By Tom Cranstoun, also known as The AEM Guy
Tom Cranstoun is also known as “The AEM Guy” for his extensive experience with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). He’s an active member in the CMS Experts community and also an upcoming speaker at CMS Summit 25 in Frankfurt in May
I've spent over 13 years implementing Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) solutions for some of the world's most recognised brands. As Technical Design Authority for EE's AEM implementation, I led the creation of an 8,000-page help website and trained over 150 stakeholders in AEM usage. At DigitasLBi, I led a team of 30 global architects on the UK's largest AEM implementation for the Nissan/Renault Alliance, eventually targeting over 200 websites in 30 languages across five brands.
My work with MediaMonks brought me to projects for Twitter, Genesis USA, and McLaren, where we pushed beyond traditional AEM frameworks to create richer experiences. At Cognizant Netcentric, I advised on headless AEM implementations for Ford, and at Inspired Thinking Group, I consulted on Jaguar Land Rover's migration to AEM from Tridion CMS.
Then onto Ford Motor Company with Netcentric, where I architected a completely headless AEM implementation using React.
Latest endeavours include investigating Adobe Edge Delivery Services (Franklin), a high-performance document-based authoring system with a modern build system, that is being integrated into AEM.
Throughout these experiences, I've witnessed first-hand how AEM has evolved from its open-source foundations to a comprehensive enterprise platform, and I'd like to share insights on where it's headed in an increasingly composable future.
AEM's Open-Source DNA: Setting the Record Straight
One of the most common misconceptions I encounter is the belief that Adobe Experience Manager is just another proprietary, black-box enterprise system. The reality couldn't be further from the truth.
AEM began its life as "Communique" (CQ) in 2002, created by Day Software — a Swiss company with a deep commitment to open standards and open-source technology. What made their approach revolutionary wasn't just building another CMS, but their dedication to implementing emerging web standards in an era when most competitors were creating purely proprietary solutions.
At the heart of AEM still lies a powerful combination of open-source technologies:
Apache Jackrabbit & Java Content Repository (JCR) form the foundation of AEM's content storage. Day Software was instrumental in developing the JCR specification, with Day's CTO David Nuescheler serving as the specification lead. This open-source content repository provides AEM with built-in versioning, access control, full-text search, and both structured and unstructured content storage.
Apache Felix & OSGi provide the modular component system that allows AEM to be built from small, reusable, collaborative components. This modularity enables hot deployment of services without requiring system restarts — a crucial feature in enterprise environments where downtime is unacceptable.
Apache Sling, developed largely by Day Software (and later Adobe), implements a RESTful approach to content delivery. Its "everything is a resource" philosophy and URL-driven design make AEM highly flexible and extensible.
Roy Fielding: The Architect who Defined How the Web Works
Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of AEM's heritage is the role of Dr. Roy Fielding. As Chief Architect at Day Software and one of the principal authors of the HTTP specification, Fielding brought his revolutionary REST architectural style to both the broader internet and AEM's foundation.
Fielding defined the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style in his 2000 doctoral dissertation. This wasn't just an academic exercise — it became the blueprint for how the modern web operates. REST principles now underpin virtually every web service and API in existence.
When Day Software built what would become AEM, they did so by directly implementing these web-native REST principles, making it one of the first enterprise systems truly designed for the web rather than adapted to it. The JCR repository, Sling's URL decomposition, and the resource-centric approach all implement Fielding's vision of how web systems should be architected.
The Evolution toward Composability
Today's enterprise technology landscape is shifting toward composable architecture — the ability to assemble best-of-breed components rather than committing to a single vendor's suite. AEM's journey from on-premise software to cloud-native solution parallels this industry shift and demonstrates Adobe's commitment to embracing it.
From On-Premise to Cloud-Native
AEM has gone through three major deployment evolutions:
AEM on-premise: The traditional model where organisations install and manage AEM on their own infrastructure, perhaps on virtual machines in the cloud
AEM managed services: Adobe manages the infrastructure while clients maintain control over updates
AEM as a cloud service: A fully cloud-native SaaS (software as a service) offering launched in 2019. The cloud service offering involved a massive shift from an OSGI driven infrastructure to a distributed composable structure using Adobe I/O (Apache OpenWhisk/ NodeJS)
This progression reflects the broader industry shift from self-managed infrastructure to cloud-native services that prioritise scalability, security, and continuous updates.
