Dries Buytaert

At Acquia Engage NYC this week, our partner and customer conference, we shared how Acquia's Digital Experience Platform (DXP) helps organizations deliver digital experiences through three key capabilities:

• Content: Create, manage and deliver digital content and experiences - from images and videos to blog posts, articles, and landing pages - consistently across all your digital channels.
• Optimize: Continuously improve your digital content and experiences by improving accessibility, readability, brand compliance, and search engine optimization (SEO).
• Insights: Understand how people interact with your digital experiences, segment audiences based on their behavior and interests, and deliver personalized content that drives better engagement and conversion rates.

Since our last Acquia Engage conference in May, roughly six months ago, we've made some great progress, and we announced some major innovations and updates across our platform.

Simplify video creation in Acquia DAM

Video is one of the most engaging forms of media, but it's also one of the most time-consuming and expensive to create. Producing professional, branded videos has traditionally required significant time, budget, and specialized skills. Our new Video Creator for DAM changes this equation. By combining templating, AI, and DAM's workflow functionality, organizations can now create professional, on-brand videos in minutes rather than days.

Make assets easier to find in Acquia DAM

Managing large digital asset libraries can become increasingly overwhelming. Traditional search methods rely on extensive metadata tagging and manual filtering options. Depending on what you are looking for, it might be difficult to quickly find the right assets.

To address this, we introduced Acquia DAM Copilot, which transforms the experience through conversational AI. Instead of navigating complicated filter menus, users can now simply type natural requests like "show me photos of bikes outside" and refine their search conversationally with commands like "only show bikes from the side view". This AI-powered approach eliminates the need for extensive tagging and makes finding the right content intuitive and fast.

Easier site building with Drupal

I updated the Acquia Engage audience on Drupal CMS (also known as Drupal Starshot), a major initiative I'm leading in the Drupal community with significant support from Acquia. I demonstrated several exciting innovations coming to Drupal: "recipes" to simplify site building, AI-powered site creation capabilities, and a new Experience Builder that will transform how we build Drupal websites.

Many in the audience had already watched my DrupalCon Barcelona keynote and expressed continued enthusiasm for the direction of Drupal CMS and our accelerated pace of innovation. Even after demoing it multiple times the past month, I'm still very excited about it myself. If you want to learn more, be sure to check out my DrupalCon presentation!

Improving content ranking with Acquia SEO

Creating content that ranks well in search engines traditionally requires both specialized SEO expertise and skilled content writers - making it an expensive and time-consuming process. Our new SEO Copilot, powered by Conductor, integrated directly into Drupal's editing experience, provides real-time guidance on keyword optimization, content suggestions, length recommendations, and writing complexity for your target audience. This helps content teams create search-engine-friendly content more efficiently, without needing deep SEO expertise.

Improving content quality with Acquia Optimize

We announced the rebranding of Monsido to Acquia Optimize and talked about two major improvements to this offering.

First, we improved how organizations create advanced content policies. Creating advanced content policies usually requires some technical expertise, as it can involve writing regular expressions. Now, users can simply describe in plain language what they want to monitor. For example, they could enter something like "find language that might be insensitive to people with disabilities", and AI will help create the appropriate policy rules. Acquia Optimize will then scan content across all your websites to detect any violations of those rules.

Second, we dramatically shortened the feedback loop for content checking. Previously, content creators had to publish their content and then wait for scheduled scans to discover problems with accessibility, policy compliance or technical SEO - a process that could take a couple of days. Now, they can get instant feedback. Authors can request a check while they work, and the system immediately flags accessibility issues, content policy violations, and other problems, allowing them to fix problems while the content is being written. This shift from "publish and wait" to "check and fix" helps teams maintain higher content quality standards, allows them to work faster, and can prevent non-compliant content from ever going live.

FedRAMP for Acquia Cloud Next

We were excited to announce that our next-generation Drupal Cloud, Acquia Cloud Next (ACN), has achieved FedRAMP accreditation, just like our previous platform, which remains FedRAMP accredited.

This means our government customers can now migrate their Drupal sites onto our latest cloud platform, taking advantage of improved autoscaling, self-healing, and cutting-edge features. We already have 56 FedRAMP customers hosting their Drupal sites on ACN, including Fannie Mae, The US Agency for International Development, and the Department of Education, to name a few.

Improved fleet management for Drupal

Acquia Cloud Site Factory is a platform that helps organizations manage fleets of Drupal sites from a single dashboard, making it easier to launch, update, and scale sites. Over the past two years, we've been rebuilding Site Factory on top of Acquia Cloud Next, integrating them more closely. Recently, we reached a major milestone in this journey. At Engage, we showcased Multi-Experience Operations (MEO) to manage multiple Drupal codebases across your portfolio of sites.

Previously, all sites in a Site Factory instance had to run the same Drupal code, requiring simultaneous updates across all sites. Now, organizations can run sites on different codebases and update them independently. This added flexibility is invaluable for large organizations managing hundreds or thousands of Drupal sites, allowing them to update at their own pace and maintain different Drupal versions where needed.

Improved conversion rates with Acquia Convert

Understanding user behavior is key to optimizing digital experiences, but interpreting the data and deciding on next steps can be challenging. We introduced some new Acquia Convert features (powered by VWO) to solve this.

First, advanced heat-mapping shows exactly how users interact with your pages, where they click first, how far they scroll, and where they show signs of frustration (like rage clicks).

Next, and even more powerful, is our new Acquia Convert Copilot that automatically analyzes this behavioral data to suggest specific improvements. For example, if the AI notices high interaction with a pricing slider but also signs of user confusion, it might suggest an A/B test to clarify the slider's purpose. This helps marketers and site builders make data-driven decisions and improve conversion rates.

Privacy-first analytics with Piwik Pro

As data privacy regulations become stricter globally, organizations face growing challenges with web analytics. Google Analytics has been banned in several European countries for not meeting data sovereignty requirements, leaving organizations scrambling for compliant alternatives.

We announced a partnership with Piwik Pro to address this need. Piwik Pro offers a privacy-first analytics solution that maintains compliance with global data regulations by allowing organizations to choose where their data is stored and maintaining full control over their data.

This makes it an ideal solution for organizations that operate in regions with strict data privacy laws, or any organization that wants to ensure their analytics solution remains compliant with evolving privacy regulations.

After the Piwik Pro announcement at Acquia Engage, I spoke with several customers who are already using Piwik Pro. Most worked in healthcare and other sectors handling sensitive data. They were excited about our partnership and a future that brings deeper integration between Piwik Pro, Acquia Optimize, Drupal, and other parts of our portfolio.

Conclusion

The enthusiasm from our customers and partners at Acquia Engage always reinvigorates me. None of these innovations would be possible without the dedication of our teams at Acquia. I'm grateful for their hard work in bringing these innovations to life, and I'm excited for what is next!