Definitions matter, especially when you’re a digital or IT leader prepared to make a big investment in a digital experience platform. For many buyers, confusion enters the picture when vendors come to the table with “marketing clouds,” but provide misleading or vague definitions of how their technology is deployed.
Here’s where definitions matter. Too many vendors are still passing off their products as cloud-first solutions, offered as a service. In effect, they’re ‘cloud-washing.’ They are painting over the reality that their WCM and related software is still being deployed on site, or on a traditional hosting environment, like Rackspace or another, perhaps with a sheen of “managed hosting” assistance thrown in for good measure.
The reality is that many vendors like Adobe and Sitecore have been falling short when it comes to building and providing enterprises a true cloud platform for WCM and digital experience.
It’s clear from independent analysts that when it comes to cloud capabilities, a scalable PaaS critical in a modern, digital experience platform. In the report, The Forrester Wave™: Web Content Management Systems, Q1 2017, Forrester Research evaluated the cloud offerings of the 15 most significant WCM vendors. Acquia received a 4 out of 5 in the cloud criterion. Forrester’s citation policy doesn’t allow us to cite other vendors’ scores here, but you can see for yourself by downloading the report.
Of Acquia, Forrester said, in part:
Acquia cloud by itself is a good fit for organizations making a conscious bet on Drupal and cloud and that need a partner with the right support and SLAs to match global, enterprise needs.” (The Forrester Wave: Web Content Management Systems, Q1 2017, by Mark Grannan, January 24, 2017)
Acquia was born and bred as a cloud-based digital experience platform provider. For nine years, our focus has been cloud-first, cloud-only. We saw long ago that two major waves in enterprise WCM and digital experience were approaching:
- The need for scalable and secure cloud-based platform as a service,
- The need for agility and innovation provided most effectively by open source software.