXP, User Experience Platform or UXP,Customer Experience Platform or CXP - you have probably heard some orall of these terms flying around or being thrown at you by vendors, industryliterature, or even your CxO or Digital Strategist in internal meetings, andwondered what they are about. And more importantly are these simplybuzzwords and nothing has materially changed, or whether there is amarket / technology shift underway? In this article, I will share perspectivesfrom leading analysts at Forrester and Gartner, but also add my colorcommentary that comes from in-the-trenches implementations of similarsolutions since the year 2000 along with an understanding of customerneeds and desires, and the reality of such solutions.

Yes, I said it - the reality does not always match the hype, and if you go inwith colored glasses, you will be disappointed. While these platforms arevital to any digital strategy and even digital transformation of yourenterprise, they are not a panacea and require a well-planned and well-executed implementation of the right DXP product. But before we go too far,let us level-set on what a DXP is and what it offers you.

Introduction

I am going to begin with some definitions from Forrester and Gartner. InOctober 2015, Mark Grannan, Ted Schadler, Stephen Powers et al in TheForrester Wave: Digital Experience Platforms defined digital experienceplatforms broadly as - Software to manage, deliver and optimize experiencesconsistently across every digital touchpoint. They also call out that “With thecustomer at the center, a digital experience platform architecture will helpto align strategies, teams, processes, and technology to meet thisintegration imperative”.

Gartner has been using the User Experience Platform or UXP moniker torefer to essentially the same concept as DXP, and they define UXP asfollows - A user experience platform (UXP) is an integrated set oftechnologies used to provide interaction between a user and a set ofapplications, processes, content, services or other users. A UXP has severalcomponents, including portals, mashup tools, content management, search,rich Internet application (RIA) tools, analytics, collaboration, social andmobile tools. It may be delivered as a suite of products or as a singleproduct.

While these definitions are helpful in understanding DXP, I have what Ibelieve is a simpler definition –

A DXP is a software platform that enables you to build and deliver integrated,optimized user experiences across all digital channels, all audiences (thoughwith the customer at the center), and all stages of the user / customerlifecycle.

5

What is a DXP?

Breaking down my definition into even simpler terms –

• A Digital Experience Platform is a platform that allows you to build meaningful applications for your user audience. It is not a pre-packaged app that you simply deploy and / or rollout.

• It serves multiple digital channels or touchpoints including web, mobile, social, email, and connected devices.

• It serves multiple user audiences such as customers, partners, employees, suppliers, and others, and allows interactions between these audiences.

• It serves users at different points in their journey - for example, end-to-end customer lifecycle from awareness to conversion to customer engagement/interaction/self-service to advocacy or employees from a new hire to a long timer.

• The digital experience is integrated and optimized across the various delivery channels as well as across various backend systems.

And now let us look at this Digital Experience Platform definition visually –

6

What is a DXP?

Figure 1 : Digital Experience Platform Overview

Now that you have my DXP definition, let us dive into what a DXP offersyou.

7

What is a DXP?

According to Gartner, a UXP / DXP provides many services including:

• Content• Context• Portal• Collaboration• Social• Mobile• Search• Analytics• Orchestration/composition• Integration and API services

Continuing to quote Gartner, “a UXP provides a high-fidelity and holisticuser experience (UX) across the breadth of services provided. A UXP is aplatform for the presentation layer. Without a platform approach, a ‘tool dejour’ approach is frequently used by developers, leading to a mishmash ofone-off tools from a long list of vendors (or open source), and amaintenance nightmare”.

According to Forrester’s Mark Grannan in TechRadar™: Digital CustomerExperience Technologies, Q1 2015, among the application portfolios ofmost of the top DX vendors, you might see some or all of the followingtypes of solutions:

8

DXP Ingredients

• Digital asset management systems• eCommerce solutions• Email service providers• Forms• Mobile analytics• Mobile app platforms• Online video platforms• Self-service portals• Product information management (PIM) systems• Recommendation engines• Site search capabilities• Social depth platforms• Testing and optimization tools• Web analytics• Web chat tools• Web content management (WCM) systems

As you can see, there is significant overlap between the perspectives fromGartner and Forrester, and I tend to mostly agree with them that most ofthese capabilities are relevant in any mature digital experience platform.However depending on your scenario, some or all of these capabilitiesmight not be relevant to you as they are not applicable in your business orbecause you have a best-of-breed tool (or tools) in your enterprise that youdo not wish to replace but rather want to integrate into the rest of yourdigital experience ecosystem - more on this later.

