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Recap of the 2024 Kentico MVP Summit

Unveiling the Future of Digital Experience Platforms: Insights from the MVP Summit 

One of the highlights for a Kentico Xperience MVP is the yearly Summit. A full week of product updates, innovations, feedback sessions, and sharing ideas. Today, we're diving into the whirlwind of innovation and strategic insights unveiled at the Kentico MVP Summit, from groundbreaking statements to actionable strategies, let's unpack the key takeaways from this dynamic event. 

Dominik Pinter's Vision: Redefining Success in DXP

At the heart of the discussions was Dominik Pinter's bold assertion: Kentico wants to deliver the most compelling digital experience platform (DXP) that make projects profitable. This mantra resonated deeply, setting the tone for reimagining the DXP landscape.  

XbyK: The Driving Force Behind Success 

With the introduction of their new SaaS solution Xperience by Kentico, they have found the perfect embodiment for this mantra as Kentico again was able to overachieve on their new business goals. With Xperience by Kentico, or XbyK for short, Kentico shows an unwavering commitment to excellence, uncompromising quality and unparalleled performance. 

Consolidation and Simplified Governance

Amidst the chaos of martech complexity and constant arrival of new tools, Kentico makes a countermove by focusing on consolidation. Less tools to handle, maintain and manage whilst doing more within one digital experience platform. Their three pillars to achieve this are: Simplified governance, streamlined workflows, and predictable pricing models & total cost of ownership.  

Sales and Marketing Strategies for the Digital Age

In the realm of sales and marketing, the focus shifts towards holistic strategies encompassing demand generation, co-marketing initiatives, and brand elevation.  

Hybrid Headless: The Unparalleled Differentiator

While the landscape evolves, one thing remains clear: hybrid headless architecture continues to stand out as the differentiator, offering unparalleled flexibility and agility. 

Digital Transformation Roadmap: A Glimpse into the Future

The roadmap ahead is paved with opportunities and challenges alike. From catering to new, larger clients to embracing the power of AI and machine learning, the journey ahead promises to be nothing short of transformative. 

On a more practical level, the introduction of classic and smart folders is a new boost in the user experience for content editors. Especially smart folders have capabilities to really support the day-to-day business allowing for automated sectioning of content items, much like your smart phone would do with your photo album. Offering live preview will provide editors with a realtime insight in how the asset they are creating will turn out on any given device, something most editors can’t live without. 

Looking at the roadmap, Kentico has divided her efforts into 3 capability tiers: market required, market attractive and improving quality of life. 

AIRA: Redefining Digital Excellence with AI 

Kentico is investing a lot in native AI capabilities all developed in-house through the AIRA department. Basic functionality like finetuning or creating content is a given but Kentico is taking things a step further. With six core principles guiding its path, AIRA emerges as a force to be reckoned with. AI functionality in Kentico needs to:  

  • Make impact  
  • Be core platform capability  
  • Be a single unified entity  
  • Transcend a dxp to other devices  
  • Have a human in the driver seat  
  • Care about security, safety and data privacy 

For the upcoming year AIRA will focus on developing features to support automations, image & content creation, translations, and customer journey insights. Being able to get automated suggestions on how and where to improve content or assets as touchpoints in a customer journey is a prime example of Kentico’s desire to add value to marketers and content editors.  

Security as a standard

Kentico has had enormous success with Xperience by Kentico in the Finance industry. Obviously, security is imperative in all markets, but with the Finance industry this is top notch priority. The reason for such success is the extremely strict testing protocols that Kentico holds themselves to before it’s released to clients, supported by their strategy and ability to stay up to date at all times.  

Also, the product vision for XbyK is to never have breaking changes and provide more functionality from the core product rather than relying on a plug-in landscape to create the best possible experience. In their vision, each individual plug-in is considered a potential security risk on its own, which you don’t need to deal with in XbyK.  

Guiding the path to content modelling

After a full week of sessions, we ended the Kentico MVP Summit with a session on content modelling. Kentico fully understands the importance of helping businesses make the transition from webcentric to a channel agnostic approach to content creation. One of their efforts is to create several workshops specifically to enable editors and developers to co-create the best possible strategy for modelling content. 

Take a ride to the future?

I am thoroughly impressed with the strides made by Kentico over the last year to create a completely new product from scratch, whereas others continue down the path of acquisitions or expanding their existing solutions.  

If you are curious about the product innovations or how good a fit Xperience by Kentico is for your business, just drop me an e-mail and I will happily take you on that journey.