LONDON — It was an uncharacteristically sunny day in England’s capital, one of the seven stops on Kentico’s ongoing global roadshow.
Kentico CEO Petr Palas started off the day with an introduction to the benefits of headless CMS — the model adopted by the company via the recent release of Kentico Cloud.
'We’re Accelerating the Development of Kentico Cloud'
Petr Palas gave the packed room a look at Kentico Cloud’s UI, as well as its blogging, analytical and personalization features.
“You don’t need to rely on developers to create pages. We wanted to make sure marketers weren’t restricted,” Palas explained as he walked the crowd through a quick landing page deployment via drag-and-drop interface.
.@PetrPalas is demonstrating how a marketer might use @Kentico Cloud to blog and publish landing pages #KenticoRoadshow pic.twitter.com/mpFB0yyDhl
— CMSWire.com (@cmswire) May 16, 2017
"We are accelerating the development of Kentico Cloud this year,” he continued.
Palas also explained that asset management and personalized content recommendations were high on the priority list for the rest of the calendar year.
The First Glimpse of Kentico 11
Petr Palas then made way on the stage for Kentico’s director of product, Karol Jarkovsky.
We're now getting some insights into @Kentico 11, which will include a built-in widget-based email marketing feature #KenticoRoadshow pic.twitter.com/YBdGUVVwnw
— CMSWire.com (@cmswire) May 16, 2017
Jarkovsky used his time in front of the crowd to discuss the company's future plans, starting with a release date for Kentico 11 — Nov. 29, 2017.
To reiterate Kentico’s commitment to keep both Kentico Cloud and Kentico CMS running in tandem, Jarkovsky also mentioned users should expect Kentico 12 to arrive sometime in November 2018.
He then went on to detail the two key areas of focus Kentico has identified for Kentico 11: email marketing and enhanced campaign management.
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“There are over 200 billion emails sent every day, most of them with marketing messages,” Jarovsky said as he demonstrated the visual, widget-based email builder which is built into Kentico 11.
Along with features to match some of those provided by the likes of Mailchimp and ConstantContact, Kentico is hoping to differentiate its email marketing platform by its native integration with data already collected within the Kentico instance.
Finally, he moved on to the enhanced campaign management tool that will also come as part of the Kentico 11 package. The tool will help marketers drill down into their social referral traffic to not just see which channels are bringing traffic, but which particular social posts, too.
'Too Many Bells and Whistles'
After Palas and Jarkovsky's presentations, I sat down with Jarkovsky to further discuss the company's future.
"Too many platforms with too many bells and whistles to impress the customer, but eventually they find out they either don't need/ or can’t implement them. We’re trying to stay lean, to bring customers the most critical features that will actually get used."
On the subject of Kentico 11’s enhanced campaign management features, Jarkovsky explained, “a lot of other tools make you terminate existing campaigns in order to start a new ones. So if you learn from your data and want to make a tweak, many platforms force you [to delete your progress and start again]. With Kentico 11, data won’t be lost in this way, as campaigns will be continuously reconfigured, not restarted."