9

DXP Ingredients

Clearly, there is overlap between a DXP, a portal, and a CMS but at thesame time, there are key differences. In many cases though thesedifferences are becoming smaller as products try to move into eachother’s domains.

A Content Management System (CMS) or Web Content Management(WCM) is geared towards building a public website and only has limitedsupport for a logged-in user experience with appropriate access controlas is needed in a customer or partner self-service scenario. The only userslogging-in to a CMS are the content authors, editors, and administrators.An example of an open source, Java CMS that we work with at XTIVIA isthe Hippo CMS.

A traditional Portal is geared towards building a self-service portal withrole-based access control and the ability for the end user to customize theuser interface based on their preference. Portals in the Java spacetypically adhered to the Java Portlet specifications (JSR 168 and 286) forenabling application developers to build custom functionality withintegration into various back-end systems. A portal was looked upon as asingle point of entry for personalized access to applications, content,processes and people. Various portal products had a varying degree ofsupport for content management.

As explained above, a DXP combines functionality from both portals andcontent management systems, and supplements this with other aspects.Quoting Forrester, Digital Experience Platforms must meet six key needsor themes

10

DXP versus Portal versus CMS

1. Coordinate content, customer data and core services to drive reuse and quality.

2. Unify marketing, commerce, and service processes to improve practitioner workflows.

3. Deliver contextually and share targeting rules to unify the “glass”.4. Share front-end code across digital touchpoints to manage a

common user experience.5. Link data and analytics to add insight and drive action.6. Manage code and extensions for maximum reuse while avoiding

over-customization.

At XTIVIA, we have a strong preference for Liferay (that we have workedwith for many years at major enterprises including HP, Bosch, Blue CrossBlue Shield, Nintendo, Domino’s and many others) and Jahia as twolightweight, Java-based, enterprise open source digital experienceplatforms that have a strong portal heritage.

11

DXP versus Portal versus CMS

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1. The technology fit - these products are typically based on Java,Microsoft, or PHP technology stacks and based on the kind of skillsin-house from a development and operations perspective, this may bea key consideration in whittling down the list of prospectiveplatforms. Keep in mind that most products do support JavaScript /HTML5 front-end development and this reduces the impact oftechnology fit - however, it is still a consideration as the product back-end might leverage these technologies and your comfort with themwill impact your success.

2. The functional fit - if you are a consumer-oriented retailer and need aheavy commerce, multi-channel capability with deep support forthousands of products, personalized offers, campaigns, and a strongpersonalization capability based on user behavior, then you probablyare better off with a product that has a commerce heritage. If on theother hand, you are an enterprise that deals with enterprisecustomers and partners, and have a significant array of IT systems tointegrate with, and offering self-service capabilities is key then aproduct with a portal heritage probably is a better fit for you. MostCMS and commerce products are limited in their ability to supportdeep integrations into external systems but most portals haveevolved to include good audience targeting / campaign managementcapabilities that can support additional stages of the customer /partner lifecycle. Another angle of the functional fit is to ensure thatthe various DXP capabilities that are directly applicable in yourscenario play well with each other, and are not disjointed products,even if they are from a single vendor.

13

DXP Product Landscape

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We now live in a connected, always-on world of information and servicesthat can be accessed through any number of channels, includingcomputers, tablets, smartphones, wearables, nearables, augmented andvirtual reality technologies, embedded devices, shared devices, and smartdevices. As the demand for personalized, connected experiences riseswhere users expect information at their fingertips all the time, so too doesthe need for digital experience platforms. As an enterprise that seeks tomeet the needs of its users, you are (or should be) looking for technologythat can unite customers’ experiences across digital devices and managethe many channels of interaction. And digital experience platforms willempower you to deliver exceptional experiences to your increasinglyconnected customers by helping you integrate new and old, disjointedtechnologies in your enterprise, and have a single, complete view of yourcustomers across departments in your organization and throughout theentire customer lifecycle. And this along with the people and processaspects of digital transformation will enable you to get and stay ahead ofyour competition!

15

Conclusion

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