Opticon’17: Enabling Customers to Accelerate Digital Optimization, Scale Experimentation Programs

Optimizely Reaches 1 Million Experiments, Impressive Enterprise Customer Growth and Expanded Platform, and AI Capabilities

Optimizely, the world’s leading Experimentation Platform, announced new capabilities to expand its enterprise-focused offerings. It also announced major growth across multiple lines of the business. The announcements came during the opening keynote at the only annual conference dedicated to experimentation, Opticon.

Opticon brings more than 1,000 Optimizely customers, developers and partners together to hear how to develop a culture of experimentation, build better digital products and experiment across all business functions.

The company revealed that it has powered over 1 million experiments on the Optimizely platform to date. Having brought in 21 of the Fortune 100 list as customers, Optimizely is now delivering 1.1 billion impressions every day through its platform with 600 experiments started every day on the Optimizely platform. The demand for these solutions and services has led to Optimizely’s explosive growth, including reaching $90 million in annual recurring revenue. By empowering the world’s largest enterprises, including IBM, Microsoft and eBay, to test new ideas and push the limits of their digital experience while mitigating risk, Optimizely is now the fastest growing experimentation platform in the world.

“Many of our large enterprise customers are now running experimentation programs at a much greater scale and across more areas of their business than ever before. This increased level of adoption and investment across industries is a testament to the business value companies gain when they are able to experiment across their digital channels,” Dan Siroker, Co-founder and Executive Chairman, Optimizely said.

Optimizely continues to focus on product innovation for its growing customer base and today announced several new capabilities to the platform. To keep pace with rapidly changing customer experiences, organizations must empower individuals across the organization — including developers, marketers, and product and business line managers — to run experiments and identify new experiences that will drive the best customer and business outcomes.

“Many of our customers are increasingly running multiple projects and campaigns at a time, often with several variations for each. To date, this has presented challenges in scaling programs due to the level of technical expertise and manual resources required. With the new Optimizely features introduced today, customers across multiple roles and business lines have access to tools that make their lives easier, enable them to scale programs faster and free up their technical resources to focus on more sophisticated experiments,” Siroker said.

With new Optimizely capabilities, including Feature Management, Stats Accelerator and Support for Dynamic Websites, customers will be able to better manage how features are introduced and launched to an entire customer base, significantly increase the speed of experimentation through automation and machine learning, and equip both business and developer users with the tools needed to run successful experiments for the modern web.

New features and enhancements to the Optimizely platform include:

• Feature Management enables teams to deploy product features and capabilities faster with more confidence and less risk. With Feature Flags, Rollouts and Variables added to Optimizely Full Stack, the Optimizely platform simplifies product development by consolidating feature management and experimentation into one unified system. Engineering teams can instrument code with Feature Flags, which enable anyone to toggle features on or off in production without deploying code. Once implemented in production, a Feature Flag can be used in a Rollout, which gives teams the ability to gradually ramp up traffic to the feature to monitor performance impact. Flags can also be configured with Variables, which provide the flexibility to update production applications on the fly. These new platform updates enable product and engineering teams to deploy the right features safely and quickly, and avoid costly deployment cycles when rolling out and rolling back features and running experiments.
• Stats Accelerator, so teams can decrease the time it takes to run experiments across the full suite of Optimizely X products. Utilizing machine learning and automation customers can achieve statistical significance for their experiments up to 2-3x faster than with legacy testing platforms, enabling them to test and iterate with much greater velocity. With Stats Accelerator, Optimizely will intelligently and automatically optimize the flow of user traffic to minimize the time needed to achieve statistically validated findings within our Stats Engine.
• The industry’s first out-of-the-box solution for supporting dynamic websites and experimenting in Single Page Apps, so business users can easily experiment on dynamic content. Across the industry Single Page Applications built on frameworks such as React and Angular, have made experimentation more challenging and required developers to create custom code to compose simple changes. This process made it increasingly difficult to scale experimentation programs. Now, on the Optimizely platform, customers can run experiments in the visual editor that ‘just work’ out-of-the box – no custom code or workarounds needed.