Edge Delivery Services & Document Authoring: Reimagining Content Creation
Edge Delivery Services (EDS), formerly known as Project Franklin, significantly advances AEM's composability journey. This innovative approach prioritizes performance, developer experience, and content creator empowerment to revolutionize website construction and delivery.
EDS provides a developer-friendly, Git-based workflow that delivers exceptional performance. Content creators can work directly within familiar platforms like SharePoint or Google Drive, eliminating the need for complex CMS interfaces. Initially an Adobe experiment, EDS has become a key component of Adobe's offerings.
The development model is particularly powerful for composability. It leverages Git-based workflows with automated deployment pipelines, allowing developers to use familiar modern tools and practices from the open-source world. Content creators work in a familiar document interface while developers benefit from modern Git workflows — bridging two traditionally separate worlds.
The result is a dramatically simplified approach to building and managing websites that delivers exceptional performance metrics while maintaining the enterprise-grade capabilities organizations expect from AEM.
The technology developed here has been adapted to traditional AEM, using Project Crosswalk, allowing the Content team to continue using the AEM translation, workflow, security etc. truly a rich CMS. Modern AEM users are able to create Edge Delivery Services sites from scratch. Adobe recently launched a web-based CMS called Document Authoring (DA), which includes document authoring, translation, and workflow features, built on the blocks and styles from Franklin.
Adobe seems to be developing a fully composable solution that allows users to bring their own markup, content source, CDN, and Git repo. I believe that Adobe has even more features planned for the future.
Universal Visual Editor & App Builder: The Next Generation of Content Authoring
The Universal Editor represents the most recent evolution in AEM's authoring capabilities. Designed to overcome limitations of the traditional AEM page editor and SPA (single page application) editor, it offers a truly framework-agnostic approach to content authoring.
What makes the Universal Editor revolutionary is its ability to work with:
Any architecture (server-side, client-side, or edge rendering)
Any framework (vanilla AEM, Edge Delivery Services, React, Next.js, Angular, etc.)
Any hosting environment (AEM-hosted or remote domains)
This flexibility enables in-context editing for both headless content (via GraphQL) and traditional AEM pages, giving organizations unprecedented freedom in how they architect their digital experiences. This tool can edit content from any source and store the result back into AEM—a truly Universal Editor.
Complementing this flexibility is Adobe's App Builder, a powerful extensibility framework built on Apache OpenWhisk—an open-source serverless cloud platform. App Builder represents another example of Adobe's commitment to incorporating open-source technologies into their enterprise offerings.
App Builder provides a serverless extensibility framework that allows developers to create custom microservices and extensions for AEM using modern open-source JavaScript frameworks and tools. By leveraging OpenWhisk's open-source serverless architecture, App Builder enables organizations to build custom functionality without worrying about infrastructure management or scaling concerns.
This combination of the Universal Editor's content flexibility and App Builder's extensibility, powered by open-source technologies, creates a truly composable environment where organizations can assemble best-of-breed components while maintaining the enterprise capabilities that AEM provides.
Real-World AEM Implementations: Composability in Action
The power of AEM's approach becomes clear when examining major enterprise implementations where its architecture adapts to diverse requirements while maintaining core strengths.
The Digitas Helios Platform for Nissan/Renault Alliance
One of the UK's largest AEM implementations targeted over 200 websites in 30 languages across five brands. With 500 staff members across four continents, this truly global implementation demonstrated AEM's scalability in handling complex multilingual requirements and market-specific integrations. Composability was key to integrating the massive factory databases of car variations
EE (UK Telecom Provider)
This implementation used AEM as a presentation layer across distinct sections:
An e-commerce Shop section using Hybris as the application engine with AEM content
A customer portal with AEM providing the front-end
An 8,000-page Help website fully authored in AEM
Customer focussed micro-sites explaining billing codes etc.
This hybrid approach demonstrates how AEM's modular architecture enables it to serve different business needs while maintaining a consistent experience.
Media-Rich Microsites and Headless Implementations
Projects for Twitter, Genesis USA, McLaren, and Ford showcase AEM's flexibility in supporting both rich media experiences and modern headless architectures that push beyond the standard AEM framework.
