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Like we announced back in April, we officially became Acquia partners this spring. In the final week of October, we thus joined our first Acquia Engage event as sponsoring partners.
While sponsor events (like all conferences, to be honest) are typically much better experienced in-person, this year’s Acquia Engage delivered an excellent experience that was a real upgrade to last year’s first virtual installment of the event.
The platform provided a main stage where most of the action happened, along with partner booths for specific partners. The top 3 partners - Wunderman Thompson, Bounteous and Epam - also offered dedicated virtual rooms for networking.
One of the highlights of Engage 2021 was definitely the announcement of Engage Awards winners in several different categories, one of the most notable ones being Open Source Giants which went to Palantir.net.
And, of course, we can’t forget the insightful opening keynote moderated by Mark Jeffries and Acquia’s CMO Lynne Capozzi, and featuring a host of other top Acquia experts, such as Kevin Cochrane, SVP of Product Marketing, and Dries Buytaert, CTO and founder of Drupal.
As Dries highlights in the keynote, there are 4 key challenges to focus on in the digital experience market:
- Growth in applications (both in complexity and number)
- Data management
- Risk management
- Content management
Since content and data are at the heart of digital experience creation, Acquia have so far focused majorly on streamlining their management. But these 4 challenges require a more holistic approach; hence one of the key focus areas for Engage 2021 and Acquia going forward is streamlining workflows, which will address all 4 challenges at once.
The keynote also presented the concept of the composable enterprise, a trend which will likely become more prominent as more and more enterprises demand next-level digital experiences. The composable enterprise is based on MACH services: microservices, API-first, cloud-native and headless, all key components of the future DX standard.
The event also came right on the heels of Acquia’s acquisition of Widen, cloud-native providers of DAM and PIM, which has helped position Acquia even more firmly as a leading open digital experience platform (DXP) by adding these capabilities to their already impressive digital experience management roster.
As digital channels evolve and the demand for top-notch experiences grows, marketers and website builders responsible for creating and managing these digital experiences will need highly efficient and streamlined tooling for doing so. The acquisition of Widen will enable and power ContentOps, another concept introduced at Engage 2021.
These are definitely exciting times for Acquia and we’re very proud to have partnered with such a visionary company. Acquia’s products are based on Drupal, with which we do most of our work, and we’re happy to be able to further expand our offering with expertise in their solutions and thus become even more oriented towards enterprise clients.
We’re looking forward to seeing more developments for Acquia and can’t wait to hear more about them at next year’s (hopefully in-person) Acquia Engage.
If you need a trusted partner to help you set up your Acquia product and integrate it with your existing technologies, or even if you just need more general help with anything Drupal-related, get in touch with us and let’s talk about how we can help.
