Optimizely Announces Enhanced Experimentation Platform at Opticon20

New capabilities enable customers to easily validate ideas, reduce risk, and ship better products faster

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Sep 16, 2020, 11:00 ET

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 16, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Optimizely, the world's leader in progressive delivery and experimentation, today at Opticon20 announced several new products and partnerships, including integrations with enterprise platforms that make it easier for customers to leverage progressive delivery and experimentation to drive more agile, competitive business decisions.

"Businesses cannot survive in today's environment by guessing," said Claire Vo, Chief Product Officer, Optimizely. "Teams are prioritizing progressive delivery and experimentation practices to navigate today's unpredictable market and remain agile for future opportunities and challenges. Today's announcements illustrate the high demand for these critical tools and Optimizely's leadership in enabling smart, data-informed product development for the modern digital team."

Optimizely's enterprise-grade platform supports billions of events daily and has conducted more than 2 million experiments to-date. In the past six months, over 1,000 COVID-19 and coronavirus related campaigns and experiments have launched as customers aim to minimize business risk and stay more closely aligned with changing customer behaviors and purchasing habits during the pandemic. Based on customer feedback and these usage trends, Optimizely unveiled several new features and capabilities in its portfolio today at Opticon20.

Optimizely Unveils New Version of Full Stack with Enhanced User Experience, New Capabilities
A new version of Optimizely's flagship feature flag and in-code experimentation platform, Full Stack, includes new capabilities and flexibility to simplify deployment and speed time to value. Full Stack is available via 12 SDKs or as a microservice and powers brands including Alaska Airlines, BBC, Blue Apron, ClassPass, Compass, Lending Club, Sky Media, and StubHub, among many more customers.

The new Full Stack includes an enhanced user interface that makes it the industry's most robust enterprise-grade server-side platform to integrate progressive delivery and experimentation. The new design allows customers to create and manage feature flags, and set up experiments on those flags within one user interface for the first time, greatly streamlining how teams orchestrate flags, rollouts, and experiments. By uniting feature flags and experiments in a single progressive delivery and experimentation workflow, all flags become opportunities to experiment, and all experiments benefit from the safeguards flagging provides.

The new version of Full Stack also features Optimizely's new Decide API. Decide API replaces nine APIs with a simpler and more powerful API, helping reduce the complexity of individual Full Stack SDKs and make them easier for engineers to adopt. It unifies the implementation process for experiments and feature flags.

In addition, the new Flag Monitoring capability in Full Stack brings the power of Optimizely's data platform and analytics to the company's progressive delivery feature set. Flag Monitoring provides developers a direct line of sight into how the code they deploy behaves as well as audience analytics detailing how users engage with a flag, which in turn allows teams to make crucial time-saving decisions. Like experiment data, flag data will be available for export and to integrate with other platforms such as Snowflake or Datadog.

The new user interface in Full Stack will be available starting in October. Decide API and Flag Monitoring will be generally available within Full Stack starting in Q4 2020. To learn more about these new tools, attend the Opticon20 session on September 16 at 9:35 a.m. PT: "The Future of Optimizely for Technical Teams."

Optimizely Unveils Stats Engine Service and Data Platform Enhancements
Optimizely has expanded its portfolio of data and analytics offerings to meet the increasingly sophisticated needs across product, engineering, data science, and growth marketing teams, and their ecosystem of data stacks. Optimizely is introducing enhancements to its experimentation data platform to drive higher standards of experimentation decision making.

The new allows customers to use Optimizely's proprietary model for A/B testing statistical analysis via an API. For the first time, customers can run Stats Engine on non-Optimizely datasets from external sources like a data warehouse or analytics tool. For example, users can join Optimizely decisions with private financial data and then run Stats Engine on anonymized metrics. They can also use Stats Engine to measure the impact of experiments on complex metrics like LTV, MAUs, and retention. In addition, customers can plot Stats Engine analysis charts in business intelligence (BI) tools like Tableau or Chartio. The Stats Engine Service will be available starting in Q4 2020.

