Google Cloud Next 2025 | Simon Chapman, Optimizely

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Simon Chapman

VP of Partner Enablement & Solution Architecture

Optimizely

play_circle_outline Optimizely's growth and innovation driven by AI, recognition, and ability to solve complex use cases

play_circle_outline Revenue growth to 400 million with plans for exponential growth through AI enablement

play_circle_outline Use cases include building intelligent supply chains, one-to-one personalization, and AI-powered insights

play_circle_outline Driving Innovation: Future AI Solutions and Strategies for Intelligent Agents and Insights

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Simon Chapman, Optimizely

Simon Chapman

VP of Partner Enablement & Solution Architecture Optimizely

Simon Chapman, an enablement expert at Optimizely, shares insights during the Google Cloud Next 2025 event, exploring advanced digital strategies and global trends in artificial intelligence and personalization. Chapman discusses how Optimizely's recent innovations reshape the digital landscape with John Furrier and Savannah Peterson of theCUBE Research.

Chapman highlights Optimizely’s remarkable growth trajectory, emphasizing the company’s leadership in digital experience platforms, as recognized by Gartner. They explain how Optimizely, under their ... Read more

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Savannah Peterson

>> Good morning CUBE community, and welcome back to fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. We're here on day three of our coverage of Google Cloud Next. My name's Savannah Peterson here in the cockpit with John Furrier, bringing you all the thrilling conversations. John, what's the coolest thing you've learned this week?

>> Well, that's a loaded question. There's so much going on.

Savannah Peterson

>> It's been a lot, I know.

>> Everything up and down the stack is kicking ass with Google. They're doing a good job. They're simplifying. I love the AI infrastructure. I love the chip, I love that, what that enables. And we're going to hear a lot about enablement here with what AI's going to enable. So this next segment's going to be good.

Savannah Peterson

>> Indeed. And it's all about optimizing it, which is why we've got Simon Chapman from Optimizely. Thank you so much for taking the time, Simon.

Simon Chapman

>> Pleasure.

Savannah Peterson

>> So when I was looking at my notes, I was blown away by your growth numbers right now. Go ahead and give us those numbers and talk to us a little bit about why this explosion is happening right now.

Simon Chapman

>> Sure. We've been on a huge path of growth for the last, well, years and years, both in acquisitional terms but also in actually building out our platform. And it's really key things around being recognized for that growth as well. So I think you saw we're now number one in terms of our digital experience. Platform ranked by Gartner as being the de facto leader in terms of being really the best in our ecosystem, in our space. Secondly, it's about the fact that last year we shipped over 400 new product features. So we are innovating and innovating and innovating. So what I'm getting at is the fact that that growth is driven by innovation, is driven by our recognition in the market in terms of how Gartner sees us and how Forrester sees us and how others see us. And it's also the strength of our offer. So therefore how we can really solve what I class as really complicated use cases. So enterprise organizations, large customers come to us and say, "We're going to give you the tough stuff to solve," and we love that. We thrive on that. And so that's driven-

Savannah Peterson

>> You like that maintenance?

Simon Chapman

>> Absolutely. We love that. We love the things that are inherently complex business problems, whether it's the fact that you want to get more in terms of serving customers on many channels, whether it's you want to be intelligent in terms of the insights that you can drive from AI powered by Gemini. It means that you can do that and do much, much more. So that growth that we've had with those fantastic numbers you lean onto has really been all driven by those key things.

>> And the revenue numbers, you guys are talking about that publicly. What's the numbers there?

Savannah Peterson

>> 400 million

>> 400 million. And how's that growth look? With this AI wave behind, you see that significantly growing?

Simon Chapman

>> We see it exponentially growing even further. So we announced that... Obviously, I think we did a big splash on LinkedIn. I think you've probably seen that. We did a big splash and said, "Look, we are going to put the bunting up and we're going to celebrate the 400 million ARR." And it's been kicking on from there. And I think the next growth that we see will be all about power of AI. So we call AI ourselves, our personality for that is Opal. And so Opal powered by Gemini. We're going to see loads of customers who are already coming to us and saying, "Look, be smart, be intelligent, do more with what we already have and make it so we can be even smarter, big, better insights, better experiences," more, more, more. And so that's the growth and we are going to see exponential growth. We fill the customer needs.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes, and it's clear that feedback loop drives your product development. 400 releases in 2024-

Simon Chapman

>> I know....

Savannah Peterson

>> according to my notes.

Simon Chapman

>> It's actually more than that, but yeah, 400 is so many.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's more than one a day. That's insane. That's an incredible clip that you're running at. I'm curious, you mentioned customers coming to you. I know that feedback loop is really tight with y'all. What are some of the use cases that folks are coming to you with across the board?

