Ibexa Summit 25: What a difference a year makes

By Janus Boye

Ibexa Summit 25 took place in the impressively large Torre Melina Gran Melia hotel in Barcelona - with Ibexa branding literally taking you to the next level

With some 300 participants mostly from Europe, Ibexa and their DXP community took to Barcelona at the end of January for their annual kickoff and it was a quite different experience compared to last year.

Unlike last year, where it was 200 participants and partners-only, this year customers also participated at Ibexa Summit 25 and that was far from the only substantial change. Where the 2024 program looked much more inwards, or if you prefer, was more partner-community focused, this time Ibexa curated an experience that set sight on the broader marketplace, bigger customer problems and even touching on industry challenges as faced by AI and the erosion in trust.

In brief: Ibexa is growing, now also with a North American footprint and importantly, the combination of DXP (digital experience platform), CDP (customer data platform) and PIM (Product Information Management) is setting them apart in a marketplace that is as confusing as ever.

Or in the words of Christian Paredes from Netgen, a long-time Ibexa partner:

“Ibexa is developing as a product very positively with new features and a stable roadmap”

Let’s dive into what happened on the big stage.

The Ibexa take on the future of DXP

In a big change from last year where Ibexa and their implementation partners filled the opening program, this year Ibexa had invited Scott Brinker, also known as the ‘godfather of MarTech’, with an opening keynote on Martech in 2025 with a pointy subtitle asking whether composable platforms can simplify your MarTech stack?

As perhaps expected, Scott opened with his usual friendly and humorous take on the seemingly ever expanding MarTech Map, which as of the 2024 edition covers some 14,106 software vendors. Martech isn’t slowing down and it’s confusing times indeed to navigate the marketplace.

Scott Brinker on stage at the Ibexa Summit 25 held in Barcelona at the end of January

He then moved onto the term composability, which as happens with most buzzwords, has also been used and misused in recent years. As Scott pointed out, the concept itself is actually not new, but to quote from one of his main takeaways:

“Composability lets you craft more tailored solution”

He shared his useful spectrum of composability as shared below to illustrate the point.

As shared by Scott Brinker at the Ibexa Summit 25

Scott also introduced the concept of a composable canvas, a marker for the 3rd age of MarTech, with increasing convergence in the cloud as app boundaries blur. With the addition of AI, there’s a shift towards the non-technical on the spectrum, as AI enables you to do powerful things without writing code.

Making the specific connection to Ibexa, Scott introduced the new concept of a Martech Aggregator Company. This is where independent products are loosely-coupled with a common business and technical framework. With a portfolio of specialist Martech apps, this is exactly what Ibexa is pioneering with their combination of CMS, CDP and PIM, and Scott made the persuasive point that aggregation might actually be more powerful than consolidation. From a customer point of view, it’s a tempting proposition with clear benefits, also when it comes to speed of innovation and reducing risk.

We then shifted gears to Bertrand Maugain, CEO at Ibexa, who had a remarkably different opening talk this year. Last year, he opened with a memorable slide on the release of v4.6 Long Term Support, something that was clearly important to the community. This year he followed in the big footsteps of Scott, and also with an open invitation to the new partners and customers in the room, he opened with a message of how difficult and confusing it is to navigate the DXP marketplace, both as a customer and as a partner, and then moved onto telling the updated Ibexa value proposition.

While talking about the cohesive marketing platform - or ‘a unified interface for marketers’, Ibexa CEO Bertrand Maugain shared how improving the user interface is a key part of the roadmap

According to Bertrand, there’s two main forces at play at the moment, when it comes to managing digital experiences:

  1. Global marketing comfort -> doing everything possible to empower marketing to do their job better

  2. Technology agility -> avoiding software, vendor or even agency and developer lock-in

To make the Ibexa value proposition clear, Bertrand drove home the point of how competitors can’t satisfy both. To quote from his slide:

  • SaaS Applications can not provide a comprehensive unified solution for business users and the current MACH fatigue proves the limits of this model (backend & frontend).

  • The current DXP Players can not fulfill a component per component approach especially when they prioritize integration and rebranding

The Ibexa answer to this is a modern composable DXP — or as he called it: The best of both worlds with on one side individual SaaS components (for example Quable PIM to address PIM-first projects) and one integrated offering to address the single purchase buying approach.

