Ignore digital experience delivery platforms in 2015, and you’ll spend all of 2016 playing catch up.
 
Since 2013, no fewer than eight vendors announced enterprise-class solutions vying to offer integrated, business-centric tools to create, deliver, measure, and optimize digital experiences. Just this week, French advertising giant Publicis Groupe acquired Sapient for $3.7 billion, and the second bullet of its press release, announced Publicis.Sapient, a new platform “focused exclusively on digital transformation and the dynamics of an always-on world across marketing, omni-channel commerce, consulting and technology.”
 
In our new document, “Predictions 2015: Digital Experience Delivery Platforms Become Flexible Or Lose Momentum,”  we share why we think that 2015 is the year that application development and delivery (AD&D) and digital marketers’ worlds collide – shared platforms, customer data, budgets, and priorities will emerge within B2C and progressive B2B enterprises. Now is the time for progressive digital customer experience technology leadership — from all corners of the organization — to come together to end the patchwork strategies of the past.
 
Platform vendors better get ready for picky buyers. In 2015, we predict that we’ll see a defined separation between the leaders and laggards of platform adopters, where leaders will want to get into the nitty-gritty of the platform components. In particular:
 
  • Platforms that don’t expose integration points will lose momentum in 2015. For 2015, Forrester predicts that vendors who only satiate thirst for integration with one-off or one-way APIs will lose deals to platforms that enable cross-channel, two-way data flows and easier connections across front and back-office systems.
  • No CRM access? No Hadoop access? No cross-channel credibility. Platform vendors have invested in data capture and management capabilities, built on scalable NoSQL and in-memory database technologies to store all three types of customer data — profile, historical, and situational — to drive contextual experiences across channels. Vendors that offer CRM will show their true stripes if they’re unable to connect it with delivery capabilities. Similarly, vendors who’ve built their own data layer and called it a day without access frameworks to common enterprise CRM or fast-growing Hadoop data repositories will lose credibility in 2015.
 
Download the full report and share your thoughts in the comments section below. Be sure to check out the other Predictions reports that Forrester has planned for this month. 
 
This blog was co-authored by senior research associate Steven Kesler.