A late 2024 field trip: 2 days at the Kentico Connection conference

In a confusing marketplace, who do buyers turn to in order to create better digital experiences? 

One of my key takeaways from two days at the Kentico Connection conference – held in Miami this month – is that they increasingly turn to their trusted digital agency.

Kentico, an established global CMS vendor from the Czech Republic, seems to have reached the same conclusion, deciding to focus its annual global Connections conference series exclusively on digital agencies. 

With about 70 participants this made for a smaller conference than when I last joined Kentico Connection in Denver and Prague way back in 2011. It was also a more intimate affair than some of the recent partner conferences I’ve been to among competing vendors. Still, the feedback I heard from the participants was an appreciation of quality over quantity as this setup allowed for more focused conversations on market trends, product roadmap discussions, licensing, and partner program improvements. 

Kentico CEO Dominik Pinter on stage during Kentico Partner Connection 2024

It seems strong market forces are pulling in different directions at the moment: AI and the continued expansion of the MarTech universe on the one side, while customers seek tool consolidation in a never-ending quest to do more with less. As an answer to this, Kentico is making three big bets:

• Investing heavily in the future of their Xperience by Kentico platform, which was initially released in 2022.
• An ambitious and innovative roadmap. More on that later.
• When it comes to their partner program, collaboration beats competition as a strategy for success (thanks to the incomparable Paul Skinner, author of Collaborative Advantage, for that quote). As a customer, is it better to partner with a digital platform where the experienced partners compete in a cut-throat, zero-sum game, or might it be to your advantage that partners have a sense of mutual trust and respect and even collaboration? My clear advice: it’s less risky for you as a customer when the partner community collaborates. 

Let’s examine what happened in Miami at Kentico Connection 2024 – and we’ll start at the beginning. 

It’s still about websites (and much more)

In his opening keynote, CEO Dominik Pinter looked far beyond the traditional tasks of a CMS to manage content and build a website. He covered how key market trends like AI and search are driving a change in both customer behavior and expectations across a set of digital channels. 

While talking about how customers want to consolidate their digital stack, he also mentioned how competing vendors are busy acquiring vendors, leaving customers and their agencies with overlapping and often poorly integrated solutions. Kentico is going another way – building out their suite on their own. 

As customers work with their digital agency to make decisions about how to:

• Build their website
• Meet regulatory requirements
• Offer a relevant experience and ultimately compose their own digital experience platform 
• Perhaps even consider whether – and when – to go headless

Kentico's answer is to offer its own composed suite, with everything you need from digital marketing to e-commerce. 

“Xperience by Kentico is ready for primetime now,” said Matthew McQueeny, an industry thought leader who also attended Connections last year. He continued:

“The product team understandably needed the time to reenvision the platform for this next leap to Xperience by Kentico, and they have done so in such a way that makes the solution a compelling choice for a wide gamut of customers from mid-market to enterprise and of varying digital maturities.”

A less talked about and less sexy aspect of any website is the constant need to modernize and keep the stack up to date. This also goes for existing Kentico customers, where those on older platforms have a 2025 migration project ahead of them. For those on Kentico 13, it’s an upgrade, but migration was indeed a major theme at Kentico Connections 2024 as some partners have their 2025 books filled with migration and upgrade projects. 

Whether moving from a previous version of Kentico (Kentico 13 is only supported until December 2026) or moving over from direct competitors like Sitecore, Sitefinity, or Umbraco - or perhaps eager to depart the current mess at WordPress – migrations are sizable projects that require careful planning from an experienced digital agency. 

Kentico VP of Product Debbie Tucek on stage during Kentico Partner Connection 2024

Besides the prospect of winning more work, I also noticed a sense of excitement when Kentico’s VP of Product Debbie Tucek went on stage to talk about the roadmap and introduce AIRA, their native Artificial Intelligence Recommendations and Assistance capability. 

What’s on the Kentico roadmap?

Debbie opened by reiterating the strong focus on digital agencies and Kentico partners – and listening to their input on how to best improve the product in order to make them successful. 

Showing the progress made in Xperience by Kentico (also referred to as XbyK) in just the past 12 months, with an average of five deliverables each month, clearly illustrated how Kentico has picked up the pace when it comes to growing and innovating its product. 

A topic that’s only growing in importance is security. Debbie showed a snapshot from the CVE Security Vulnerability Database, where Kentico was clearly doing much better than Umbraco, Drupal, WordPress, and Adobe Experience Manager. 

A snapshot of CVE security vulnerabilities comparing leading vendors

Debbie also discussed the wider ecosystem, which is required for the majority of customer projects. Be it Salesforce, Zapier, Azure, or Intercom, she highlighted how Kentico offers tried-and-tested integrations for these and more. 

Combining slides with a live demo, Debbie and her team then turned to AIRA, the AI-enabled digital coworker, as Kentico calls it. Intended to help customers become better at digital marketing, it offers several features, from automating time-consuming workflows to automatically tagging content and analyzing customer journeys to identify drop-offs. 

