How Are We Different?

The new 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrantᵀᴹ for Digital Experience Platforms is out, and I’d encourage you to have a look.

We are positioned as a Visionary in the research. This means we’re now one of only two in the “Visionary” quadrant.

It isn’t just Magnolia’s achievement, however: It is our customers'. What we’ve done is to observe and listen—then adapt to what our customers need. If Magnolia is a visionary, it’s because our customers have led the way.

Have you ever had a new colleague join your team, loudly proclaiming they could do everything better than anyone else? Someone vocally criticizing the other team members and from day one pointing out everything that’s wrong with their way of working. Telling them there’s a better way than what they’re used to doing, and downplaying their plans for improvements. “Trust me, I’ve done this before, and I’ll show you how it’s done my way.” And then trying to change everything that’s wrong at once. But when it comes to it, it slowly starts to unravel – some ideas don’t turn out to be that strong. Other improvements start dragging out. And if you stick it out long enough, one day you may hear a begrudging half-acknowledgment, “Actually, this is much harder than I thought.”

Well, Magnolia is not that guy.

Magnolia’s approach is not for those looking for one DXP suite to do it all. We don’t claim to do everything better than everyone else.

One of Magnolia’s core strengths is being a team player.

That means recognizing there are other players on your team, or to be precise: Other software in your stack. Over the course of a season, you may want to swap some out or add new talent. But you’d never win the league by changing the entire team for new players at the same time. It would be too disruptive.

I describe Magnolia as a “Composable DXP”, but what does that actually mean? Fundamentally, it’s being able to bring in various best-of-breed services and to combine them into an overarching digital experience platform—as opposed to getting most parts from one vendor. But it’s not simply going out and buying a bunch of LEGO bricks to compose your DXP. It goes much deeper and broader than that.

It means appreciating that you need to integrate with existing systems that are outside of the digital experience in many cases. I’m talking about “legacy” systems which are crucial to our customer's business but aren’t comfortable directly integrating with frontends. And which no DXP will ever replace.

A composable DXP is happy to mix and mingle and bring more parts to the party.

It also means agreeing that various DX tools are usually already in place. And that future plans can call for very specific best-of-breed solutions to solve a problem. If you blissfully ignore that reality, your digital experience will never smoothly evolve into the future. It’ll be stop and go.

When you’re bringing together multiple systems, it’s not just to surface them on frontends. You need to be able to coordinate and operate everything that goes into a coherent digital experience. We’ve invested heavily in the user experience, and making the interface easy to use. And this is where Magnolia’s focus on integration isn’t just about playing nice with others. It’s also about extending that user-friendliness across customers’ internal ecosystem.

Instead of having to jump from one backend to another to create that seamless experience, it should be coordinated from one friendly interface.

So at Magnolia, we’ve asked our customers: What if you don’t want to be disrupted, but want to be the disruptor? What if you don’t want to stop and go, but move on a purposeful trajectory? What if you don’t want to jump around back-ends, but want to be cohesive?

To us, Magnolia isn’t Visionary because we dictate how to run the digital experience. What’s much more important to us, is that each of our customers has their own vision. We just enable it.

Download your report here.

2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms, Irina Guseva, Mike Lowndes, Jim Murphy, Gene Phifer, February 23, 2022

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