Partner Focus: discover Ibexa’s solutions

We continue to present the Kaliop blog section: “Partner Focus” with our partner Ibexa, a digital experience platform dedicated to B2B. Discover the exclusive interview delivered by Michaël Colpin, Sales Director of Ibexa France. He introduces us to the company and presents the company’s solutions, projects and ambitions.

Originally recognized for its expertise around content and its open source CMS, Ibexa, formerly eZ, has evolved a lot in recent years. Can you tell us about this transformation?

Since the launch of eZ Publish in 2003, Ibexa has always been at the forefront of content management. Over the years we evolved the solution, first in 2015 to eZ Platform which dropped all legacy code from the software and transitioned to a completely new code base built on the Symfony Full Stack Framework. The content repository core and user interface were rewritten but still retained the same concepts as the previous eZ Publish software as well as adding more functionality.

Then in 2020, the product properly evolved into a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) with greater capabilities, first extending them with B2B Commerce capabilities by acquiring e-commerce software which had been developed on top of eZ Platform and Symfony. The company rebranded in April 2020 to Ibexa, heralding its repositioning as a leading B2B Digital Experience Platform vendor. That same year, Ibexa experienced a seismic shift in the type and size of customers it serves while adopting a 100 percent channel-driven sales model. During the same Spring, the release of eZ Platform v3 incorporating content management, site building, e-commerce, personalization, and accelerated development capabilities completed the transition of the company’s software to the DXP space.

With the last version – Ibexa DXP 4 – we have fully overhauled the user interface of the DXP and introduced the Product Catalog, a powerful DXP-native PIM component that will help our customers manage a vast number of products distributed via various online sales channels. We have hardened our position as the only DXP dedicated to B2B enableing B2B organizations to transform sales strategies and build frictionless buying experiences in a sustainable, cost-effective and fast manner.

The next version, due for release in September 2021 introduces Ibexa, our new customer data platform. A new component within our DXP platform capable of unifying, segmenting, and refining customer data, enhancing unique and more personalized experiences across marketing, e-commerce, and customer service.

In addition, we are introducing our Corporate Accounts feature. A new way to organize and manage users is by assigning specific roles and limitations for various commerce or business entities and customizing their experience according to their needs and specifications.

The Digital Experience Platform, Ibexa DXP, offers its customers a whole range of complementary solutions to meet their digital transformation challenges. Can you describe the different modules that make it up?

Ibexa DXP is designed for change, built for growth. By that we mean that the modular DXP that consists of three distinct products – Ibexa Content, Ibexa Experience and Ibexa Commerce – can be each used as a standalone tool or combined for enhanced performance and a more comprehensive digital experience.

Fig.1. Ibexa DXP: comprising Content, Experience, Commerce with Personalization, PIM

• Ibexa Content is an intuitive and comprehensive Content Management System (CMS) that enables you to deliver personalized content quickly and efficiently to your customers via a wide range of channels. From simplifying collaboration to streamlining content distribution, Ibexa Content makes working across multiple channels, markets, and languages easy, effective, and affordable.
• Ibexa Experience is digital experience software that puts your clients at the center of everything you do. It makes creating the various touchpoints your customers have with your brand easier than ever, enabling you to guide your clients through your critical business processes. Noteworthy features include:
  – Site Factory allowing you to create campaigns quickly, build and manage microsites, sub-domains, and multiple brand sites, including Single Page Applications (SPA).
  – Page Builder allowing content authors to create landing pages using drag and drop with a library of default blocks to deploy
  –  Form Builder allowing for the creation of simple or advanced forms.
• Ibexa Commerce provides businesses with a unified and streamlined platform from which you can customize all aspects of the e-commerce experience. By integrating content, personalization, and commerce functionality into a single, dedicated interface, Ibexa Commerce helps you manage every moment of the customer journey.
• Ibexa DXP can address most requirements through extensibility and customization without code hacking. This makes it usually a strong fit with project cases showing advanced/ complex requirements and makes the platform a particularly good fit for complex applications like B2B e-Commerce use cases with integration with ERP/ CRM systems and asynchronous connectivity in real-time.
• In addition, you can host Ibexa DXP either on premise or in the cloud. Ibexa Cloud is an end-to-end cloud hosting platform with streamlined back-end infrastructure and services for your Ibexa DXP implementation which enables your development team to deliver more efficient development-to-production processes. Ibexa Cloud manages the infrastructure stack from initial coding to deploying and running the application. Customers have the choice of multi- or single-tenant deployment and can specify the region in which they want their data to be stored.
• Another optional add-in is Ibexa Personalization which can be used with any of the three main products. Our personalization solution empowers you to deliver truly unique customer experiences, it provides your business with all the tools required to produce and distribute customized content and product recommendations.
• Ibexa DXP’s integrated PIM – Product Catalog – is designed to further improve your ability to deliver world-class customer experiences across all digital channels as it gives you greater control over the way you store, structure, and share product information. Its headless features are decoupled from any specific channel. This means you can expose products (and all their associated details, documents, and information) to any, and all, digital (and physical, such as web to print) channels. Effectively, it liberates your product catalog from the restrictions that traditional means of publication impose on it. Your business is now free to display and sell your products through any digital sales point be it an app, a kiosk, IoT device or other.

