High Score Labs News   •   April 27, 2020

These days, many organizations that we have seen and worked with can at times have large, expensive and hard to maintain CMS/DXPs that require large portions of their budget just to maintain. Some complaints that we have seen can be summed up as:

• Difficult to find the right talent to support
• Paying a large license fee every year, think 150k – 300k and then needing to pay an agency 100k – 300k just to develop one site
• Once its live, nothing seems to work as was advertised and requires constant support from either expensive agencies or expensive SMEs
• Many organizations have marketing teams that are experienced in using other tools for their marketing efforts that just work, but then are forced to use a system that is difficult to learn or requires more effort just to get a simple result vs what they already have experience with

With this in mind, what could be the solution? We feel strongly, that given the fact that a lot of budgets are getting cut, this is the time to consider Drupal and Acquia. We will go over the main reason why next.

What is Acquia?
Acquia is a set of tools that are designed to just work. Many of these tools are targeted at teams that would rather focus on more profitable aspects of their business than spending all their time and money on a ‘money pit’. What tools does Acquia offer? First and foremost, it is built as a series of add on services to Drupal, an opensource platform that has a very large and dedicated support for integration modules (think social, email, 3rd party software, etc), developer support and ease of ongoing maintenance. We will look at the costs and research to support this last in the article. Right now, lets look at the products that are offered.

Acquia cloud
This product offers many advantages. Scalable cost structure based on what you need to support your goals and the ability to scale as you grow. Ease of infrastructure setup, vendor support, upgrades, built in CDN and many other features, all for a fraction of the cost vs other options.

Acquia Sitefactory
Are you tired of every time that you need to create a new site, you need to engage an agency, spend a lot of money and more often than not, it has issues, delays, leading to increased cost? Have difficulties managing several sites? We have noticed that other DXPs and CMSs available often lead to such frustration. Often it is promised that once you get it setup, you don’t need developer support; however, the truth is often that instead of requiring 20% developer support of the system, you need 80% of the work to be done by a team of developers. Sitefactory resolves this issue. For example, you can have a design agency design several different site ‘templates’. When the need arises to create a new site, i.e., you are a pharmaceutical company that is advertising a new drug and need a single page site to run for 3 months in support, the marketing team can go into Sitefactory and after answering a few questions and selecting options, create the new site and start entering content, using all the tools that you already have.

Acquia Lift and Mautic
Some DXPs and CMSs sell on the idea that, although the license is very expensive, most of all the advanced features are already bundled in the license. One of the reasons why we like Acquia is that it allows you to gradually grow into your journey as an online powerhouse, adding new products only as needed and when you are ready. Lift is a tool that focuses on site optimization, personalization, campaigns and more. Out of the box, it just works with room to customize as needed. This is a very dependable and easy to use interface, as in our experience, marketing teams and business users do not want to waste large amounts of time with a complicated system that is prone to issues but instead focus on their online outreach efforts. With Mautic, email campaigns have never been easier. Another facet that we really like and are sure that you will like, is the fact that it supports out of the box integrations with top platforms, for example SalesForce.

Why us Acquia and Drupal?
Forrester did some research to identify the answer to this very question. The cost savings was clear from the report. Some of the cost advantages to your business are:

• Reduce the required number of agencies and developers required to support the system
• Choose the right licensing that fits your immediate needs and budget. From there, when you are ready to grow your business, you can add the other features. This saves budget up front and gives you room to grow
• Reduced learning curve on the marketing toolset since the interfaces are more ‘drag and drop’ and work out of the box. In addition, you have assistance from Acquia
• Time to market is greatly accelerated
• It is easier to find top talent in Drupal than some of the other more niche markets that you can leverage to get the project going and then teach your team how to support it
• Integrate with tools that you already use. If all you want is a CMS and then integrate that into, for example, SalesForce, you can and wont have to worry about being charged for tools that you will not use
• Be able to use existing Drupal modules that are mature (have been used in production environments by customers for years) or the option to leverage Acquia more fully

At High Score Labs, we have many years of experience working with Drupal and Acquia. As an Acquia partner, we can help you plan your move! Since we have years of experience using other platforms, our value to you is that we can help you make a move in the most efficient way possible. Why not request a free assessment and demo today!

Request a FREE assessment and demo today!