In the rapidly evolving digital experience technology landscape, adaptability and flexibility are paramount for organizations aiming to stay ahead. Optimizely, a leader in digital experience platforms (DXP), has provided innovative tools to meet these ever-changing needs. Following their announcement at Opticon 2023 in San Diego, Optimizely has officially released a groundbreaking SaaS-based content management system (CMS) that promises to transform the way organizations handle content. This new offering combines unparalleled customization with user-friendliness, eliminating the need to choose between complexity and ease of use.
Efficiency, flexibility, and accessibility are crucial in digital marketing. Traditionally, Optimizely CMS operated on a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model. With the release of Optimizely SaaS (Software as a Service), customers can now benefit from a headless design that stores content as raw data, enabling versatile and reusable content across multiple channels.
At Opticon 2023, Chief Product Officer Rupali Jain emphasized the importance of flexibility in today’s rapidly changing market. Organizations constantly seek platforms that offer more choices, often driven by an architectural directive for a headless platform that integrates seamlessly with existing or planned SaaS-based marketing technology stacks. Recognizing this, Optimizely introduced the SaaS version of their CMS, distinct from the existing PaaS offering. This new iteration allows content to be developed independently from the presentation channel, ensuring a more versatile approach to content management.
One of the most exciting developments with the SaaS platform is the introduction of Visual Builder. This tool addresses common challenges faced by headless and SaaS-based CMS vendors, offering a user-friendly solution for content management while maintaining a real-world representation of pages. Visual Builder empowers editors to create and edit content within layouts that resemble the final output through on-page editing. These layouts can be turned into templates for reusability, streamlining the content creation process. Visual Builder also supports personalization, utilizing audience data from the Optimizely Data Platform, mirroring the powerful personalization capabilities of the PaaS platform.
Optimizely has also expanded the capabilities of Optimizely Graph, a set of APIs that enables digital teams to easily access and repurpose content from multiple sources and deliver it everywhere. The solution now offers faceted and fuzzy search functionalities, improving how users explore and find content within the integrated SaaS CMS platform. With content delivery served at the edge via CDN, Optimizely Graph makes content globally available at blazing-fast speeds.
Optimizely not only allows users to build their digital experiences through Visual Builder, but it also provides the flexibility to leverage partners like Vercel or Netlify to assist in hosting their frontend experiences. Recently, Optimizely strengthened its partnership with Vercel, the leading Frontend Cloud platform, to provide developers with a comprehensive suite of tools that include advanced deployment capabilities, seamless scaling options, and robust performance monitoring.