It is a perfect storm in our industry right now. And though that storm has been one the big consumer brands have dealt with for several years, it is becoming louder and stronger for nearly every company - large, small, B2B, associations, you name it. 

This storm is not a scary one. But it is loud and involves a few primary elements coming together: 

• An increasing need to develop a meaningful content strategy - that oftentimes goes beyond a simple website
• A gigantic shift in the underlying technology amongst most of the major platforms in the Content Management space - namely towards .NET Core
• Changing demands from users related to user experience and digital marketing - relevancy, speed, and multi-device interaction leading the way

Ultimately, this storm means nearly every customer needs to examine the platform options that can best facilitate - them to take full advantage of it all. 

BlueModus is a certified partner in nearly every major .NET Content Management Platform - and from our perspective Kentico’s Xperience platform, now in its 13th version, is one of the strongest options, offering a much more navigable path through this perfect storm of tech evolution.

We have focused a lot of effort on helping companies to move forward with new CMS tools that can make their business flexible, future-proof, available to the world of omnichannel distribution, and stable. For some, a true headless architecture makes sense, while with many a more conventional CMS front-end will prove valuable. Kentico offers both routes - in Kentico Xperience 13 you will find more conventional CMS tools, with a primary website management experience. Its sister product, Kentico Kontent, gives you the headless CMS experience. With these choices, you get what is one of the most advanced CMS on the market today.

At its core, Kentico 13 offers a very robust set of Digital Marketing tools - those we would expect with any enterprise-class system: Strong authoring and page creation capabilities, A/B testing, personalization, a streamlined integration bus, and advanced workflows and marketing automation. The thing that sets Xperience apart, though, is not the feature set - but rather, the simplicity and agility it offers in development. 

When you start the migration to Xperience 13, the system can be spun up quickly, but it is not a “lite” version by any stretch. Out of the box, you will begin working with a flexible content architecture that can manage whatever content model you throw at it. The real difference, though, is in the ongoing development support and maintenance. Kentico’s architecture elegantly focuses on an immensely strong backbone, which allows developers to easily create new features and attach memorable experiences. And that says a lot - happy developers make for fast developers. 

Part of this power and stability is credited to Kentico being one of the first CMS platforms to fully embrace the .NET Core development environment, which offers nearly limitless flexibility to help support true omnichannel marketing strategies on the front end. Soon the entire system will be fully powered from front to back with .NET Core. 

With the tools Xperience 13 offers, you can begin managing your marketing with a true content hub almost immediately. To paint a picture - consider a franchise organization. They can take advantage of this kind of modern content management to fully protect and enhance common branding. With a centralized repository containing all their marketing assets for all locations, they can maintain consistent and minute-to-minute messaging across multiple locations, out of the box. As a microcosm of the wide world, this is a perfect example of the power and flexibility of Kentico Xperience 13.

With all that Kentico’s Xperience 13 platform offers, it may seem a big step to move forward - and as we’ve discussed in earlier articles, it certainly can be. And yet, while the intent is to bring the world of true digital experience management to your business, it does not have to be a major transformation all at once. 

Strategically, it is a tremendous opportunity to rethink your entire content and digital marketing architecture and to rebuild every level of your content modeling to take full advantage of it. But the process can also be successful with baby steps. Start with your website, and then see where the process takes you. As you build your future in content management, you will inevitably learn more, see more, and do more. And Kentico Xperience is built for just this type of evolution.