What Enterprises Need from DXPs in 2025: Beyond Vendor Agendas

Karim Marucchi:
Hi, I’m Karim Marucchi, CEO of Crowd Favorite and today I’m really excited to have a conversation with Dan Drapeau. He is from DXP Catalyst and he is one of the leading experts on talking about what’s going on with the DXP space and the different content management systems that are out there. Dan, thank you for having this conversation with us. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and DXP Catalyst?

Dan Drapeau:
Absolutely. Sure. So you know I’m the founder and Managing Director of DXP Catalyst Consulting. It’s a consulting firm I launched in late 2023, so about a year and a half ago or so. What I do is I provide DXP or Digital Experience Platform Advisory services, helping companies ranging from higher ed institutes to private equity backed consumer brands to upper mid market and small enterprise, helping them make informed strategic decisions about the right technology. And I take a vendor neutral approach to everything I do. My work really focuses on helping clients solve problems like CMS fragmentation, platform consolidation, solving for customer data and content silos, and also modernizing platform and platform architecture. At the core, my approach is really about optimizing Martech ecosystems and helping clients select the right technologies.

Karim Marucchi:
Awesome. I’m curious, when you mentioned CMS fragmentation, what’s that about? How does that happen within your customers purview?

Dan Drapeau:
I see it most often in higher ed and public sector, but it really happens in all industries. It’s a scenario that occurs where, let’s say in higher ed an institution has a number of content management systems that they’re using. These are often vast decentralized networks of websites. There could be hundreds of domains. So oftentimes a Business school or a med school might just have their own content management system and they’re on their own siloed platforms. So it’s a problem of if the company or institution wants like a unified platform strategy, what do they do? How do they deal with having six plus CMS solutions? And you see it in public sector as well. And like CPG brands, you know, when you think about them and they’re growing via acquisition, each brand might be on their own content management system. So it creates a big problem over time.

Karim Marucchi:
I see. And then I guess on the other side of that are organizations that get stuck into these giant monolithic content management systems or DXPs.

Dan Drapeau:
Yeah, so that really has to do with like kind of modernizing some of these companies that are on these antiquated monolithic solutions and getting them to something more modern. That doesn’t necessarily mean composable architecture, but you know, we’ll be getting into that specific topic a little bit more. But getting them away from vendor in an ecosystem where everything in the kitchen sink is included in one single solution.

Karim Marucchi:
Well, as you know, at CRUD favorite, we try to really focus down on some of the open source, keeping that as the hub. But I can see where you can even use a closed source solution sort of as a hub of a composable system and then decide you want to use different aspects of different platforms.

Dan Drapeau:
Of course I know your agency focuses really on Open Source and WordPress specifically. So you know, Acquia has kind of built that open source solution in Drupal. Why haven’t we seen like a similar movement around WordPress? You know, there’s like WordPress isn’t featured of course in the Gardener DXP. So like why haven’t we seen something similar to like what Acquia is doing but with WordPress?

Karim Marucchi:
Well, we actually are starting to see it. And so my agency was founded on actually the premise of scaling WordPress for the enterprise. And since then we’ve also included other technologies like Laravel and Python and all the other wonderful open source technologies that are out there. But we really do have a special pedigree in really being able to scale WordPress. And for many years WordPress was seen as just a publishing system, whether it’s blog or for publishers only. It was really how can we just scale content management? And you might have noticed over the last five or ten years automatically has been acquiring companies like Parsley for the analytics and they’re acquiring other systems to add on to. I don’t know if I’d call it a Walled garden. But I know that when you have WordPress hosting on Automattic they’re really they really heavy on making sure that you know about parsley and you can use parsley as your analytics. I think the future is more and more hosts whether they’re enterprise or direct to consumer, direct to small business are doing that Elementor has type of hosting if you go to even the hosting of SiteGround when you install WordPress it says here’s some add ons that’ll help you turn it into a more robust system and their secondary products I think that is the future is especially in the enterprise space. You’re going to see the folks who have these enterprise hosting companies make more and more available tools wise to you. My direction for my clients will be make sure you’re not getting locked in, make sure they’re not turning it into a walled garden that you can use their system out of convenience if it’s the best solution for you, but you also can shift away and use something else because that’s the whole point of open source. Right? Right. Also in Gartner’s report this year was mention of the evolution of Headless and mentions of Contentful and Content Stack. What are your thoughts around how headless CMS vendors are shifting towards DPX?