How does Ibexa DXP stand out from other DXP solutions to create effective customer experiences?

We have termed Ibexa as the B2B Game Changer. We know, that in B2B, companies have been slower to adopt digital initiatives, due to a host of reasons not least the sheer complexity of their businesses, the many stakeholders involved in the selling cycle and just not being ready.

In many cases the recent pandemic forced their hands, as to do nothing at all would have ensured their certain demise. We have found that what has been appreciated by companies adopting Ibexa DXP is a phased approach. We help B2B businesses to transform realistically, step by step. For some, this gradual revolution may never ultimately be about full-blown e-commerce, although that option will always be there if the business has reached a certain level of digital maturity.

Fig.2 Ibexa Digital Experience Platform: scalable and extensible

Agility and scalability are important requirements to which Ibexa is able to respond to too. Easy to scale and highly customizable, our modular technology allows companies to focus on the right next steps in their digital roadmap and develop at a pace that suits their business needs. It helps them to accelerate their time to market while limiting risk and investment.

B2B customers’ behavior is changing rapidly – they demand better and more frequent digital interactions. But to meet those expectations businesses need the technology and processes to transform your sales set-up and create superior customer experiences across all channels.

Via our unique network of partners, our Digital Experience Platform accelerates this critical business transformation. Combining content management, personalization and e-commerce and PIM in an all-in-one, modular solution, Ibexa DXP is designed to change with your needs and is built to fuel your growth.

Ibexa recently was acquired by QNTM. Will this new partner accelerate the product roadmap? Can we expect any changes in strategy?

With QNTM Group (which is fully owned by Altor Fund V; Altor is one of Scandinavia’s largest private equity firms), Ibexa gets a very strong investor and the backing to support our ambitions. At the time of the acquisition in November 2021, we had seen three years of tremendous growth and seen the product go through quite an evolution which we continue to build on. QNTM’s acquisition will boost our development speed and roadmap even further.

By joining QNTM’s ecosystem of companies and reach the aim of building the leading European ecosystem for Digital Experience, we are united by a common vision of helping our clients master the digital transformation of their sales and marketing processes. We see synergies with other companies in the ecosystem and indeed are actively collaborating with Raptor Services on the CDP capability due to release this Autumn. It is a new module that will centralize customer data to drive personalization, content tailoring and more effective marketing campaigns.

Our network of highly competent, customer-centric partners has been an instrumental component of Ibexa’s success and growth. Growing with partners is very much in line with QNTM’s ecosystem thinking as well. Ibexa’s go-to-market model is run exclusively with our partners and will continue as before, collaborating closely to meet the needs of our customers and make an impact in our markets. We are growing the partner base and making an even stronger ecosystem.

We have regular release cycles of the product and have a strong roadmap for the future – our vision is to strengthen our position as the B2B game changer. This year we are enabling the B2B digital selling shift by bringing together customer and product data together on one platform. In 2023 there will be greater automation and interoperability introduced, further serving complex B2B sales processes. Looking further out, into 2024 we looked beyond the DXP to sales engagement, e-procurement and Digital Sales Rooms

What can we wish for you in the future?

That we stay firmly on our growth trajectory, we are looking to double the size of our company over the next three years and see successful the successful opening of local operations in Benelux and UK.