Episerver to acquire personalization firm Idio, extending digital experience focus

Enterprise content and commerce vendor Episerver saw 200 percent growth in the number of sites and applications it hosts in the last year, with over 4,000 domains now running their technology.

And the company has announced today it will acquire Idio, a content personalization and analytics platform. Idio's technology is used today by enterprise scale organizations, with a specialization in asset management, information services, and B2B technology firms.

Idio works as middleware and automatically indexes, analyses, and categorizes unstructured content data into a structured content hub, said Episerver chief product officer Justin Anovick.

“Episerver and Idio are a seamless fit both technically and culturally, and we are highly motivated to prove our combined value now and in years to come," he said in a statement. He added that Episerver customers will see value from the technology without any integration required.

Today's announcement aligns with the company's recently updated messaging, revealed around their Ascend 2019 conference, focused on delivering a customer-centric digital experience platform. That platform still begins with e-commerce and content management, but now includes a range of new and upcoming cloud services in areas including Idio's content personalization engine, solutions for marketing automation and customer service, a customer data platform, and other customer-centric AI for commerce.

The company has added over 160 new features to the product suite over forty-one weekly releases in 2019, said vice president of product management David Bowen.

Product priorities over the last year have included adding more process governance for content creation, the ability to bundle content changes, new shopping cart management tools to help customer service better work with customers, and new analytics delivered as embedded Microsoft Power BI dashboards that provide trend analysis, baseline data, and interaction data across channels. More content analytics are coming next, Bowen added.

Speaking at the Ascend event, director of product strategy for commerce Ed Kennedy explained that Episerver's analytics investments, including its own customer data platform (CDP) offering, are focused on improving a company's insight and decision making.

"As we look to the future of our roadmap, we want to see [our customers] all truly using that CDP to take action from those insights based on what customers are doing, and to develop your own predictive models about what customers will do next. That's a big focus of our investments," he said.