Dan Drapeau:
Yeah, it was interesting. You know content. There’s a million, you know, headless pure play like headless solutions out there now. Contentful and Content Stack were certainly. There’s certainly the two big ones that are in the space that have been around for a long time. I always kind of thought they would remain just as headless CMS solutions and not convert into more composable suites. It’s been interesting over the last few months to kind of see what they’ve done in the market. I believe it was like last August or so Contentful acquired nine tailed for personalization. So I’m not sure the status of that if that’s fully integrated into their product ecosystem yet. And then Content Stack already had their own native personalization solutions but then they acquired Lytics, CDP and yeah, both were kind of listed in the Gardener Magic quadrant. So I feel like it’s a little bit premature. You know, they’re making the right acquisitions and they’re gradually going to become what I would consider to be like true DXPs. But you know, when you’re looking at a DXP as an ecosystem of capabilities, just because you have a content management system and a personalization or CDP solution doesn’t really make you. I think you need to be able to support additional tools and offerings and not just have a connector for every single thing.

Karim Marucchi:
So what kind of misconceptions do you see about open source platforms at the enterprise level?

Dan Drapeau:
Quite a few of them. Some of these topics are recurring themes over the years. The common misconceptions I see are that, you know, it’s insecure, it’s free, it’s not enterprise ready, it’s only about cost savings, it lacks support, it can lead to fragmentation. So yeah, I think what’s driving these kind of misconceptions is like just legacy perceptions and outdated narratives about, you know, open source. So I think there’s really just a lack of awareness and education. And also marketing by proprietary vendors I don’t think helps open source either. There’s some misalignment with enterprise culture and some companies that have been on proprietary platforms, there’s some resistance to change. I don’t think they would openly approach open source. So that tends to be what I see. I think more of the responsibility is going to fall on consultants and agencies for working with these organizations.

Karim Marucchi:
It’s interesting you say that because one of the things that really elevated open source and WordPress specifically to our customers was when platforms like WP Engine really started offering enterprise level support on the platform and partnering with agencies like ours saying there’s an enterprise that’s looking for next level support. Let’s mimic the sort of the IBM Red Hat experience of the late 90s and early 2000s in making sure that open source doesn’t have this hole. We’ve seen successful examples with some of the largest Fortune 50 clients in the world who have used Crowd Favorite and WP Engine and other vendors to really be able to lock in that. What’s going to be interesting to me is can open source platform hosts and open source agencies effectively communicate the opportunity to clients that you can create a non walled garden, that you can truly create a composable area for enterprise success with open source DXPs. That’s going to be the challenge of the future, I think.

Dan Drapeau:
What are some like real world examples of businesses avoiding vendor lock in that you’ve seen?

Karim Marucchi:
So on the enterprise side, I can think of the last 10 and 15 years of very difficult migrations from monolithic closed systems that almost felt like they were engineering it in a way that it was almost impossible to get the data out of those systems from one system to the other, let alone anything else. I, I think the advantage of using open source as a hub in a DXP is that you control the format of the data, you control how the data is used. And really migrating even from one open source platform as a hub to another is always much more simple than trying to get from one of these closed systems to another. And that’s where I feel these systems have an opportunity to capture the enterprise business. In saying we would welcome working with open source as the hub of the content management system and let us add our special features and ingredients and modules to your open source hub. There’s a real opportunity out there, but I don’t know if the DXP vendors are going to see that.

Dan Drapeau:
I agree with that.

Karim Marucchi:
So, Dan, let’s talk about the future of DXPs.

Dan Drapeau:
Sure.

Karim Marucchi:
If I’m an enterprise buyer, what am I looking to focus on moving forward?

Dan Drapeau:
I mean, I think taking aside composability and a lot of the stuff we talked about, AI certainly has a pretty big role, you know, here in content and customer experiences. So, you know, I think a lot of the AI capabilities that we see today, like content tagging, for example, are assistive and not autonomous. I do think it might be a little bit of hype when it comes to like true orchestration of content and customer experience. That said, I think for certain vendors are on the right track. We’ll see at some point if like AI can really dynamically orchestrate experiences across channels and automate decision making and optimize user journeys in real time. I’m really interested in seeing the development of AI agents within DXPs. You know, I think Salesforce, Adobe and Optimizely are kind of taking the lead charge on that so far. So I think that’ll be kind of interesting to pay attention to.

