Unpacking Opticon 2024

However, we were also there to celebrate of 30 years of Episerver, now Optimizely. Everyone in the audience who had been associated with the company for more than 10 years was asked to stand up, and a notable proportion of us did just that — probably more than at any other Opticon conference, as Sweden is the homeland of the company and where they built their strong base for growth.

The remainder of the day showed us why editors and developers continue to attend Opticon and remain loyal to Optimizely after all these years. The somewhat diffuse messaging from last year’s Opticon was replaced by a clearer product offering this year, with a proud CEO, Alex Atzberger, declaring, “Optimizely is stronger than ever before,” and the Geta team attending Opticon 2024 tended to agree.

The rise of headless and composable commerce initially seemed to leave Optimizely behind, doomed to be labeled monolithic by its technologically agile competitors. However, they turned this messaging on its head at Opticon with “We are ONEderland” — where all editors and marketing department's needs could be met in one place. According to Julia Gebhart, Optimizely’s new Product Marketing Director, editors are “disillusioned with fragmented tech stacks,” thereby positioning Optimizely as a user-friendly alternative.

However, it has never really been the editors or day-to-day users, who demanded headless technology. Having to work with many different systems and suppliers is not on the top of a wishlist of any editor. It has been tech teams, developers, and CTOs who wanted easier ways to integrate with third-party systems and quickly deploy new features across multiple channels. Optimizely has responded to this challenge with technological improvements that should also make the tech teams happy. Optigraph will for example make creating search queries easier, Edge delivery should speed up performance, and a more API-friendly framework will perhaps reduce the need to move to purely headless solutions. The composable modules they are currently offereing are limited to a payment integration with Speedly so it would good to see they will ramp up this side of things to compete with other vendors. Optimizely was trying to keep both camps happy and it will be interesting to see how this journey goes.

Optimizely announced a name change of their Paas solution to Connect Commerce to emphasize the “coupled solution” of commerce and CMS. This is, in part, to introduce CMS opportunities to customers who only know Optimizely through the old test-based Optimizely stack. For Scandinavian users, who mostly use Paas, the emphasis on presenting a CMS seems strange, as this is the aspect we know and love best. The CMS will soon be available in version 13, and by then, the stack is, well, stacking up nicely: A an easier, and AI driven, visual page builder, embedded personalization, experimentation, and CDP will be supplemented with a basic analytics and reporting system. This will show sales, average order values, most sold products, etc, and be part of the core solution, which I can see editors being quite happy about especially if updates could be real-time (now that GA4 can take up to 48 hours to update numbers).

For me, the demo of the updated personalization tools topped my wishlist for my Geta Optimizely clients. I believe this is what many of them have been looking for to improve their marketing and content optimization. In addition, AI algorithms are being used to suggest relevant content to editors and improve text and translations within the CMS editor and in different aspects of the commerce solution too.

Their Saas solution - Configured commerce - is still focused on giving B2B users an out-of-the-box solution that can also offer personalisation and experimentation. However, difficulties of integration with other systems are still a sticking point so the announcement of "middleware" arriving in 2025 will be welcome here.

All in all, I would say Optimizely's new product offerings show they are absolutely a powerful force to be reckoned and should be around to celebrate new significant anniversaries in the coming years.