Technology Record - Issue 22: Autumn 2021

107 I’ve been working with our product for 13 years, both as a service partner and now a member of the product team, and it never fails to impress me with its underlying elegance. Content in Content Cloud is stored andmanipulated as pure data.The only reason content objects appear as web pages or embeddable elements is because their design implementation and the resulting user interface (UI) makes them function that way. Our founda- tions are incredibly solid, presentation-agnostic and they don’t need to change. We are continuing to invest heavily in Content Cloud. By the end of this year, we’ll be releasing a fully compatible .NET 5 version, with some astonishing performance improvements. This has been a mammoth project for us, but one that positions the platform for an amazing future. Our next major release will be our GraphQL engine, which is now in beta. And we’re increas- ing the scale of our headless application pro- gramming interfaces (API) with a new content modelling API, more features in our content modelling UI, and a new content-focused editing experience that will effectively embed the same feature set that pure-play headless vendors offer inside a more fully featured CMS platform. Improving on this on top of our current prod- uct means no major re-implementation for our customers. Even as we continue to move forward into cloud delivery, our commitment is that cus- tomers will be able to move forward at a pace and path that makes sense for their business. Given the direction of the market, did we take a long look at Content Cloud and ask ourselves if we should tear it down and start over? Sure, we did. But we came to the simple conclusion that if we spent years re-doing all this, the underly- ing framework of the resulting product would probably be very similar to what we have today. We trust our system to adapt to whatever is next. Content Cloud is a strong, stable platform that our customers can count on now and long into the future. Deane Barker is senior director of content management strategy at Optimizely