Simon Chapman

>> Sure. So it really goes down to three kinds of use cases. One is actually building intelligent supply chains. So people want the ability to build some content and use it however they want. So whether it's going to an app, whether it's going to a CMS, whether it's going to a marketing channel in general, they want the ability to have that same messaging going everywhere. So that omni-channel play through supply chains is huge for us.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah.

Simon Chapman

>> Secondly, it's about driving towards one-to-one personalization, not just enough to show this or that to a particular audience. How about I make it so it's truly intelligent? So when I show the right content to the right person at the right time, it's driven by data and it's driven by the fact that we are personalizing that explicitly to that particular audience. And then third, doing all of that powered by intelligent AI. So the ability to take all of those insights, those intelligence pieces, and then saying, "Well, actually I want the machine to do some of the work for me." So we've got this phrase that we use. We are now going to be launching this and calling it the unlimited workforce, where it sits as part of your workflow. And you can ask it questions like-

Savannah Peterson

>> I like that.

Simon Chapman

>> How can I improve my SEO? How can I generate content, rag-based content faster, better with the insights and the intelligence from the previous things I did and maybe drive personalization campaigns and the supply chain too? So it's three key strands. There are many others, but they're the three biggest for us.

>> And what's your role? You are an enablement, so you work with the partners? You're targeting customers? Is it the CMO in the companies? Is it technical sale? What's the-

Simon Chapman

>> It's all of those, to be honest.

>> What's your-

Simon Chapman

>> So we-

Savannah Peterson

>> Many hats over here.

Simon Chapman

>> Many, many hats worn. And so it's the fact is that my team and our responsibility is to basically make people smarter. That's the short version of it. Now what does that mean? It means both internally, but also actually working with our partners to implement the solutions on our platform. And so I get to hear about all the exciting use cases that people want to do, all the sticky problems that they maybe have and they bring them to us and we've got SMEs that are solving and working with our partners to build those solutions. And so I get to see all of the exciting stuff that our partners want to build, whether it's accelerators, whether it's new solutions they're building, whether it's integrations they want to build, whether it's working with new platforms and new solutions, or all of the above.

>> And so you have a large ecosystem, can you talk about your partners?

Simon Chapman

>> Yeah. So we have a huge ecosystem. We have over 800 partners that we work with, of which we have very recognizable names across larger SIs through to more boutique-based agencies. So they're solving different problems in terms of their size, so therefore depends on who they are. And so ultimately that scale and breadth is something that I'm personally very proud of because it means we can support a very vibrant and active community that are building really exciting solutions. So yeah, it's a huge community.

>> Got it.

Savannah Peterson

>> What are some of the solutions that you're most excited about personally?

Simon Chapman

>> For me, I'm looking forward to the day when actually the agents that we're building, agents talking to agents talking to agents, so that's truly intelligent stuff... And we are working with yourselves on these kinds of things, where in the future I personally think that we may not have experiences that are web-based experiences. You are actually an agent is understanding an experience and then saying, "Well, ah, give me something an agent can understand to then do the next step of my process." So you'll have content and experiences driven solely for agents and it won't be a website necessarily, it'll be something else, but formatted perfectly for an agent-

>> So content-

Savannah Peterson

>> It's very interesting if you think about it....

>> targeted agents.

Simon Chapman

>> Absolutely, and I think that will be the path. I mean, the scenario I'm looking forward to is the time when you go onto an agent and you ask the question, "Can you book my flight and my hotel? And by the way, my loyalty number is this and can you get me the best price knowing my nearest airport is this. Go."

Savannah Peterson

>> Highest probability of upgrade.

Simon Chapman

>> Absolutely.

Savannah Peterson

>> All the things-

>> Savannah, which airline you like? Stay away from X, Y, Z.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Simon Chapman

>> It is and I think it's just that kind of intelligence I'm looking forward to. The phrase that I always use is convenience tech. Can I make my life more convenient-

>> Ooh, never heard of that before....

Simon Chapman

>> to do what I need to do? And whether that's solving a business problem, whether it's reporting and intelligence or something else.

>> We were having this debate on theCUBE Pod and also some other CUBE interviews where... What's the timing of having a... Identify a hotel, book a flight, get a car, know my preferences on airlines, hotels, and what I like, say I'm going to New York or where else and actually booking it and doing the transaction with the payment rails? On the front end minus the payment rails, that's kind of in line right now. We're starting to see that cross-platform. The payment seems to be where everything gets stuck. What's your vision on that? Is that happening, because as payment rails come in, Stripe, whatever, that's where the e-commerce seems to kind of break, at least from our perspective. What's your reaction to that? Is that misguided or is it...