Karim Marucchi:
How are they doing it differently?

Dan Drapeau:
I really like Optimizely’s approach. They don’t necessarily just visualize it as here’s a bunch of, you know, gen AI or machine learning driven AI capabilities. It’s like they picture it to their customers along a marketer’s journey. So, you know, the journey from ideation to creating content to adding assets to optimizing it. They kind of plug in some of like their AI capabilities into each of those areas and then they have Opal, which is like their AI agent that sits on top of it and works throughout the entire ecosystem, not just like content management by everything. So that’s kind of what I’m seeing there.

Karim Marucchi:
Okay, so if we’re thinking about enterprise DXP strategies for 2025, give me your top three priorities. If an enterprise is evaluating a DXP.

Dan Drapeau:
Scalability and cloud native capabilities Vendor support and the ecosystem and composability and modularity. There’s a few others I’d want to list. It’s kind of hard to really.

Karim Marucchi:
I was just asking for the top three just to see which ones you prioritized. I’m glad to see composability was there, but okay. What are some of the other ones? Out of curiosity?

Dan Drapeau:
AI driven personalization, the ability to integrate with like emerging technology, let’s see, data privacy and compliance analytics for decision making.

Karim Marucchi:
That point you made about quite literally making sure that they can keep up with innovation. Because I think that’s where open source has a real leg up over some of these other platforms. Because you can keep an agnostic hub and then use best of breed. As we were saying earlier with some of the conversations you’re observing with Squiz and the conversations I’m having with Squiz around how to compare really bring some of their composable pieces back into open source. I think that is the future. If we can really look at hey, Optimizely is really good over here and Squiz is really good over there and you know, name other mat system is good with this other thing. How can we use the best of breed for making a truly composable orchestration layer for our customers experiences? Right?

Dan Drapeau:
Absolutely. I think there’s too many scenarios out there where it’s like just closed loop. So the more collaboration and openness to doing that is definitely the future in my opinion.

Karim Marucchi:
How do enterprises think about if they want to think about how to approach a DXP investment, what would you tell them the first steps are?

Dan Drapeau:
Well, I think in general you need to have like a well thought out strategy and ensure that your investment in technology is really aligning with your business objectives, your customer needs and already like existing organizational capabilities. It’s not just about platform capabilities, it’s about how it fits into the company’s vision. You know, what’s the roadmap for success? I think vendor selection is a big part of the strategy and the ability to also like measure success. You know, if you’re going to make this type of investment, what does that mean? Is it improved time to value? Does it mean you’re going to have increased engagement rates? I think those are all kind of factors.

Karim Marucchi:
So this has been a great conversation. But I’m curious, what are the key insights to watch for in 2025? What do we see coming down the road and what does DXP Catalyst think needs to come out of the vendor.

Dan Drapeau:
Field in DXPS I think in 2025 they’ll probably be like a reality check on composability. Based on everything we just discussed out of Gardner’s report, I think a reality check might be in order there for the majority of businesses. AI is continued shift to practical use cases, and I could see some consolidation and market shakeups a little bit here as we move forward, getting closer to 2026.

Karim Marucchi:
So Dan, before we wrap up, what are your thoughts around vendor agendas versus real business value for 2025?

Dan Drapeau:
Yeah, you know, at the end of the day, I think enterprises don’t adopt digital experience platforms because they want the latest composable architecture or other features that are marketed. They adopt them to solve real business challenges. So I think too often vendor agendas really drive the conversation and vendors position their products as the future. Whether it’s composability, AI or mock capabilities, it’s not always about considering what the businesses actually need. So the first question like enterprises should ask is like is this composable? It’s Morgo. Will this help us deliver better experiences, streamline our operations, and drive measurable outcomes?

Karim Marucchi:
Awesome. Great answer. Thank you again for this great conversation around the 2025 Gartner DXP Magic Quadrant. I’d like to invite everybody to go to DXB Catalyst and subscribe to Dan’s newsletter and follow up with Crowd Favorite on our website for more insights. We look forward to continuing the conversation online. Please feel free to get a hold of either one of us with any questions. Dan, thank you.