Verbat.com

Kentico 10 & What It Brought To the Table

Kentico, an esteemed content management and digital experience platform provider, recently released the latest version of its popular ASP.NET CMS platform, Kentico 10, which is more than meets the eye. Karol Jarkovsky, Director of Product at Kentico, talked about the issues the new Kentico 10 can deal with, and what the future holds for the product, over a Skype interview with Laura Myers, a tech reporter of CMS-Connected.

The company is known for the research it does prior to developing and releasing products. According to the Director of Product, their research saw frustrated marketers, content creators, and developers as they are swept over by the sheer complexity of various CMS tools they have to use, while not getting the advertised benefits of those tools.

This was stated as one of the reasons they developed the latest Kentico version as an intuitive tool that solves aforementioned issue by properly aligning both marketers and developers, while allowing them to get their job done faster.

Pain points

Karol also explained three primary issues or pain points Kentico noticed in the market during its research, which were also considered while they developed a rooted solution in the form of Kentico 10.

  • Many organizations want to increase productivity but lack the necessary technology to do just that
  • CMS lacks the capability to deliver enough context for businesses to achieve their goals
  • CMS either doesn’t scale as needed or demands a price to do so

First pain point – Improving productivity

He further stated how the new Kentico addresses each pain point, and emphasized the importance of improving productivity. He explained with an example of how content authors spend about 10-15 minutes searching for the right image, and then spend more time optimizing it for various channels and layouts. Kentico 10 offers a solution for this in the form of responsive images management, which enables users to specifically predefine image variants. The system will only need a command from the user on the variants they want to be created, and the image will be automatically optimized accordingly before upload. This improves productivity, addressing the first pain point.

Second pain point – Context

Regarding context, Kentico pointed out that marketers struggle the most with three main issues.

  • Converting prospects into customers
  • Increasing existing customer value
  • Attaining an ROI through marketing

The success of marketing campaigns directly influence the chances of achieving these goals. But Kentico identified a workaround which involves tweaking the marketing campaigns. Marketers learn and improve with failures. However, the tools available don’t let marketers tweak the campaigns they are already running based on their new findings. They will have to conclude the campaign, and start a new one from scratch.

As a solution to this, Kentico added a campaign management tool in Kentico 10 which enables marketers to tweak running campaigns on the go, rather than ending it and starting all over again while losing data in the process. Karol also mentioned that they added something similar to an analytics tool to the Kentico 10 in the form of ‘campaign journey tracking’. This basically gives marketers an analysis of the running campaign, enabling them to identify the point in the campaign that got the highest visitor drop outs. This indicates the points of failure and the steps in the campaign that can be improved. Though the solution addresses the context pain point, it also aids in productivity enhancement.

Third pain point – Scalability

Data sets in organizations today are larger than ever. 53% of the data in these organizations are estimated to be left unanalyzed. 45% of the organizations surveyed were unable to analyze data across disparate sources, and 42% do not feel they can analyze the data enough to gain beneficial insights.

The data will only keep growing. Consider Internet of Things (IoT) as well, and we will have over 20 billion ‘connected devices’ in the world by 2020. This means there could be a great increase in data volume and data fragmentation. A tool that scales itself along with growing data can make a significant difference. Keeping scalability in mind, Kentico made sure that the latest release of its CMS tool is the most scalable version to date.

The Future of Kentico

Karol also spoke about the future of Kentico in the interview, and what they plan to do now that Kentico 10 is out. He revealed that they have already started working on Kentico 11 which will be featured as an improved ecommerce solution that focusses on integrations. As organizations generally go for reputed, standalone ecommerce solutions, Kentico plans to provide integrations with those popular B2B/B2C ecommerce solutions.

This would be beneficial particularly to organizations in the mid-market as they wouldn’t miss a stable, effective CMS solution that matches their ecommerce functionalities well. The Director of Product also revealed that Kentico plans to work with ecommerce market leaders to develop optimal solutions that deliver the best of both CMS and ecommerce. He added that they will be improving data visualization, and the marketing dashboards as well.

As Kentico’s Bronze Partner, Verbat looks forward to more innovative CMS solutions from Kentico that caters to the needs of the market and help organizations meet or exceed the high level of customer expectations.