VShift Introduces AEM Digital Experience Accelerator to Help Launch Faster on Adobe

The digital experience landscape wouldn’t exist without Adobe – and more precisely, its Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) platform. 

AEM has long held the crown in the kingdom of DXPs (just as Gartner), and leading global enterprises depend on its scale of features to power the most complex and demanding digital strategies.

While ubiquitous, the Adobe name also conjures that oft-demonized word: monolith. It is an epic ecosystem of interconnected, often Frankensteined solutions that can feel overwhelming and unwieldy – and its AEM platform is no exception. 

Amidst the publishing and marketing automation suites snuggling under the Adobe umbrella, AEM has always enjoyed an elite (if not pricey) reputation, making it the domain of serious enterprises. However, it can also be incredibly challenging and time-consuming, requiring curated expertise from certified practitioners. 

All of this can impact the velocity of getting digital projects to market. And in an era where real-time responsiveness is key, any delay can translate into lost revenue or even market share. 

Given these pain points, VShift – a customer engagement and digital experience agency and MACH Alliance member – has developed a new AEM Digital Experience Accelerator. The proprietary program is targeted at AEM users, helping them deliver more engaging digital experiences with Adobe and do it all faster, easier, and more cost-effectively.

“In our experience with complex organizations, we kept hearing the same pain points – cost, time-to-market, internal friction,” said Al Collins, Founder & CEO of VShift. “We developed the VShift AEM Digital Experience Accelerator to make our clients’ experience with AEM better and help them get the most out of their Adobe investments. Our new program offers a streamlined process, an easier way of launching customer experiences, and an increased capacity to innovate at a fraction of the time and costs usually involved.” 

The accelerator program was announced at last week’s MACH THREE Conference in New York City, this year's venue for the world’s leading composable technology conference. 

As a MACH-certified agency, VShift has cultivated deep expertise with enterprise-scale organizations in highly regulated industries like financial services, insurance, and healthcare – focusing its solutions through a composable lens. The company also has a proven track record of crafting and delivering digital platforms for companies like Freddie Mac and Prudential.

Accelerating the value of AEM with composability

Accelerators are aptly named, but there are numerous benefits beyond speed. Such is the case with VShift’s AEM Digital Experience Accelerator. 

First and foremost, it expedites digital product or website development-to-launch programs – and according to VShift, this can effectively reduce the timeline to weeks. It can also be customized to an organization’s specific needs, helping them meet their explicit business goals.

With increased velocity and less internal friction between content owners and tech teams, brands can move faster. The accelerator also provides great flexibility for changes, allowing teams to swap out components or switch directions in a snap (composable thinking at work).

That “swapability” is what helps make VShift’s Digital Experience Accelerator a MACH-worthy solution. It also reflects those attributes by minimizing vendor lock-in and decreasing the oppressive need for specialized AEM-certified resources to execute. This is a persistent drag for many organizations when it comes to managing their AEM footprint and properly staffing for new projects and digital initiatives.  

All these benefits add up to enhanced productivity and cost-effectiveness, enabling organizations to maximize their AEM investments and cut costs by supporting customer experiences with more affordable, composable solutions. Marketing and content teams can also realize huge benefits by harnessing more control while navigating within their organization’s security policies. 

A complete market-ready solution for AEM success

VShift’s accelerator is now available as a complete package that includes a ready-to-deploy cloud-hosted environment with orchestration and integration tools. Users will have the ability to rapidly design and prototype their projects via Figma and AEM’s headless platform and connectors. 

For any organization developing a website, app, or digital product, customizability is a key part of the experience. To that end, VShift’s accelerator promises a customizable prebuilt core UI component library. There’s also an AI-enhanced starter kit for a content model, complete with tags and an automated builder/loader for speeding up the content modeling and deployment process. 

From a connective integration perspective, VShift delivers some slick capabilities via its accelerator. This includes its own “universal” GraphQL-based connector. They also provide a web app structure that includes a baseline for pages and functionality. 

On the visual editing front, VShift provides composable choices. Organizations can leverage AEM’s Universal Editor or use a non-Adobe visual editor to handle digital composition in a composable framework. VShift also offers value-added composable modules and services like authentication-as-a-service or search-as-a-service.

To realize the full value and potential, VShift’s accelerator is accompanied by intuitive guides and documentation, as well as an expert team with deep AEM experience and composable tech.

“We spend about two to three months customizing the VShift AEM Digital Experience Accelerator to a company’s needs," Collins added. "Then we turn over the reins, leaving our clients with thorough reference documentation and allowing content creators and tech teams to launch engaging customer experiences faster, easier, and cost-effectively.” 

Why it matters

Accelerators have become a vital panacea for monolithic software. This new breed of pre-built frameworks provides a mature foundation and progressive architectures for building complex websites and applications faster and more efficiently. While the landscape varies, accelerators are proving invaluable as enterprises and agencies look to maximize value from platforms like AEM in an increasingly composable world. 

Despite its monolithic posture, Adobe continues to be an industry-leading staple across a multitude of market segments. Even with its less-than-rosy attempt to acquire Figma and rule over the entire digital experience journey, the tech mammoth remains ever-relevant and persistently innovative. 

In fact, its skunkworks around AEM Franklin (also known as Project Helix or Composability) is showing real promise by enabling AEM pages using Google Drive or Microsoft Office via Sharepoint. Instead of components, Franklin uses “blocks” like text, images, and buttons to generate new pages quickly and even create reusable templates. Cool stuff. 

As a MACH-certified DX agency, VShift is reinforcing the value of Adobe for its customers and the market at large. Its new AEM Digital Experience Accelerator is bridging the best of all worlds by providing a pathway to greater composability and flexibility. The big benefits are clear: faster time to market and lower costs. But it’s also addressing the challenge of legacy software, and helping organizations continue to mine value from their AEM investments. 

We’ve written at length about the constant challenge of defining “composable” in a market of conflicting ideologies. In my recent coverage of the MACH THREE Impact Awards – of which I participated as a judge for the second year – I go into deeper detail on this reality and how the MACH Alliance continues to maintain tacit guardrails for the industry. 

Regardless of how any headless CMS or enterprise DXP projects its unique flavor of “composable,” the only measure that matters is how it impacts the customer. VShift’s accelerator – and other offerings like it – focus on the most challenging layers of a digital stack, where legacy systems are still mandated or represent a significant investment. It strives to address key pain points and deliver a complete solution with a clear set of composable principles baked in. 

Maybe that's the “shift” in VShift. To learn more about its accelerator, click here. 

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