Optimizely's , provides a new way to help teams integrate Optimizely Results data into their analysis workflows and data stack, and is generally available today. Customers with advanced analysis needs can now join Enriched Events with other data to develop machine-learning models and build custom reports and dashboards. Enriched Events Export supports event-level joins, with tags and metadata preserved so resolution is not lost. It features an intuitive schema, partitioned into decisions and conversions to make joins with internal data easier. It is enriched with useful information like session IDs and details regarding which experiments and variations were active when the event fired.

Optimizely introduced new data tools today that also help avoid data silos within businesses. The new oevents is an easy command-line tool for data scientists and other technical users to load just the data they need in the Optimizely platform, without a production ETL job in place. A new automatically loads Enriched Events Export data into a Snowflake instance with zero engineering work needed. In addition, a new automatically loads Enriched Events and other Optimizely data into a destination of choice. All three of these new capabilities are generally available today.

A new collection of integrations and tutorials for working with Optimizely data and APIs, called , was also announced today. Labs is a collection of reference implementations and integrations for teams to extend Optimizely's platform. It includes recipes for integrating Optimizely SDKs for specific programming language frameworks, reference code for sending data between Optimizely and different data providers, and Jupyter notebooks to enable more complex experiment analyses. All materials in Labs are open-source and hosted on Github.

In addition, the company announced new partnerships and integrations that enable even more businesses to leverage Optimizely's enterprise-grade platform and embed experimentation where they are already working, including new Amazon Personalize, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce, and Salesforce integrations.

Learn More During Opticon20, September 16-17
Hear more from Optimizely, its partners, and its customers regarding these announcements and best practices adopting progressive delivery and experimentation at Opticon20 North America, Optimizely's free, virtual user conference taking place September 16-17, 2020. Developers, technical product managers, and data analysts are also invited to attend Opticode, a one-day event on September 17 featuring technical sessions and hands-on workshops. Learn more and register here.

Additional Resources

About Optimizely
Optimizely's leading platform offers a complete set of digital experience optimization technologies, including AI-powered personalization and experimentation, which encompasses A/B testing, multivariate testing, and server-side testing. We take out the guesswork to enable brands to deliver relevant experiences driven by data. The world's greatest brands choose Optimizely to win and compete in the digital economy, including Gap, StubHub, IBM, The Wall Street Journal, and many more. To learn more, visit . On September 3, 2020, Episerver, a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms, announced that it entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Optimizely. Read more here.

SOURCE Optimizely

WASHINGTON: A top Senate Republican on Tuesday said conservative economist Judy Shelton does not have the votes to be confirmed to one of two vacancies on the Federal Reserve board.

Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, who holds the No. 2 spot in the Senate Republican leadership, said Shelton’s nomination will not be brought up until the votes are there.

We’re still working it, he told reporters after a weekly Republican lunch. She’s a priority for the White House. It’s the Federal Reserve. It’s important, so obviously we want to get it done. But we’re not going to bring it up until we have the votes to confirm her.”

Shelton’s nomination cleared the Senate Banking Committee earlier this year on a straight party-line vote of 13-12, with Democrats opposing the nomination. They contend that her views are too far out of the mainstream for the seven-member Fed board, which currently has two vacancies.

President Donald Trump nominated Shelton and Christopher Waller, the research director at the Federal Reserve’s regional bank in St. Louis, for two vacancies. If both win confirmation, the president will have installed six of the seven board members including elevating Republican Jerome Powell, originally an Obama selection, to be Fed chairman.

While Waller is viewed as a credible choice, Shelton has proven controversial because of her past views, including advocating a return to the gold standard, which most mainstream economists see as unworkable.

At her confirmation hearing, Shelton said she supports the Fed’s independence from political meddling but she defended the sharp attacks Trump has frequently launched against the central bank and Powell for the Fed’s handling of interest rates.

Trump has had trouble filling recent vacancies on the Fed board, with conservative economist Stephen Moore and the late Herman Cain, a former GOP presidential candidate, withdrawing from consideration after opposition surfaced.

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