What an amazing week! Our team was in Austin for Acquia Engage, the digital transformation conference that brings together digital leaders and innovators to discuss the whys, whats and hows of delivering best-in-class customer experiences.
This 3-day conference kicked off with a warm welcome reception, which provided a great opportunity for attendees and partners to network and connect before the event got into its full swing. We enjoyed seeing familiar faces, including our partners and customers, and also had a chance to meet with folks new to Drupal and Acquia. According to a survey we ran at our booth, 15.4% of those who filled the survey were not using Drupal yet and 23.1% were not yet on Acquia.
Kate and Ayhab at our booth.
A diverse mix of verticals were represented at the event, and made for really interesting conversations at our booth, from sharing our experiences on all the different digital initiatives and to learning more about the trends that were happening in different industries. We were happy to discuss and share details on our two 2018 Engage Award Finalists: the Blue Cross Blue Shield North Carolina project for Leader of the Pack: Health Care and University of California project for Leader of the Pack: Education.
Keynote Sessions: Build/Manage/Optimize
The Keynote and sessions were well attended, with robust content in 3 different tracks (Build, Manage, and Optimize), that offered learnings for all attendees, regardless of where they were at in their digital transformation journey. Personalization, Lift and Journey were hot topics amongst the attendees and there was a lot of shared excitement and anticipation for upcoming development in these products.
A look at digital marketing trends in the past vs today.
In the Keynote, Acquia’s CEO Mike Sullivan highlighted 3 critical factors to achieve digital freedom:
- Simplicity,
- Scalability,
- Intelligence.
These themes were echoed in Acquia CTO and Drupal Creator Dries Buytaert’s Innovation Showcase. He stressed Acquia’s focus for their product roadmap will continue to be in making the experience simpler, more scalable and smarter. They announced the coming year will see more investment and improvements made in Acquia Lift/Personalization, Acquia Site Factory and Acquia Lightning. We're highly anticipating Acquia Lift 4.0, as they announced that this will include some exciting new features like campaign-based scheduling, multi-lingual personalization and real-time dashboards.
Mike Sullivan, Acquia CEO, at Keynote: “85% of consumers believe that their experience with brands online needs to be made easier”
Survey Says...
We took the opportunity to engage with attendees and ran a short survey at our booth to explore what their digital strategy roadmap looked like for 2019. We found that the top 3 priority digital initiatives for organizations in the coming year were website migration & redesign, web/mobile application development, and customer experience/journey orchestration - 61.5%, 61.5% and 53.8% of respondents reported these initiatives, respectively.
We also noted that 34.6% of respondents reported Personalization as being a priority initiative, so it will be interesting to see how the new developments in Acquia Lift will play out in the new year.
All in all, it was another great conference, filled with learning, networking and of course, lots of live music!
We hope to see you at Engage 2019!
Band from the Engage party at Speakeasy. Austin delivered on being the Live Music Capital of the World!
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