The DXP Catalyst Update - Jan 7, 2025

INTRO
Welcome to This Month’s DXP Catalyst Update

It has been a while since the last edition. All is well at DXP Catalyst, and the gap is largely due to a very busy stretch of client work going back to late August. We also quietly crossed our two-year anniversary in the fall. By celebrating, I mean we noticed the date and kept working.

As we kick off 2026, I’m looking forward to getting back into a more regular rhythm with the newsletter, attending more industry events, and sharing insights from ongoing advisory work. The year starts with the CMS Experts Kickoff event next Tuesday and Wednesday in Florida.

Below are a few company updates from the last several months.

UPDATES

Client Engagements

From August through December, DXP Catalyst supported two DXP advisory programs alongside work tied to our Digital Enablement for SMBs service line.

PE-Backed Ed Tech Company. DXP Advisory

We had the opportunity to advise C-suite and executive stakeholders at a PE-backed education technology company undergoing a significant digital modernization initiative. The organization supports more than 150 university websites and initially framed the effort as a CMS replacement. That scope expanded quickly into a broader DXP strategy once it became clear that content management alone would not address their long-term needs.

The leadership team was explicitly looking several years ahead and wanted to ensure the strategy accounted for emerging capabilities such as multi-agent orchestration, LLM-powered conversational search, and evolving approaches to GEO. The decision to modernize beyond their existing ecosystem had already been made. We were brought in at the point where another agency was preparing to run an RFP focused primarily on suite-oriented DXP platforms, with the goal of complementing that process with deeper platform strategy and architectural guidance.

The platform strategy ultimately spanned content management, content operations, digital asset management, personalization, experimentation, customer data management, analytics, and search. Agentic AI capabilities were considered horizontally across these areas, particularly for content creation and tagging, experimentation ideation, and future-facing conversational experiences, including considerations around generative engine optimization.

When defining the evaluation approach, we looked at two primary paths for assembling a modern digital experience ecosystem:

• Composable suite-oriented platforms that provide pre-integrated capabilities under a single vendor

• Composable best-of-breed ecosystems where a DXP acts as a central hub, providing core capabilities while allowing selective integration or replacement of surrounding components as needed

Comparing these models is not straightforward. Weighted scorecards work well when evaluating individual components like a CMS, but across an entire ecosystem, functional fit alone is insufficient. Architectural fit, operational complexity, non-functional requirements, and vendor maturity become just as important.

Traditional RFP processes are effective for aligning large stakeholder groups around functional needs, but they tend to break down when evaluating multi-component ecosystems. In this case, we proposed a dual-track approach:

• A traditional RFP track, which naturally favors suite-oriented platforms

• A composable architecture track, focused on ecosystem design and component interoperability

On the RFP track, we helped broaden the field beyond traditional suite vendors to ensure all viable approaches were considered. The client ultimately evaluated Contentstack, Squiz, and Uniform in addition to just Optimizely and Sitecore.

One area we spent some time analyzing was customer data architecture. Because the organization already operates a data warehouse, the discussion centered on whether a CDP was needed in the near term at all, and if so, what form it should take. We evaluated the trade-offs between adopting a suite-based CDP with its own persistence layer versus a more composable, warehouse-native approach that builds on existing data assets. This also surfaced a broader question about sequencing. Since a personalization strategy had not yet been fully defined, we examined where a CDP would realistically add value today versus becoming relevant later as activation and personalization use cases mature.

The engagement expanded to include organizational implications of the future-state architecture, covering ownership models, governance, and team responsibilities. December wrapped with vendor and contract negotiation support, and the client is now moving into planning and execution, with a pilot launch targeted in the coming months.

What made this work especially interesting was the ability to look across the entire student lifecycle, from lead generation through application, enrollment, and long-term retention, within an organization supporting hundreds of universities. The platform strategy extended beyond the website, creating opportunities to support content operations for email campaigns and other upstream communications from a shared foundation. With additional AI applications being developed in house, we also explored how a shared intelligence and activation layer could enable more unified experiences across channels, rather than treating web and email as isolated touchpoints. These are the types of programs where long-term platform decisions meaningfully shape how organizations operate.

We will be sharing more insights from this work over the coming months.

