By Janus Boye
If you’ve been working in CMS in the past decade, you’ve probably heard of Kentico, the Czech-based software vendor that initially released their product back in 2004, but since then has been rapidly growing and winning customers and partners around the world.
As we’ve covered in this blog, most of the attention around Kentico in the past years have been on their newer Kontent product, which was initially called Draft, while the older, and also to be fair, more mature Xperience product, lived a bit more quiet life.
Having multiple and somewhat overlapping product streams can be challenging for any vendor, also those bigger than Kentico. It easily creates confusion externally and the internal focus can be a struggle. Back in 2019, I called it an ambitious and bold dual product strategy.
Fast forward to this summer - a big and unusual decision became public: Kentico should be split in two, creating Kontent.ai as a stand-alone company leaving Kentico to refocus on the Xperience product and what they call flexible DXP as a service. More on what that means later.
From left to right: Bart Omlo - new CEO of Kontent.ai, Petr Palas - the original founder, who remains the chairman of the board for both companies and then finally Dominik Pinter, the recently appointed CEO of Kentico
Newly appointed Kentico CEO Dominik Pinter hosted a recent member call to introduce us to the new Kentico, including a talk about where Kentico stands today and he also shared a bit about the ambitious plans for the future. Let’s start by getting to know the new Kentico a bit better.
Reintroducing: Kentico
Today, Kentico labels themselves as a DXP (Digital Experience Platform) vendor. They have some 160 employees and 5 offices on 4 continents.
The Kentico brand also had a slight refresh. This is the new logo
From a customer perspective, they are focusing on upper mid-market customers looking for a fully integrated, easy to use, and flexible digital experience platform.
As a part of the split in July, Kentico received an independent leadership, a renewed business strategy and also 20M $ committed investment. According to Dominik this will go primarily to sales and marketing, allowing the company to invest heavily in R&D from their own profit. The plan is to hire at least 60 more people over the next 12 months.
It’s an ambitious growth plan, optimising the company to get to the next level and winning many new customers is an important part of it. The stated goal is to grow the annual recurring revenue by 5x by 2026.
Partners remain an important part of the strategy, as they have been in the past, where they are a vital part of implementations. Kentico already has more than 1,000 digital agency partners globally.
How does Kentico fit in the marketplace?
Industry analyst firm Gartner labelled Kentico a niche player in the 2022 Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms alongside Squiz, Progress, CoreMedia and Crownpeak.
Looking at the confusing and crowded marketplace, Dominik further fleshed out the positioning of Kentico by mentioning the focus by Gartner on composable DXP. This is essentially a best of breed approach and with some refreshing clarity and honesty, Dominik bluntly said:
“This is an expensive approach, which requires procuring software from different vendors. Consequently, the implementation gets expensive and you are responsible for integrating the pieces”
Dominik would only recommend the composable DXP path, as advised by Gartner, to the very largest fortune 500 companies.
What Kentico calls ‘flexible DXP as a service’, is intended to offer customers lower total cost of ownership and according to Kentico: “All you need to create rich digital experiences for your customers and help you grow.”
The product strengths are in particular speed of implementation, multichannel experiences and a marketing-friendly user interface e.g. for campaigns. As always, working with the right agency is key, and the partner relationships will be a key part of the continued success for Kentico.
Let’s look a bit closer at the latest release.
Xperience by Kentico
As a follow up to existing Kentico Xperience 13 offering which came out in 2020 formerly known as Kentico EMS. Kentico used the big company news in July, to also ship their new flagship product, which is called Xperience by Kentico. That means, similar to as you know it from other cloud offerings, no more version numbers. Now it’s just Xperience.
Xperience is available both on-premise and as a cloud solution. There’s not a direct upgrade available from version 13, but there is a migration path as the products are built on different stacks.
A look at the Xperience by Kentico documentation shows, that the initial release as part of an early access program was back in July and since then both new features have been introduced and there’s also been a slew of hotfixes.
Here’s just a few notable and recent improvements of Xperience:
A new way of working with content in the Content Hub
Form Builder has been fixed to also work on smaller devices
Email management with new email templates and email applications
According to Dominik, the first few customers have already gone live with Xperience and you can also talk to several of the Kentico partners to hear their initial experiences.
Learn more about the new Kentico
Dominik shared a blog post when the news came out back in July, which has some additional details: Welcome to the next stage of your DXP journey, Kentico! There’s a bit more insights in the product vision in a follow up post which shortly later: Empower marketers, enable developers—Kentico’s CEO on headless and our future
Just last month, Kentico was named a Leader in G2’s Grid® Report for Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) for Fall 2022. G2 is a peer-to-peer review site that helps users choose the right software.
You can also meet Kentico in our CMS Expert group and at the upcoming CMS Kickoff 2025 conference in Florida in January.
Finally, you can also view the slides (PDF) or just lean back and enjoy the recording from the call below.