What is QNTM?
QNTM is a European-based MarTech group which consists of eight companies that collaborates closely. Three of them are even more tightly connected and that’s Ibexa (DXP), Raptor (CDP) and Quable (PIM). QNTM is owned by Swedish-based private equity firm Altor.

This is quite some progress compared to last year and the touch from the private equity owners at QNTM stood much clearer this year. What at the beginning of 2024 seemed a vision that could turn into reality, it’s clear that the folks at Ibexa alongside their friends in the QNTM ecosystem have had a productive year, also with the acquistion of PIM vendor Quable in December and more recently the merger with CDP vendor Raptor. They do indeed seem more patient and long-sighted than the traditional Silicon Valley-backed venture capitalists.

Is the improved combined offering enough to make the MACH Alliance envious as Bertrand teased on stage? Perhaps, but more importantly, it’s certainly attractive for many customers to have one integrated offering to make procurement easier.

An important point to the entire ecosystem is also that Ibexa is growing. DXP revenue is up compared to last year and with the integration of the two smaller vendors (Raptor and Quable), Ibexa is now at twice the revenue from last year. There’s also growth in North America, a big region which Ibexa hasn’t prioritized in the past, and there’s a now a dedicated Ibexa rep in the US focused on serving existing partners and growing the business. It’s not much, but it’s a big step to gear up for an important market.

Finally, and refreshingly, Bertrand closed his keynote with personal considerations on the time we live in, in particular when it come to a European response to trust, ethics and authenticity - a call to work together on not just copying the usual Silicon Valley approach, but building software for the future based on European values.

Key announcements from Ibexa

As an expected part of sizable vendor events, Ibexa also used the opportunity to make a few key product announcements.

A useful simplistic way of how Ibexa sees the combination of the three products integrated with shared AI, Collaboration and UI

To reiterate, the updated positioning for Ibexa is that they offer a composable platform with built-in premium integrations. We saw what they call 'the ‘product experience layer’ with a live demo that showed both familiar elements such as a content tree, GenAI used to generate text in the PIM and how the different elements looked nicely integrated at the user interface.

As a part of the live demo, we also saw how the platform can be used to orchestrate digital intelligence, giving 360 degree customer views across all touchpoints, unified customer segmentation and content-to-commerce personalisation.

It was also good to see what Ibexa calls ‘focus mode’ — a simplified interface tailored for clarity and ease of use.

Finally, we had a glance at the roadmaps, with integration being a big part of the efforts for the next 6 months, e.g. integrating the PIM with DXP and integrating CDP recommendations with the DXP. Further out, the focus on improving design and user interface was a major theme.

Just before heading to lunch, we had one final plenary session to make us think beyond the world of DXP.

Trust, Authenticity & the future of content in the age of AI

Margaret Ann Dowling, a Dublin-based media industry and emerging market specialist led an intriguing talk on authenticity, trust, and the role of content amidst AI-driven changes.

With a deep knowledge of content creation, Margaret Ann joined us from outside of the realm of the technology-centricity, but rather from the content perspective and she set the stage by pulling us back in time to the 1500’s and the first days of the printing press and the later launch of newspapers. A time long ago where publishers, editors, writers and journalists started helping audiences to navigate the world around content and storytelling. In some cases this promise was symbolised by a unique identifier which is akin to a Universal Symbol of quality, trust and authenticity — a promise to help them travel in their minds to places they may never get to in their lifetimes.

Today, AgenticAI enables fast moving multimodal reality and it's good to pause for thought. To think about our mission, vision and values as companies, and to reflect on dual use in technology and to explore some of the themes which will shape our content and drive our future.

Using wonderful art in her slides that were liberated from the usual tech jargon we had seen during the morning, Margaret Ann served a good and thought-provoking appetizer for our minds. Here’s just a few of the questions she affectionately left for us to think about:

  • How do we ensure that content remains trustworthy and authentic? The distinction between authentic and automated content will define how we consume and create in the future

  • What differentiates engaging human narratives from technically perfect AI generated pieces?

  • Trust is the cornerstone of content.But how do we trust AI generated content?

  • What happens when AI makes decisions beyond human understanding?

