Kentico Software has two full-fledged products that have just recently undergone rebranding—Kontent, a headless CMS, and Xperience, a digital experience platform. Together with the rebrand and visual facelift of each product, two respective divisions were created, each with its own strategy and executive team, that still cooperate closely. Kentico also announced the promotion of a new Managing Director, Bart Omlo, who joined the company in 2015. The organizational changes together with the formation of the senior managerial level bring about another novelty—Petr Palas, the founder and sole owner of Kentico has announced heading to a strategic level and devoting himself fully to his role of the CEO.
Kentico Kontent is a headless solution that gives organizations control over their entire content lifecycle in a single unified environment. Content is a critical part of every customer experience and many enterprise organizations still struggle with managing their content at scale. They’re limited by content silos and legacy technologies.
Kontent allows them to unify their content across the organization and deliver consistent experiences across channels. Flexible content models, collaboration, and workflow lead to faster content production, better consistency, and higher quality. Content is managed completely independently of the presentation, which frees developers to build with their favorite technologies while content teams can focus on producing high-quality content.
Petr Palas, the CEO of Kentico Software, explains the reason behind creating two product divisions, “To offer a headless CMS was a strategic decision we made as soon as in 2010. We had a well-established CMS/EMS solution on the market at that time, but we also knew that a cloud-based solution was the future. Within the company, we built a start-up in which I was personally involved, and we invested our own money in it. We experimented and made fully-functional pivots—Kentico+, Kentico Draft, Deliver, Engage, Compose—that laid the foundations to Kentico Cloud, now Kontent. The time when it was a start-up within the company is long gone though. We now have two full-fledged products and thus had to make this logical step forward.”
“We made the decision at the turn of the year and, a few months later, we had two parallel units running like clockwork shoulder to shoulder. Not having an investor helps here—we are more flexible and able to make our own decisions, based on what’s best for the product and, by extension, our clients. The changes are not driven or hindered by shareholders’ interests or maximizing profits,” said Bart Omlo, the Managing Director of Kontent and also former VP Global Sales.
Kentico Kontent, built from the ground up as a pure headless CMS, has grown rapidly in the last years, adding big-name references such as AC Milan, PPG, Anaplan, Kramp, Rewe Group, Trusted Choice, Vogue, and more to the growing list of enterprise organizations employing the software.
“We are witnessing a mindset shift in enterprise organizations—from focusing on the channels towards the actual content,” reveals Bart Omlo. “This shift is happening in every segment of the market—from financial departments through airlines, big car manufacturers, B2B supermarket chains, universities, you name it. What these companies have in common is that they see the headless CMS as a future-proof approach to setting up their digital landscape. They realize that if they want to move on in the future, they need more flexibility in their digital landscape. And Kontent fits the requirement for great content in an agile digital landscape perfectly.“
At this time, everything is in the cloud and facilitates people working remotely on content wherever they are in the world.
And with the SaaS model, it’s a great fit for purpose in the current situation when an increasing number of companies work in distributed teams anywhere in the world.
“One of our customers—the Oxford University that needed to present their research results regarding COVID-19 really fast.They couldn’t have done it without Kontent because, although they’d already had the data, it was Kontent that made it easy to grab it and publish it on a different channel,” said Bart Omlo. “ We also helped some organizations get in the market quickly at this difficult time.”
Kentico Kontent growth is exponential. The company confirms that its Monthly Recurring Revenue has doubled for several consecutive years. The same with the traction on website, social media and other digital channels. From the partner perspective, the product has around 100 active partners.
The growth is tangible in all the product aspects—be it the annual number of releases that amount to dozens in Kontent, or the establishment of the new strategic partnerships.
“We are the TOP headless CMS solution in the market. We couldn’t be more ready than now to conquer the market. I think that for Kontent it’s really important that we now really start capitalizing on the investments we made in the past, on all the hard work we put into our product, organization, our marketing.“ Bart Omlo concludes.
Kentico Software is an established global company with two award-winning content management products: Xperience, a full-featured DXP platform, and Kentico Kontent, Enterprise headless CMS. Kentico has customers in over 120 countries, its offices are located in six countries on four continents. Over the last 16 years, a community of 1,000+ partners has formed around Kentico.
Support, Consulting, and Customer Success teams operate from three independent locations: the US, Europe, and Australia. With over 250 employees and 20 support engineers in multiple geographies, they’re able to provide consistent quality of support 24/7. Gartner named Kentico a Challenger in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for WCM 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019. G2 named Kentico a Leader in the G2 Grid for WCM and Headless CMS, based on reviews by real, verified users.
