WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

Curious to know what technologies are used on your competitor’s website?

As soon as the power turns on, hackers can gain an advantage.

This post will discuss the different architectures that have been prominent in previous years and how they’ve influenced the architecture of today. 

This chart shows the cloud infrastructure services market worldwide from Q1 2016 to Q2 2019.

In mature markets like Web Content Management, there is almost always a single proprietary leader and a single Open Source leader. There is Oracle and MongoDB. Splunk and Elastic. VMWare and Docker. Gitlab and Github. That is why I believe that next year it will be Acquia and Adobe at the very top of the WCM Magic Quadrant. Sitecore and Episerver will continue to fight for third place among companies who prefer a Microsoft-centric approach. I was not surprised to see Sitecore move down this year as they work to overcome technical product debt and cloud transition, leading to strange decisions like acquiring a services company.

One of the many challenges with building or refreshing a website is the selection of a Content Management System (CMS). Despite our best efforts the CMS can often be a source of difficulty in a project, but there are alternatives. Read about the approach we took on www.thoughtworks.com to developing functionality to support content management in an incremental fashion.

CONCLUSION

This article has detailed an incremental approach to developing a content managed web application, in contrast to the adoption of a CMS at the outset. While there are the costs associated with developing functionality which you could get “off the shelf,” these are offset by some of the advantage of this approach – flexibility, simplicity, control, obviating the need to learn a bespoke framework and above all being able to move in small steps from a simple static web site to a managed one.

• Content creation functions, such as templating, workflow and change management
• Repositories that organize and provide metadata about content
• Library services, such as check-in/check-out, version control and security
• Website management features, such as layout, menus and navigation
• Content deployment functions
• Personalization and analytics capabilities
• The ability to integrate well, via APIs, with adjacent technologies such as digital commerce platforms, social media platforms, marketing automation platforms and broader digital experience platforms (DXPs)
• Hybrid (traditional and headless) and pure headless capabilities for API-driven omnichannel content delivery

We applied the editing-publishing separation
pattern in building a two-stack CMS to support a global
readership while supporting complex coordination of legacy
editing tools. 

When content volume is low and only few trained people are responsible for content creation and maintenance, any added complexity of a two stack CMS isn't worthwhile. Such complexity makes it harder for content creators to learn how to use it and adds significant effort in system maintenance. (Although this may be mitigated by tools that are designed to work in this style.)

Gartner has recently started talking about a new integration technology called the “event broker”.  As you may have guessed from the name ;), it’s a category of brokers and streaming technologies that move and govern events across applications, devices and processes.

Want to learn more? Check out this video. It explains what an event broker is, how they are categorized and why you might need one.

Here are all the slides, plus analysis from Recode.

Fortune summary: tech firms are focusing on privacy; more people are using images to communicate; Twitter and Amazon are making small in-roads into the Facebook-Google ad duopoly; 51% of the world's population is now online.

LUMA is the leading investment bank focused on digital media and marketing. We provide strategic advice, proven M&A expertise, and extensive industry knowledge to optimize outcomes for our clients.

Changes in Google mean changes to rankings, right? Not exactly. Here we will cover the biggest SEO trends that don’t affect your rankings.

There are a number of approaches to measurement, depending on the important metrics for your business. Google’s Jeremy Freedman walks you through the steps toward better attribution.

In our 26-criterion evaluation of web content management system (web CMS) providers, we identified the 15 most significant ones — Acquia, Adobe, Amplience, Automattic, BloomReach, Contentful, CoreMedia, Crownpeak, Episerver, Kentico Software, Magnolia, OpenText, Progress, SDL, and Sitecore — and researched, analyzed, and scored them. This report shows how each provider measures up and helps digital experience (DX) and strategy professionals make the right choice.

This chart shows a distribution of worldwide downstream traffic, by web application in 2018.

The vendor's focus on core R&D and channel-based selling proved a winning business strategy, but I think Sitecore has hit a ceiling in recent years.

"When you have rising monetization, rising growth and rising data collection, it drives a lot of regulatory scrutiny whether it’s related to data privacy, competition or safety in content."

How do you know if you need Digital Asset Management technology in your enterprise? Do any of these challenges resonate with you?

In an evermore connected world, large-scale cyberattacks and online threats to businesses are rising exponentially. The Cyber-Risk & Resilience special report, published in The Sunday Times, features insights into the impact cybercriminals can inflict on organisations and individuals. From chatbots spreading fake news, risks concerning personal data, biometrics and fraud, as well as tackling phishing emails, the potential dangers are unprecedented. Also included is an infographic on why hackers hack and an article on the top five ways quantum computing will change cybersecurity for good.

The dot-com boom and bust is often compared to the Gold Rush. But Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos says its more like the early days of the electric industry.

Machine Learning Research Should Be Clear, Dynamic and Vivid.
Distill Is Here to Help. The web is a powerful medium to share new ways of thinking. Over the last few years we’ve seen many imaginative examples of such work. But traditional academic publishing remains focused on the PDF, which prevents this sort of communication.

A narrative about a recent assessment I did to a peer’s website which ended up in a potentially very impactful situation.

Overall we found out that HTTPS interceptions are more prevalent than expected (4% - 10%) and pose serious security risks as they downgrade the encryption used to secure web communications. Furthermore, the HTTPS implementations used for interception do not have the same automatic update mechanisms that browsers do, making fixes less likely to be rolled out. Intercepting middleboxes have also contributed to the delayed release of TLS 1.3 in browsers. It is our hope that raising awareness around this issue will help software vendors that rely on interception to realize the risks of this practice.