Adobe AEM Edge Delivery Services: A Game Changer for Rapid Digital Experience Implementation

Delivering exceptional digital experiences feels like a never-ending race against rising customer expectations, a shrinking window of opportunity, and a fiercely competitive landscape. Technology’s rapid evolution only adds to the challenge, forcing companies to constantly adapt in order to stay competitive 

Navigating these factors to meet accelerated customer demands often falls on IT and marketing teams. Yet, outdated business processes, limited technical expertise, and inflexible technology stacks act as constant roadblocks to building exceptional digital experiences. Nowhere are these challenges more evident than in an organization’s Content Management Systems (CMS), the crucial tech-stack element where IT and Marketing responsibilities come together. 

Traditional CMS development can be a slow and costly process. This is primarily due to the monolithic nature of most traditional CMSs, built as single, large applications. Any changes or additions require time-consuming adjustments to the entire system by technical specialists. Resulting in frustrated teams, missed opportunities, and an inability to deliver the kind of lightning-fast, engaging experiences that today’s customers expect.

But what if marketing didn’t have to rely on the tech team to make updates to the website? What if they could harness the tools they already possess to update and optimize their content seamlessly? That’s where Adobe Edge Delivery Services comes in. 

Adobe created AEM Edge Delivery Services to address the growing need for companies to deliver digital experiences at hyperfast speed to market. EDS is a set of composable services designed to enhance the capabilities of AEM. It separates the majority of the backend development and management found in traditional CMS while expanding content authoring capabilities.

Empower Marketers to Deliver Content Faster

Edge Delivery is a headless CMS built for content velocity. It eliminates the dependency on IT for content-centric experiences, allowing marketers to make changes quickly and easily. With its document based authoring capabilities, users can modify content from Google Docs and Microsoft Word docs through a browser interface directly into the live web application. This accessibility of content authoring is a game changer for non-technical users and significantly speeds up the process by removing the mandate for developers and certain portions of traditional DevOps scope in content publishing workflows. This significantly reduces time-to-market for new digital experiences, ensuring that customers have access to the latest content and features in a timely manner. 

Deliver exceptional digital experiences at lightning speed

The speed efficiency of Edge Delivery Services goes beyond content management.  It features a global Content Delivery Network (CDN) and built-in image optimization, ensuring content is delivered flawlessly and quickly to users across devices and locations.  Seamless performance translating into improved customer experiences. 

Additionally, Edge Delivery integrates with Adobe Experience Cloud, enabling marketers to leverage advanced customer data and personalization capabilities to create highly targeted and engaging experiences that meet the individual needs and preferences of each customer, ultimately driving engagement and conversions.

The ability to focus on what matters

With the accessible authoring capabilities mentioned above, Edge Delivery reduces the dependency of Marketing relying on IT for content-centric changes or fast prototyping. This subsequently frees IT from supporting Marketing and is a win/win proposition! This all enables faster speed-to-market by having business users and more junior talent contribute to the content production process.

Edge Delivery Services requires less tech than a traditional AEM build. Traditional AEM builds include supporting back end development skills (Java/OSGi/JSP/Dispatcher/HTML/CSS/JScript/GIT/CICD) while EDS builds require only basic front end development skills (CSS/HTML/JScript/GIT). The lighter technical footprint is easier to manage and the talent requirements to maintain are more readily accessible in a competitive market.

The Edge Delivery Advantage

So, at this point you are likely wondering if Adobe AEM Edge Delivery is a good fit for you? If you find yourself in any of the following scenarios, let’s talk!

1. You are an existing AEM CMS customer and are looking to find efficiencies in speed-to-market or a more centralized content workflow that can be serviced by non-technical users
2. You are looking for a new CMS solution with a keen eye on speed-to-market and have frequent publish or prototyping needs
3. You are looking for a new CMS solution and have little to no availability to IT resources or are in short-supply of technical development talent

Adobe AEM Edge Delivery Services addresses the challenge faced by marketers in delivering digital experiences rapidly. By eliminating the limitations of traditional CMS, EDS empowers marketing teams to develop and launch experiences with improved content velocity, seamless delivery, and reduced time-to-market.

Ready to unlock the power of exceptional digital experiences powered by Adobe Edge Delivery Services? Contact SH/FT today.