With Optimizely acquisition, Episerver goes all-in on A/B Testing

Episerver, a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms, has recently announced its acquisition of experimentation and A/B testing platform provider Optimizely. This combination promises more powerful content creation and optimization capabilities for both companies’ customers.

Optimizely, founded in 2009 by Dan Siroker and Pete Koomen, offers experimentation technologies such as A/B and multivariate testing, website personalization and feature toggle capabilities. It provides its services to over 900 customers, including eBay, GAP and the Wall Street Journal. It is reported to have raised more than $200 million in capital in the past, including a $50 million investment from Goldman Sachs in 2019.

As we’ve previously stated, A/B Testing and experimentation with content is essential to creating a personalized and engaging site. The combination of Episerver and Optimizely puts experimentation at the very core of the content management experience and offers tailored, easy-to-use experimentation suggestions intended for use by marketers and merchandisers.

According to Episerver, the combination creates a unique system of differentiation to:

• Inspire innovation: Running better experiments across both front-end layouts and back-end logic, with easy-to-use tailored recommendations, drives increased revenue, productivity and cost.
• Increase agility: Gaining real-time answers accelerates collaboration and creates more responsive customer experiences for improved lead generation and faster time to market.
• Improve outcomes: Measuring outcomes of different options allows digital teams to orchestrate unique digital experiences for each customer, at scale – driving transformation, customer engagement and brand differentiation.

As was the case with Episerver’s acquisition of Idio, now Episerver Content Recommendations, the integration of Optimizely greatly improves Episerver’s value proposition, especially for enterprise customers with large amounts of content on their sites.

“Winning in today’s digital world requires delivering the best and most personalized digital experiences,” said Jay Larson, CEO of Optimizely. “Episerver and Optimizely have a shared vision to optimize every customer touchpoint through the use of experimentation. Together, we will enable our customers to do more testing, in more places, with greater ease than ever before. We believe this combination will make experimentation a mainstream business best practice and an essential part of competing and winning customers in an online world. With the combination of creation and optimization, we look forward to building a new community of digital experience leaders.”

In the company’s press release, Episerver CEO Alex Atzberger refers to the acquisition as “the most significant transformation in [its] history – one that will set a new industry standard for digital experience platforms.”

You can read more about the acquisition here. To find out more about the capabilities of Episerver and Optimizely, contact us today.