Episerver rebrands as Optimizely

Digital experience platform Episerver announced today that it is rebranding under the name of one its recent acquisitions, Optimizely.

Experimentation and delivery platform Optimizely was one of three major acquisitions by Episerver in 2019 and 2020, the others being analytics and personalization vendor Idio, and InsiteSoftware, a commerce vendor focused on manufacturing and distribution.

Also today, Optimizely announced the launch of Optimization-as-a-Service (OaaS) which will integrate with Episerver’s product and content recommendation tools to offer a unified targeting, testing and recommendation solution.

We asked Episerver CMO Kirsten Allegri Williams about the thinking behind the change. “A lot of research went into the name change,” she said. “And while there are strengths associated with the Episerver brand, the opportunities tied to the Optimizely name allow us to modernize our purpose and product positioning aligned with the company’s growth objectives.”

Brief histories. Episerver’s signature CMS was launched in Sweden in 1997. After expanding its U.S. footprint and developing an ecommerce offering, it merged with U.S.-based CMS vendor Ektron in 2015. In 2018, it was acquired by Insight Venture Partners for a reported $1.16 billion.

Optimizely was founded in San Francisco in 2010. It offers two cloud-based products, Optimizely Web and Optimizely Full Stack for guided software experimentation and feature roll-out.

Why we care. As adoption of digital commerce expands, even among verticals never considered digital-first, the race between ecommerce vendors to differentiate their offerings, especially through personalization capabilities, heats up. Episerver was primed by Insight Venture Partners to build swiftly through acquisitions. We’re waiting to see what Sitecore does with the billion dollards of private capital invested last week.