To answer this question, we compared 13 digital experience delivery vendors across 29 criteria in our recent Wave report, "Digital Experience Delivery Platforms, Q3 2014." Overall, we found many areas of differentiation, but client adoption and usage is a mixed. While some organizations have made strides in contextual, omnichannel delivery, many fail at customer data management. Almost all of the vendors focused on customer acquisition but many haven't begun to support the entire customer life cycle. In the end, no vendor achieved Leader status.

Despite no Leaders, these 13 vendors are definitively tracking toward the goal of an integrated platform for enterprise digital customer experiences. Specifically, Adobe and hybris outpaced the competition as an aggregator and all-in-one, respectively, but IBM and Sitecore also placed as Strong Performers. Each of the Contenders in our evaluation  — Acquia, Demandware, Digital River, HP Autonomy, Intershop, OpenText, Oracle, salesforce.com, and SDL — have strengths and bring an enterprise track record around their core differentiation, but most vendors' platform efforts are still building credibility among enterprise clients.

Earlier this year, Forrester asked 148 digital customer experience decision-makers from across enterprise technology, marketing, and commerce roles, "What are the biggest technical barriers to creative and effective customer-facing systems?" Systems integration and data management solidly led as today's top challenges. Our Forrester Wave analysis aims to uncover which platforms address these top technical barriers and additional priorities such as contextual delivery and bridging content and commerce-driven experiences.

We encourage you to read the report and download the Forrester Wave Excel tool (choose the "download" option for Figure 5). Each vendor's scorecard is rich with detail, and most importantly, you can customize the weightings of each criteria to create a vendor shortlist that matches your priorities.

We want to hear from you: How are you assembling and integrating digital customer experience delivery capabilities? Are you optimistic about pre-integrated digital capabilities for delivering creative, effective, and coherent customer experiences?