Looking Ahead: dotCMS Product Outlook For 2020

With the new year underway, we want to give an update on what’s been happening with dotCMS—and the exciting things just around the corner. Here’s a brief overview of the great year the company had in 2019, and an outlook of the dotCMS platform for 2020.

What Happened With dotCMS in 2019?

2019 was a great year for dotCMS in terms of industry recognition, platform adoption, and the release of new features.

Increased Recognition

dotCMS has amassed a number of positive reviews on G2 Crowd, many of which are from large enterprise organizations. Among the testimonials, customers have touted the benefits of dotCMS Cloud and the supportive relationship that dotCMS maintains with the community. Others spoke about the stability and simplicity of the platform as a hybrid-headless CMS solution for enterprises.

Along with a number of positive testimonials on G2 Crowd, the site gave dotCMS a “Higher Performer Summer 2019” status. G2 crowd later awarded dotCMS “Best Support Winter 2020” and “High Performer 2020” as well. These reviews and the recognitions from G2 crowd are no doubt due to the massive growth in dotCMSs customer-base, the new partnerships that the company has been forging, and the innovative features that the latest releases of the platform have included.

Learn More: dotCMS Reviews & Product Details on G2

Continued Growth

dotCMS saw massive platform adoption in 2019. In the third quarter alone, dotCMS had a 20% growth of new clients from the U.S., Europe, and Australia. These clients operate in numerous industries ranging from Technology and Financial Services to Retail, Apparel, & Fashion. In addition, more than 90% of new adopters are choosing dotCMS Cloud over on-premise or self-hosted deployments.

There were also a number of key new partnerships, including Unbxd, The JRT Agency, and BSC. These partnerships give customers access to technical and platform experts, and have enabled innovative solutions like the Commerce Experience Solution. This solution, in particular, brought together the powerful search capabilities of Unbxd and commerce functionality from Commercetools to deliver superior shopping experiences using a headless commerce approach. Another example is the Banking Experience Solution that is featured in an upcoming webinar.

Groundbreaking Features

The dotCMS 5.x series brought many innovative features to customers, and a huge slew of minor improvements as well. For marketing teams, Edit Mode Anywhere is a powerful hybrid-headless capabilities for managing SPAs, PWAs, and other web apps from within the platform interface. Using Edit Mode Anywhere, marketers can edit content in-context, drag-and drop content, create and change page layouts, preview changes, personalize experiences and more, while running dotCMS headless.

Related Article: Edit Mode Anywhere, Empowers Marketers in Hybrid Headless CMS Environment

The developer experience has also vastly improved with native GraphQL support and additional low code tooling. Most notable is the Scriptable API builder for creating custom endpoints using Velocity and Scripting as a Service to generate new endpoint on the fly from frontend applications. In addition, there were many smaller improvements such as API enhancements, an updated starter site, and an SPA starter kit for rapid single page app development.

Related Article: Scripting as a Service: A Look at dotCMS’s Scriptable API Builder

On the IT operations side of things, dotCMS has been hard at work improving the stability and continuity of the platform. That means improving its microservices architecture and making it easier to integrate the dotCMS with DevOps and CI/CD processes. dotCMS also recognized the trend towards containerization and now offers native support for Docker as well.

dotCMS Key Initiatives For 2020

dotCMS is planning to focus on three key initiatives in 2020 based on the evolving demands from consumers, and a more challenging digital landscape for marketing teams. The top priorities for dotCMS this year are cloud-first support, an intelligence service, and NoCode tooling.

Cloud-first

While dotCMS is a cloud-first solution, we want to remain a completely cloud-agnostic platform. That means dotCMS users can operate in a multi cloud environment, and still deploy the platform on-premise or to a self-hosted cloud infrastructure as an alternative to the dotCMS Cloud service.

dotCMS also plans to slowly roll out self-service tooling for dotCMS Cloud customers. We believe this will drive customer time-to-value and increase the digital agility of enterprise organizations because customers will have the option to operate independently of the dotCMS Cloud team.

Finally, with the increasingly strict regulations around consumer privacy regulations, dotCMS is making an additional investment in the security and compliance of the platform. This will ensure enterprises can build secure applications that comply with local and global data legislations and garner trust from its customers, that their privacy and personal data is safe.

Intelligence

dotCMS is doubling-down on data and analytics in 2020 with a separate SaaS-based product. The new service will give marketing team actionable insights that will allow them to optimize engagement with their audiences. The intelligence offering will be interoperable with both self-hosted deployments and the dotCMS Cloud. These features complement the platform’s existing intelligence capabilities to aggregate data relating to content performance, personas, trends, and more.

This new dotCMS product will be the foundation for future intelligence features as well, such as A/B testing, multi variant testing (MVT), and other testing tools. It will also enable advanced experience orchestration and facilitate digital marketing teams in optimizing conversions for better business results.

NoCode

dotCMS has been pushing NoCode for a while now because it dramatically reduces the time-to-market and total cost of ownership (TCO) for enterprise organizations that are building out new digital experiences. That’s because NoCode allows marketing teams to operate autonomously, and greatly reduced development requirements. In 2020, dotCMS will continue to expose more NoCode capabilities to further the digital agility of marketing teams.

In particular, dotCMS plans to enhance the platform’s UI to enable greater collaboration amongst developers, marketers, site administrators, and other key stakeholders. We expect these UI/UX improvements to be delivered incrementally with each new release. Most exciting, however, is our plans to launch a NoCode/LowCode integration builder within the platform’s interface that will significantly reduce development efforts for customers going forward.

More to Come From dotCMS

It’s still early in 2020, but dotCMS has an exciting roadmap ahead with new features on the horizon to improve the workflows of all stakeholders within the organization.

Stay tuned, we’re gearing up for an awesome year.

Beyond dotCMS 5.2