Simon Chapman

>> Again, and obviously I see a lot about integrations in my role, I think it's really about the fact that you have, A, good quality integration. So you know basically that either the API has the appropriate functionality or the appropriate ways in which you can detect that and be ahead of it. Now that's just good architecture and good planning to be honest. So therefore, I would say it's a solvable problem to be honest, and I would say that. I'm a developer, so I would say that. So my point is basically the how you choose to build out and track those things.

>> Yeah. Yeah, you got to engineer the rails-

Simon Chapman

>> Absolutely....

>> on the payment. Once you do that, you're end to end.

Simon Chapman

>> Absolutely. I think it's all about those guard rails as you say. Then basically making sure you can detect when something isn't what you expected. And that dare I say, is right for an agent because an agent can detect when it isn't the normal behavior.

Savannah Peterson

>> Right. The anomalies.

Simon Chapman

>> And then can have... The anomalies and you can then effectively force it down an appropriate key.

>> Simon, I want to ask you a question since you've got your finger on this pulse. I was seeing on Twitter, on X, a conversation, some marketing channels like, "The marketing channels are dying. There's not enough of them. Used to be a lot of them. Now it's kind of like only a handful of them. There's a long tail of little ones."

Simon Chapman

>> Yep.

>> You talk about omnichannel, how is that going to change? Because it used to be: I'd spend some money if I'm a marketer here. As these channels get very specific, it is a long tail, but if they're relevance, how do you get... And also they talk to each other. What's your reaction to that and how should marketers or people react to that?

Simon Chapman

>> So we do a lot of work on... I have to mention before one-to-one personalization, and I think it's going to go towards more on that, where you have more curated experiences, more personalized content, that not just that blast type stuff. And I think people in my opinion, are a bit sort of tired of seeing blast content and actually they want to see something that's more relevant to them. If you look at classic surveys that always come out, they always say make it more relevant. It isn't relevant, make it more relevant, make it more personalized to me and my needs and my behaviors and the things that are most attuned to me. So I will personally see more of that rather than actually the more blasting stuff.

>> Actually, agents might actually filter the blasts.

Simon Chapman

>> Well, this is also true. And if-

Savannah Peterson

>> Also, that.

Simon Chapman

>> If you're thinking about some of the scenarios where people consume, how they consume their media now and everything else, it is moving more towards where you are getting this hyper-personalization more and more and more. And if I think about my consumption, I'm sort of switched off by a blast, but if someone's put a level of intelligence into it and personalized it, it's more rewarding for me because I've got something out of it which is more tuned.

>> Really the bad guys are doing it.

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, it was really interesting. We had a conversation to start the week with Shopify and we were talking about the Instagram spikes, the Instagram ad targeting and whatnot, and you see these spikes that are comparable to a Black Friday, Cyber Monday. And it's really interesting to your point because it's not just about me feeling seen, it's transactionally much more beneficial and you're saving time, money, resources, and it's more sustainable if you're not just firing things out to everybody-

Simon Chapman

>> It's very true. I mean, if you look-...

Savannah Peterson

>> all the time....

Simon Chapman

>> at that kind of business, the most important thing is about make it relevant, make it timely, make it so it actually knows who I am as a person and then hopefully I will transact more. So I've known about this for years in my previous life in terms of working at different vendors, it was always about capturing the customer in the moment. So the highest propensity to buy or the highest propensity to do the thing I want them to do. And if it's a better experience, they're probably going to do it, but if it's a generic experience, maybe not so unless it's transactional, of course. But my point is you get the idea, is the better the experience, the higher personalization it is, the more likely I am to do the thing you want me to do.

>> I like-

Savannah Peterson

>> And the more personally connected you feel to brands or to whatever-

>> 100%....

Savannah Peterson

>> the thing is. It's very inclusive. When we were chatting a little bit before we went live, you were talking about some of the trends that you've seen and you mentioned the suite of products now versus one-offs. Tell me a little bit more about that.

