The 2020 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Digital Experience Platforms: A Liferay Perspective

It’s with pleasure that we note Liferay received the highest scores among evaluated vendors for both B2B and B2E use cases in the 2020 Critical Capabilities for Digital Experience Platforms*.

What is the Gartner Critical Capabilities Report? 

Often overlooked in favour of their more recognizable cousins, the Gartner Magic Quadrants, Gartner Critical Capabilities reports serve an important role for technology buyers. According to Gartner, “a Critical Capabilities document is a comparative analysis that scores competing products or services against a set of critical differentiators identified by Gartner. It shows you which products or services are a best fit in various use cases to provide you actionable advice on which products/services you should add to your vendor shortlists for further evaluation.” In other words, a Magic Quadrant provides readers with an overall view of how vendors stack up in terms of their “completeness of vision” and “ability to execute” in a product category as a whole. Critical Capabilities, by contrast, zoom in on vendors’ capabilities with regards to specific use cases.

For Liferay and our customers one Critical Capabilities document stands out from all the others: the Critical Capabilities for Digital Experience Platforms. This report analyses the digital experience space across three primary use cases: business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B), and business-to-employee (B2E). We’re very proud that Liferay was awarded the highest scores among evaluated vendors in the latter two use cases. The news comes on top of Liferay having been positioned as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms for the tenth time**.

A Leader in B2B and B2E Use Cases 

While Liferay has been committed to helping customers deliver meaningful, engaging experiences to their partners and employees since our founding in 2004, our industry has changed dramatically. Among the most notable recent moves are the withdrawal of software behemoths IBM and Microsoft. As CMSWire Staff Reporter Dom Nicastro writes regarding the Magic Quadrant for DXPs, “IBM's removal was all but expected. It sold off much of its digital experience software in two waves: to HCL in 2018 and to Centerbridge last year.” HCL’s plans for the former WebSphere portfolio remain to be seen.

With Microsoft’s focus increasingly dominated by the company’s fight with Amazon and Google for market share in the cloud hosting market, it too has begun neglecting the portal and intranet space. Nothing epitomizes this more than the upcoming end-of-life (EOL) for SharePoint 2010 in October of this year. According to reporter David Roe, “SharePoint 2010 was one of the most successful editions that Microsoft ever released.” It’s EOL “means that there will be no more upgrades, no more security patches and 2010 will become less and less reliable posing a risk to any enterprise that continues to use it.” While enterprises are free to migrate to a new version of SharePoint or to SharePoint Online, this can be painful for organizations that have made significant investments in customising their SharePoint deployments.

By contrast, Liferay remains fully committed to serving B2B and B2E use cases and has continuously rolled out new features and functionality. To illustrate, Liferay offers:

• Complete control over branding with fully customisable themes, pages, layouts, and applications. Liferay DXP allows developers to create site themes that impact the look and feel of all pages and applications. Content pages in Liferay DXP allow marketers to use prebuilt fragments to customise their pages without coding and mirror a desired corporate look and feel.
• Extensive social and collaboration tools including blogs, wikis, message boards and forums, contacts, and calendars. All modules are seamlessly integrated, featuring tagging, ratings, common metadata, mentions, RSS capabilities, and social bookmarking.
• A robust and fine-grained permissioning model that makes it easy for administrators to delegate access to individual users or groups of users and to restrict access to sensitive data, regardless of access method.
• Support for federated SSO using SAML 2.0 or OpenID Connect and certification with popular SSO systems such as OpenAM, Siteminder, CAS, Shibboleth, Kerberos, and others. With Liferay DXP's extensible authentication pipeline, virtually any SSO configuration and vendor can be supported.

Furthermore, every feature we create revolves around providing greater integration and interoperability with other systems. Liferay DXP allows Liferay web services to be exposed in a number of formats including SOAP, JSON, XML, REST, and GraphQL. This long-standing focus on integration and interoperability, combined with our powerful features, are why we believe Gartner has scored us as the highest ranked offering for B2B and B2E use cases in the 2020 Critical Capabilities for Digital Experience Platforms.

B2B and B2E Use Case in Action

Learn how S&P 400 insurance company Genworth Financial used Liferay to deliver a new intranet with self-service functionality and a modern look and feel.

Learn how multinational technology company Hewlett Packard Enterprise used Liferay to get ahead of competitors with a single entry point for 170,000 global partners. 

* Gartner “Critical Capabilities for Digital Experience Platforms” by Irina Guseva, Gene Phifer, Mike Lowndes, 3 February 2020.

The Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms was formally called Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals (2010-2016).

**Gartner “Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms” by Irina Guseva, Gene Phifer, Mike Lowndes, 29 January 2020.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.