The afternoon AI panel featured Margaret Ann among the panelists, and the conversation continued on what’s really happening right now in the industry and around us.

An AI panel on how to balance productivity and authenticity

Leading with a question usually works well, and this is what Lars Eirik Rønning, VP Customer Relations from Ibexa did as he moderated the AI panel and started the conversation with this:

How do people feel about authenticity when AI is part of the process?

Among the panelists were also Norwegian Internet pioneer Bente Sollid, who added a useful perspective by looking at the value AI can deliver in combing through piles of data inaccessible by humans to make sure we don’t overlook valuable insights. She also made the good point, that AI is more an assistant, rather than a replacement for humans. As she said:

“It’s not the quantity of content that creates value, it’s rather how humans use AI to reinforce what makes your brand, your message and creativity unique”

From the AI panel at Ibexa Summit 25: From left to right - Lars Eirik Rønning, Ibexa; Scott Brinker, Bente Sollid, Janus Boye and Margaret Ann Dowling

Both Margaret Ann and Scott also expanded on their points from their morning talks and connected it to the new possibilities with AI, while balancing speed with ethical creation.

My humble contributions were around automation, authenticity, and the need for better content authoring interfaces, perhaps even conversational ones.

Finally, customers were also on the program and let’s look briefly at some of their sessions.

Insights from customer stories

Native Instruments, a Berlin-based company supporting musicians around the world, shared their requirements for picking a DXP and why they ended up selecting Ibexa, alongside Algolia for search and Magento as e-commerce platform.

We also heard from GHA, a Dubai-based hotel loyalty program. This was an interesting case of utilising Ibexa DXP to simplify content management, create engaging landing pages, and distribute content seamlessly to alliance partners. We saw how the platform enables efficient content creation, approval, and editing workflows, along with a powerful API-driven approach to sharing content across multiple hotel brands.

Finally, I’ll also mention the global law firm CMS, which shared an impressive case study with robust permissions, groups and rights. A common requirement in the legal and other regulated sectors, but not something usually implemented with this granularity and level of detail. Here we also saw a live demo presented by a customer on permission management, workflows and language handling.

A closing word on the partners

As Bertrand mentioned in his opening, the ecosystem around Ibexa is key, and for Ibexa to win bigger, they’ll also need to sign up many more partner, while still feeding the existing ones. Clearly there’s potential to bring CDP (Raptor) into the existing DXP (Ibexa) projects and vice versa, but many agencies will also have to invest in training to become skilled in what will be a new CDP discipline for them. Similarly for PIM (Quable), sure there’s cross-selling, but the existing offering is very French, comparatively small in the market and both training and deeper product integration lies ahead.

Ibexa and their QNTM owners are clearly betting big on the preferential but non-exclusive composable ecosystem, MarTech Aggregator Company as Scott Brinker called it, where different solutions from other vendors are more than welcomed to assemble a unique digital experience stack based on client tastes or needs. As Alex Net from Barcelona-based digital agency Infinitum Digital said after the conference:

“This approach enables Ibexa to compete against the microservice fatigue where complexity grows exponentially as more solutions must be integrated and the suite fatigue where ROI and project implementation are an enormous challenge in day to day implementations.”

Similarly from Gauthier Garnier at Platform.sh, who also attended both this year and last year’s Ibexa conferences:

“Ibexa continues to navigate the evolving digital landscape with remarkable elegance. In an era where the battle between SaaS, PaaS, On-Prem, and AI-powered solutions is disrupting digital strategies across the board, Ibexa stands out by embracing nuance. They recognize that seemingly contradictory approaches can coexist: investing in Vertical SaaS solutions where it adds value—like with Quable and Raptor for mature, commoditized products—while preserving the flexibility of their core platform for deep, tailored customization. It’s a strategy that not only makes sense but highlights Ibexa’s strength in managing enterprise complexity with exceptional grace.”

Learn more about Ibexa and the DXP marketplace

First, two pieces to help you zoom out and see the progress:

Secondly, the conversation naturally continues at our upcoming conferences, incl. CMS Summit 25 in Frankfurt in May. Ibexa is also a long standing member of the CMS Experts community, where we will keep talking AI, composability, MarTech and how to navigate this marketplace for the foreseeable future.