Q1 2020 Product Updates to the Acquia Experience Platform

April 28, 2020 7 minute read

Learn how updates to the Acquia Digital Experience Platform empower businesses to meet the digital expectations of customers in any circumstance.

A reliable, resilient and immediate digital experience is now the fundamental requirement for every business. Organizations are facing unparalleled demand to provide real-time digital communications and significant public relief as we all work together to navigate the COVID-19 crisis. So much of the world has changed in just a few months, but Acquia’s commitment to providing our customers the tools and support they need to build and manage their digital experiences is stronger than ever. We recently pledged to offer full platform capabilities and services to organizations, such as government agencies and healthcare providers, who are facing major traffic spikes and heightened expectations to deliver digital resources and maintain their operations.

Acquia is confident that we are well-equipped to rise to the demands your business is facing. Our globally distributed workforce and infrastructure deployment strategy allow us to offer services for thousands of brands around the world - especially during times of uncertainty. Our adherence to the most stringent security standards means you can trust us to keep your sites protected and running smoothly Our open Digital Experience Platform with its dual-cloud architecture, Drupal Cloud and Marketing Cloud, reflects the key needs of the market and provides businesses with the technology required to meet the expectations of their customers.

Keep reading to see how we have equipped the Acquia Digital Experience Platform with new product updates and enhanced capabilities.

Acquia Drupal Cloud: Build, design and run sites and applications

Acquia Drupal Cloud is designed to overcome the technical and business challenges brands face when designing secure, uninterrupted, highly performing digital experiences at scale. As many businesses face economic uncertainty and hardship, we aim to offer solutions that bring exceptional results without placing unneeded strain on your organization’s time or resources. Drupal Cloud brings developers, site operators and IT leaders the tools they need to build faster and deliver maximum impact.

Drupal 9

The newest version the free and open-source web content management framework Acquia is built on - Drupal 9, is scheduled for release on June 3, 2020 and will feature many powerful enhancements to Drupal’s functionality, ease of use and security capabilities. Drupal 9 will come with all of the features and functionalities of Drupal 8 that have been enhanced to make it easier than ever to develop and launch your Drupal sites. These enhanced features include:

Layout Builder - To provide content layout capabilities
Media - To allow uploading and reusing images, videos and other assets
BigPipe - A performance improvement that allows the main content of a page to be sent quickly while sidebar and auxiliary content are still being generated
Content Workflows, Media Management and a New Administrative Interface

A beta of Drupal 9 is now available and can be run on the Acquia Platform today.

Acquia Cohesion 6.0

Acquia Cohesion is an intuitive, low-code solution for building and editing Drupal sites that empowers marketers and content editors to dynamically build and design digital experiences on the front end. Cohesion 6.0 simplifies development processes, giving teams the ability to launch sites up to 50% faster than traditional timelines. Here are the newest capabilities available in Acquia Cohesion 6.0:

Style Guide Manager Live Preview - Allows content editors and brand managers to implement and preview new changes and evaluate their impact before deploying changes to the site.
Rebuilt API for Scale - Refactored API better equips IT leaders to manage individual components for site builders across hundreds or thousands of brand sites to reuse components and styles at scale.
Easier Drupal Migrations - To simplify the migration of sites to new versions of Drupal, Cohesion automatically compiles the code required to render your website. When changes are required, they are done automatically without any input from your technical team. The ability to accelerate migrations means marketing teams can reallocate resources to projects that drive customer engagement and increase revenue.
Self-Service Training - Cohesion can be fully self-service through newly available training and certifications in Acquia Academy.

Acquia Cloud

New Relic Pro- All Acquia Cloud and Acquia Cloud Site Factory customers have full access to New Relic’s Application Performance Monitoring services. Acquia customers can access site performance data, such as response times and end-user satisfaction. This helps companies reduce the duration of incidents caused by their application’s code or configuration and provide immediate insights into the possible root causes of issues whether that’s traffic, recent code or configuration changes, slow queries to the database or issues with third-party services.

New Relic is Drupal-optimized, meaning customers can further leverage its interfaces and APIs to gain insights into slow Drupal modules, Views and hooks.

Acquia Cloud Site Factory

Load Test Environments - As brands prepare their sites for high-traffic events, load testing ensures that customers can understand any potential bottlenecks or performance challenges and work to address these issues without putting their live sites at risk. With so many websites experiencing an influx of visitors and traffic spikes as people operate in a totally digital environment, the ability to load test offers reassurance that your properties won’t suffer any unexpected outages.

Acquia Marketing Cloud: Understand, personalize and engage customers on any channel

Establishing trust and building valuable customer relationships is the most important priority for every modern brand. As more brand interactions are dependent on digital challenges, offering customers consistent, relevant and delightful experiences is essential for continued growth and success. At the heart of these experiences is a deep understanding of who your customers are and what they want. The Acquia Marketing Cloud leverages data-driven insights and a unified view of the individual customer to design personalized and engaging digital journeys when it matters most.

Acquia DAM

Notification-Based Asset Sync - We’ve improved the sync time between assets in Acquia DAM and Drupal. For enterprise organizations tasked with managing tens of thousands of assets, quicker sync times vastly improve overall site performance and address prior issues with asset availability.

Protection Against Unexpected Deletions - Content managers and site operators no longer have to face the frustration of losing Drupal assets in the instance of a sudden DAM outage. Acquia DAM now safeguards Drupal assets against any potential outages, saving the time of having to recreate or rebuild any assets that are currently in Drupal core.

Acquia AgilOne

Acquia AgilOne is a customer data platform (CDP) powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence that provides a unified data intelligence layer for the entire Acquia Marketing Cloud. Here are the most recent enhancements for AgilOne:

Interactive Queries - Gives data science teams direct query access and real-time data sharing with data visualization tools, making it simpler to cleanse and process customer data and securely share that data with other teams and platforms.
Cohort Analysis - By tracking cohorts over time, you can measure and compare marketing and sales performance using the KPIs that matter to your business (e.g., lifetime value, likelihood to buy, average order value, etc.), as well as more easily test and experiment with different variables that may have an impact on your business. Cohort Analysis provides insights in real time and identifies changes, trends and opportunities throughout the ongoing customer lifecycle. These improvements help marketing teams better understand the business impact of marketing campaigns and dynamically attribute revenue to customer segments both online and offline.

As always, Acquia believes in offering a convenient and cohesive digital experience for customers no matter their circumstances. For a complete overview of the current Acquia Digital Experience Platform, you can watch our recent webinar.