Simon Chapman

>> Sure. So the phrase that we quite often hear is that people say, "Well, I've got a bunch of tech solutions, but I'm looking to consolidate, what I'm looking to do." And that could be for a variety of reasons. That can be because I don't have the integration that I need and someone hasn't built. It doesn't exist. And so it could also be the fact that they've got budgetary concerns and pressures and they want to consolidate because they feel they can get the appropriate deal or price point that matches what they've got in their budget. Now there are two reasons, there are many others. Why are we hearing this so much is because organizations are... Obviously, the fact that we are a leader in those quadrants helps enormously, that we have a wide portfolio of solutions that can support those things. So people are coming to us and saying, "Look, I've got very complex problems. I know that you've done this before. I'm going to come to you because you do all of these things and you've got integrations with all these things. Can you do that for me?" And quite often we're asked that question, the answer is yes, because then we can support that and do it. Whereas you're not thinking about the plumbing involved with this solution, that solution, and that solution, that solution.

Savannah Peterson

>> Nobody wants to do that.

Simon Chapman

>> No one wants to do that. And so the best of breed piece that people were doing when they were having hundreds of MarTech solutions and trying to get it all to work together-

Savannah Peterson

>> And it's a yes....

Simon Chapman

>> that's costly, time-consuming, all the above. And what happens if someone drops that integration? They don't maintain it, what do you do? Do you just stop?

Savannah Peterson

>> Right.

Simon Chapman

>> So that-

>> Here's the platform that solves that old best of breed mosaic where if it's not best of breed anymore, the whole thing fails, or is that what you're getting at there?

Simon Chapman

>> Absolutely, but actually because we're innovating so much, we actually feel we're doing a bit of both. So therefore we're offering the suite in terms of all the tools that you need, but also the fact that we're the leader, we actually are offering the best of breed part of the same time. I mean, I can give you an example as well about that, that innovation, which is great. Our CEO says this phrase really commonly. He says, "Effectively, we're big enough to innovate, but ultimately we care deeply in terms of actually understanding how we approach our customers."

>> Just as an aside, Palo Alto Networks came on here, they're a security company, they said, "Best of breed's dead and dead in their industry because of the sprawl of best of breed." And so you're almost on the same track as that.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, yeah.

Simon Chapman

>> Absolutely. I mean, anyone who's seen that diagram from the chief of MarTech, the one that shows-

>> The big collage?

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes. That's what I was thinking of when you started talking about this. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Simon Chapman

>> It's bigger and bigger, doesn't it, all the time. And the amount of solutions that you see and it was like... I remember the first diagram, was like that and now it's insane, isn't it? A huge number of solutions.

>> Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> It is. It's interesting. You mentioned being a leader, 12X industry leader, no less. Just to call that out. I can imagine... Well, you've probably got a team of people who love solving complex problems-

Simon Chapman

>> I have....

Savannah Peterson

>> which is pretty fantastic. So I know there's some things you can't talk about today, but give us a little bit of the future problems you're trying to solve or what you hope to build next.

Simon Chapman

>> Sure. So one of the things that we're solving now and doing more around is what I touched about, is flexibility of content use. And so that means using standards like GraphQL to take content from our graph service and using it interchangeably across any channel. Now we are doubling down there, the ability to take content, and almost treat it as a thing that you can just do what you want with. And that's what we're being asked to do. We're being asked to say, "Well, I want to do this on a CMS." "Fine, no problem. Take the content from Graph and use it heedlessly." "I want to use it on an app." "No problem." "Use it on an email marketing solution." "Okay." And so Graph is sitting at the heart of what people want to do to be the source of truth for all content and then share it with anyone they would like to. We're doubling down on that because that's what people want. They want the total flexibility to build the solution they want knowing they have a content authority that's sitting right in the middle. And if it's AI that's building that, brilliant. So therefore you can enhance and improve and refine. So therefore it's all of those things and more.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, I think you're spot on with that. No surprise. I've got one very important final question for you. When we're hanging out at Google Cloud Next in 2026, because this has been fantastic, what do you hope to be able to say then that you can't yet say today?

Simon Chapman

>> Well, the thing I can't say in terms of talking about our AI strategy, there's a lot happening in the very near future in terms of how we're working with partners like Google to build out new and exciting AI solutions. So I hope to be talking about those solutions next and next year when we're here and we're talking about how we've driven true innovation in terms of taking insights, having intelligent agents, and doing much more. So we're doing lots of stuff. So I'd say watch this space in terms of the intelligent AI stuff, and that's what we're going to be doubling down on this year.

>> We'll be following you.

Savannah Peterson

>> We can't wait. I know we'll be watching this space. That's for sure. Simon, this has been absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much.

>> No problem.

Savannah Peterson

>> And congrats to the team. Huge numbers, exciting stuff. And I love people who like complex problems. It's a special breed.

Simon Chapman

>> Always. Absolutely.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. So cheers to y'all and thank you, John. This has been a fantastic segment. Thank all of you for tuning into our three days of live coverage here in Las Vegas, Nevada at Google Cloud Next. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.