What everyone is missing about the 2020 Gartner DXP report

By now you have heard the news that Acquia is now a leader in Gartner’s Digital Experience Platform (DXP) magic quadrant. 

Acquia is now in in the elite territory of market leaders:
 

Compared to 2019 Acquia has made MAJOR progress. 

We can’t say we are surprised by this news, as we called it that Acquia’s Open DXP approach was a winning strategy last year. We aren’t above patting ourselves on the back.

But you need to look deeper for the larger story at play here. Consider:

• Gartner also announced that they will be discontinuing the Web Content Management System Magic Quadrant. If you are a platform for managing content and engaging site visitors the DXP Quadrant is now the only game in town. Platforms like WordPress are now even further behind in the enterprise playing field.
   
• Liferay, Salesforce, Bloomreach, and Episerver all lost considerable ground in 2020. It is quite telling that their momentum is in the wrong direction.
   
• Gartner is on to Sitecore’s crisis, long the stuff of professional murmur in 2019: While still a leader, Sitecore lost position in 2020 compared to 2019.
   
• Adobe did not strengthen their position in 2020.
   
• The only leader platform with forward momentum was Acquia.

What does this all demonstrate? Sitecore continues to struggle, Adobe’s lead position continues to weaken, and Acquia continues to strengthen. In 2021 we are likely to see Acquia displace Sitecore and nip at the heels of Adobe.

Conventional wisdom has it wrong: Demographics isn’t destiny, market momentum is. And the market is quickly circling the wagons around two solutions: Adobe and Acquia.