Member-Based Trade Association. MarTech Advisory

We also supported a partner agency working with a member-based trade association undergoing digital modernization. The engagement focused primarily on discovery and planning, culminating in the design of a multi-year transformation roadmap.

At a high level, the roadmap included guidance around data cleanup across a broad Salesforce ecosystem, modernization of the existing websites, and planning for a new member portal. The portal will enable individuals within large member organizations to register accounts, participate in events, and collaborate with peers. Today, the organization has limited visibility into individual users and no self-service registration model. A key part of the effort also involves sunsetting several fragmented platforms and tools in favor of a more integrated and centralized member experience.

While the organization currently uses WordPress and were considering an alternative CMS, we recommended continuing with it in a headless capacity, paired with a Next.js front end hosted on Vercel. Federated search will be powered by Squiz Funnelback, with the option to later layer in Squiz Conversations for LLM-based conversational search.

Uniform will eventually support personalization, experimentation, and select agentic capabilities through its Scout assistant. This approach allows the organization to retain WordPress and Next.js while introducing a more flexible experience orchestration layer. CDP was considered but placed further down the roadmap, with an initial focus on improving member experience and self-service capabilities.

This is a multi-year journey and will be interesting to watch as it evolves.

Privately Owned Financial Services Firm. Digital Enablement for SMBs

While this newsletter is typically enterprise-focused, we also support rapidly growing SMB organizations in the NY and NJ region. These are often companies at an inflection point, either modernizing an aging digital ecosystem or building foundational digital infrastructure for the first time. Our work in these cases centers on mar-tech strategy and architecture, with a strong emphasis on sales and marketing enablement, most often within HubSpot.

We have been working with a NJ-based, privately owned financial services firm for some time, initially through a partner agency and directly since early summer. We executed a new engagement beginning with strengthening their CRM and sales foundation in HubSpot, establishing best practices and enabling scalability as the team grows.

From there, the work expanded into marketing activation, starting with basic email marketing and progressing into more advanced campaigns and automation. We continue to partner closely with their CIO on technical planning and integration architecture between HubSpot and other core systems. The organization supports multiple sales motions, customer types, and lead sources, each with its own process requirements, all of which continue to evolve rapidly.

We visit the client on site every other week.

Company Anniversary

We marked our two-year anniversary in October. The first year was deliberately focused on laying a strong foundation, and momentum picked up in the latter half of our second year.

The increase in DXP and martech advisory work over the last six months reinforces why we started DXP Catalyst in the first place. Too often, agencies steer clients toward platforms they already implement rather than those that best fit the organization. A Drupal agency is more likely to gravitate toward Acquia. A Sitecore or Optimizely partner advocates for those ecosystems as it’s in their best interest.

DXP Catalyst was founded to change that dynamic. We operate as a vendor-neutral, independent consultancy focused on platform strategy rather than implementation. By staying close to vendor roadmaps and leadership across the DXP ecosystem, and drawing on deep engineering and architecture experience, we provide objective guidance grounded in how these platforms actually work and where they are headed. The current pace of innovation makes staying up to date both challenging and essential.

Our role is not to advocate for a single solution, but to clarify trade-offs and help organizations make informed decisions. In many cases, there is no clear winner. The right choice depends on functional fit, architecture, operating model, pricing, vendor profile, and long-term roadmap alignment, along with an informed assessment of whether a suite-based platform or a more open, composable DXP ecosystem is the better fit.

While we do not focus on a single vertical, PE-backed organizations and higher education continue to be a strong fit heading into 2026.

CMS Kickoff 2026

The CMS Experts Kickoff event takes place next Tuesday and Wednesday in St. Pete, Florida. It is one of their two major North American events, and the agenda looks strong. I attended the local CMS Experts events in New York and Boston last year and am looking forward to reconnecting with many familiar faces.

I’ll be heading down on Monday and staying in Florida for a few extra days, including some time in Miami. After a colder-than-usual winter so far in New York, the change of scenery will be welcome.

Final Thoughts

More insights coming soon from CMS Kickoff as well as from ongoing client engagements. There is a lot to unpack, and this will likely settle into a monthly cadence rather than a weekly one, with each edition covering more ground.