Challenges on the Path to Composability
Despite AEM's architectural readiness for composability, several hurdles remain on the path to implementation:
Technical Challenges
Organisations implementing composable approaches with AEM often struggle with API complexity, having to choose between REST and GraphQL options and understanding their appropriate use cases. Storage architecture decisions significantly impact performance, while caching becomes particularly complex in marketing environments. Integration with e-commerce platforms, customer portals, and other systems adds another layer of complexity.
Business and Cultural Hurdles
Perhaps even more challenging are the organisational aspects of composability. Many teams still view AEM through a legacy lens as a monolithic system. Skills gaps between traditional AEM specialists and open-source developers can create friction, while governance models for hybrid proprietary/open-source environments remain unclear. Organisations often struggle with questions about ownership of queries, schemas, and rendering logic in a composable architecture.
Migration Considerations
For organisations with significant investments in traditional AEM implementations, the transition to composable approaches isn't straightforward. As one architect I've worked with noted:
"Some clients have invested way too much in what they have now. They could never justify re-architecting everything to make the jump to Edge Delivery."
While Adobe continues to support AEM on-premise (with quarterly service packs released on top of AEM 6.5), the innovation focus has clearly shifted to cloud offerings. This creates a tension for organisations trying to balance existing investments with future-focused architecture.
The downside discussed here applies to all Composable Architectures.
Bridging Open Source and Enterprise in AEM's Future
AEM's journey from open-source foundations to enterprise cloud capabilities demonstrates how these seemingly opposing worlds can strengthen each other. This marriage of open standards with enterprise capabilities provides a blueprint for how organisations can approach their digital experience architecture in an increasingly composable future.
As Adobe’s CTO has noted:
"The future of digital experiences isn't about monolithic applications but about composable services that can be assembled to meet specific business needs."
AEM's evolution toward composability, built on its RESTful foundations and enhanced with cloud-native services, positions it to remain relevant as the industry continues to shift.
The introduction of Edge Delivery Services (formerly Franklin) with its Document Authoring capabilities and App Builder with its OpenWhisk foundation represents Adobe's most ambitious step yet toward bridging the enterprise and open-source worlds. By embracing Git-based workflows, serverless architectures, and framework-agnostic editing, Adobe is creating a truly composable ecosystem that gives organisations the flexibility they need while maintaining the enterprise capabilities they require.
The path forward is clear: cloud-native architectures, composable services, and open APIs will define the next generation of digital experience platforms. For developers, marketers, and content strategists, bridging the gap between open-source innovation and enterprise capabilities will be essential for delivering the flexible, adaptable experiences that today's organisations demand.
While this transition won't happen overnight—particularly for organisations with significant investments in traditional AEM implementations—the direction is clear. AEM is changing from a single, all-in-one system to a flexible, cloud-based platform, and understanding both its open-source heritage and its enterprise evolution will be crucial for organisations navigating this changing landscape.
Adobe's Strategic Roadmap for AEM
Adobe's strategic roadmap for AEM has been focused on several key areas:
Cloud-first approach: Adobe has been moving decisively toward AEM as a cloud service as their primary offering, with quarterly feature updates and continuous improvements. Their long-term goal appears to be migrating the majority of customers to the cloud platform.
Composable architecture: Adobe has been emphasising composability through:
App Builder as the primary extensibility framework
Edge Delivery Services/Franklin for high-performance content delivery
Universal Editor to enable editing across different technology stacks
APIs and headless capabilities to support content anywhere, Adobe architects state that ES is a bottomless CMS
Experience-led commerce: Integrating AEM more tightly with Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento) and supporting headless commerce approaches with their experience-led commerce initiative.
Generative AI integration: Adobe has been incorporating their Sensei GenAI capabilities across AEM, focusing on content creation, personalisation, and marketing optimisation.
Unified authoring experiences: Moving toward more consistent authoring experiences across different content types (pages, content fragments, documents) with the Universal Editor and Document Authoring.
Developer experience improvement: Simplifying developer workflows through Git-based processes, CI/CD pipelines (continuous integration and continuous delivery), and modern development approaches.
Learn more about what’s happening in CMS
The conversation continues in person in Frankfurt at CMS Summit 25 in May, where Tom is leading a session titled What are we missing from AI?
At the conference, you can also meet Lars Trieloff, who works as Principal at Adobe and will talk about Cultivating a Performance Culture: Lessons from Getting 200+ Websites up to speed.
If you can’t make it to Frankfurt, then do consider joining the CMS Experts community, which meets regularly in Europe and North America.