Technology Record - Issue 22: Autumn 2021

106 www. t e c h n o l o g y r e c o r d . c om C ontent management” is a misnomer, and it has been for years. It made sense back in the day when all we did was actually manage content. Decoupled systems meant that your content management system and your content delivery system were two different things. You managed content, then you kind of threw it over the wall to some rudi- mentary delivery framework. What’s the dividing line? It’s vague, but I’ve tended to split it at the publish button – anything you do to the ‘left’ of publish is management, and anything to the ‘right’ of publish is delivery. It’s fair to say that most of the recent changes in content management systems (CMS) have hap- pened in delivery. This is natural since we had to solve management challenges first. And manage- ment is less volatile than delivery. While man- agement is a process of refinement, evolution and adjustment; the delivery side is in constant upheaval – it keeps reinventing itself. This means that systems which are poorly architected on the management side will suffer when trying to adapt on the delivery side. Systems without a solid data management foundation find it hard to stay on the edge of the delivery curve. The level of delivery-side change magnifies architectural shortcomings, and sev- eral vendors have had to scrap their systems and write new ones. The most recent vendor to give in is Sitecore. In a recent video, it heavily implied it was abandon- ing its current CMS architecture in favour of a software-as-a-service approach, which would be based on its StyleLabs acquisition of 2018. The firm took the underlying object architecture of the StyleLabs digital asset management and are using that as its go-to CMS going forward. Effectively, Sitecore is walking away from the much-vaunted CMS it has been developing for over 20 years. From someone who has been in this industry for 20 years, that’s pretty wild to see. Let us state something for the record – Content Cloud is both Optimizely’s present and future. And the reason is simple: it doesn’t need to be scrapped and re-architected. Long live Content Cloud Optimizely is continuing to invest in the future of the Content Cloud CMS system, trusting its ability to adapt to whatever comes next DE ANE BAR K E R : OP T I M I Z E LY V I EWPO I NT “Content Cloud is a strong, stable platform that our customers can count on now and long into the future” “