From an analyst perspective, it was refreshing to see an AI-powered feature that seemed easy to get value from. I’ll be listening closely to partners and customers at upcoming meetings to hear about their experience with AIRA.

An overview of Kentico's AIRA service across the XbyK and AI ecosystem

As part of the live demo, we saw how AIRA Unified brings XbyK to Messenger. In other words, it provides a chatbot-like way to communicate with XbyK inside Messenger, e.g., for marketers and editors to interact with XbyK to answer questions such as: How many articles need approval? How is my email campaign performing? Is that new touch point I added having an impact?

We also saw the industry’s legendary share from Word to XbyK, a true evergreen demo for two decades, which still aims to address the fact that most content doesn't start in the CMS but rather is born in Word. The idea that Debbie pushed is to use AIRA to ingest from a range of business applications where content is created.

Kentico didn’t just do all the talking, they also let several partners share their experiences on the program. 

Listening to the Kentico partners

Kentico Connections offered both a Business and Technical track, and I stayed in the Business track throughout. First up was Becki Dilworth, Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer at BlueModus, an agency that has over 10 years of experience working with Kentico. 

Becki shared how they help customers select a CMS and how in their view, Kentico stacks up very well against the usual competition of Sitecore, Sitefinity, and Umbraco. It’s always interesting to see how agencies evaluate vendors and among the key evaluation criteria at BlueModus were:

• Deployment
• Forms
• Personalization
• A/B Testing
• Email (transactional/promotional)
• Multi-lingual
• Microsites
• Completeness of the next version

That final bullet, where Sitecore and Kentico both scored top grades, is particularly interesting, as customers don’t want to start on an outdated platform before they launch their project. Becki also openly shared how BlueModus is helping customers upgrade to XbyK and talking to them about when to best plan it as part of their digital initiatives. 

Next up was Wes McChristian, who leads the Kentico practice at Americaneagle.com. He talked about the power of planning, which may initially sound like another best practice session that could have been held five, 10, or 15 years ago. To my delight, he brought in the bestselling 2023 book, How Big Things Gets Done, and shared openly how it had changed the way he thinks about digital projects and what it takes to make them work. His advice: you need to slow down to speed up. During his presentation, he shared this poignant quote from the book:

“Projects don't go wrong, they start wrong.”

Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner – How Big Things Get Done

Finally, on day one, Mike Wills, VP Technology at BlueModus, shared what they had learned from working with XbyK since the initial release. An honest and open session that was clearly received well by other digital agencies – also a kind of valuable experience-sharing session I’ve rarely seen at other vendor partner events. 

Day two was mostly Kentico sharing important updates to their partners, including on licensing, sales certification, marketing activities and plans, and Debbie Tucek also dived further into the roadmap. 

What’s next?

A big part of any vendor event is nurturing its community, and this year's Connection in Miami delivered on that. Along with the high-quality business and technology-focused conversations, the conference offered lively socializing – and even a delightful morning run along the palm-tree-lined streets of South Florida. It's these human attributes that help make in-person events like this more immersive, productive, and invaluable. I hope to experience Kentico's spirit of “connections” well into the future.

Kentico Partner Connection attendees during the event's morning run in Miami

While Kentico doesn’t command the same marketing power as say Sitecore or Optimizely (which is holding its annual Opticon conference as these lines are written), Kentico Connections 2024 demonstrated that they do continue to have a viable footprint in North America, and the healthy mix of new and existing partners in different sizes also documents a solid flow of new customers on the platform.

The topic of accessibility might not be the sexiest one, but it is relevant and about more than just compliance. It’s about trust as well – and at least this analyst would have liked to see more coverage of this timely topic. The same is true of sustainability, which seems top of mind among European platforms. North American partners might not be driving this agenda, but that doesn’t mean that Kentico should stay on the sidelines, as customers are actively looking for digital solutions to meet both new legislation – e.g. “anti-greenwashing” rules – and to reduce their digital carbon footprint

Migrations and upgrades are clearly what’s next for many in the Kentico ecosystem in 2025. The end-of-2026 deadline for Kentico 13 is not that far into the future. Is the XbyK package feature complete to allow migrations of enterprise implementations? We’ll be following closely to see how enterprise partners respond. 

A word on e-commerce: This wasn’t covered much at Connection, but there seems to be a push from some customers and agencies to do this. Some agencies prefer other routes to delivering ecom solutions, but Kentico seems committed to offering this to customers. Development begins in January, and they have dedicated resources to deliver commerce experiences. This will be interesting to follow, as it’s a big area that most competitors leave to integration. 

Finally, AIRA clearly stirred excitement in the room, as anything AI-related tends to do. We’ll be following closely how it is implemented – and its future impact.

Learn more about Kentico and current market trends

If you're interested in reading more about Kentico, here are some useful links:

• Brian McKeiver's Recap of Kentico Partner Connection 2024 in Miami
• Kentico Marks 20 Years of Innovation and Leadership 
• CMS Critic Recap of Kentico Connection 2023 in Nashville

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