Dries Buytaert

This October, Acquia welcomed over 650 people to the fourth annual Acquia Engage conference. In my opening keynote, I talked about the evolution of Acquia's product strategy and the move from building websites to creating customer journeys. You can watch a recording of my keynote (30 minutes) or download a copy of my slides (54 MB).

I shared that a number of new technology trends have emerged, such as conversational interfaces, beacons, augmented reality, artificial intelligence and more. These trends give organizations the opportunity to re-imagine their customer experience. Existing customer experiences can be leapfrogged by taking advantage of more channels and more data (e.g. be more intelligent, be more personalized, and be more contextualized).

I gave an example of this in a blog post last week, which showed how augmented reality can improve the shopping experience and help customers make better choices. It's just one example of how these new technologies advance existing customer experiences and move our industry from website management to customer journey management.

This is actually good news for Drupal as organizations will have to create and manage even more content. This content will need to be optimized for different channels and audience segments. However, it puts more emphasis on content modeling, content workflows, media management and web service integrations.

I believe that the transition from web content management to data-driven customer journeys is full of opportunity, and it has become clear that customers and partners are excited to take advantage of these new technology trends. This year's Acquia Engage showed how our own transformation will empower organizations to take advantage of new technology and transform how they do business.