Every decision we’ve made was for you
In 2004, Petr Palas, our founder, the only owner and CEO, decided he wanted to create a product for the whole world to use. And so he did. Kentico CMS (and later the introduction of Kentico EMS) was a content management system that helped our clients create websites.
It has never been about the money
Petr Palas founded Kentico in 2004 to help people tell stories that change the world. He believed there was a better way to manage content so he created the very first Kentico CMS to make the everyday work of web developers easier. Money was never his primary motivation. Rather, he focused on delivering the best product, one that our customers simply couldn’t get anywhere else.
And meanwhile, Kentico grew–it took us only 12 months to build a great team and earn our first million czech crowns, and four years to build a US branch and reach the one-million dollar mark. Everything we’ve achieved we’ve done without a dime borrowed. What we earned we put back into development and the product. Fortunately, Kentico has never been the type of a company to merely sell you a CMS and wish you good luck. We wanted to maintain close relationships with our customers, support them, encourage them and help them achieve their goals.
"I am so glad that our desire to help the customers and support them in achieving their goals has never changed in Kentico. I think that every business needs the “why” because such things make companies successful."
We were developing a SaaS CMS before anyone even dreamt about it
It has always been the vision of Petr Palas driving the innovation at Kentico. However, some of the ideas we had came way too far ahead of their time. In 2011, we created our spin-off product Kentico Plus, the SaaS CMS in Cloud. That was back at a time when Microsoft Azure still experienced multiple blackouts in a day and when nobody else had so much as thought about content management systems, let alone a SaaS solution, in the cloud.
The product was great—it promised the customers more than they could have ever wished for. We introduced modern features and took care of everything—they didn’t have to lift a finger. However, it soon became clear customers were not yet ready for such a solution, much like the market at large. In 2011, there were no APIs that would transfer information from our Kentico Plus to Azure so we had to do a lot of things manually. We had invested a lot of energy into education of the market but it still wasn’t sufficient.
We realized we had to shelve the product for the time being. For most companies, that would have been it; announce the cancellation of the service and hit the off switch. But that would have never been enough for us. We made sure that every one of our customers’ websites running on Kentico Plus was able to transfer to other platforms seamlessly.
Everything we’d learned the hard way during this project later served as a solid foundation for our headless CMS Kontent by Kentico. Since 2011, Microsoft Azure has come a long way and so have we.
The excitement and enthusiasm we had when working on our spin-off of Kentico Plus was unbelievable. There were so many sleepless nights but it was all definitely worth it. Even though the product was way ahead of its time and we had to drop it in the end, we learned so much during the process.
Two divisions in 2020 – Kentico Xperience and Kontent by Kentico
By 2020, we were not inspired solely by Petr Palas and his vision. We had a Board and a whole Executive Team full of visionaries and hard grafters who have made Kentico the company it was back then. Most of them worked their way up through the ranks in our organisation. They put their all into creating products and services that were designed for helping marketers and developers, supporting them along the path towards their goals.
We’ve always listened to our customers and partners. You and your feedback helped us transform Kentico CMS as you knew it in two fully-fledged products that were both regularly recognized by analysts such as Gartner, Forrester or G2 in their reports. Kentico CMS no longer existed. Instead, there was a digital experience platform Kentico Xperience for midmarket and a headless CMS Kontent by Kentico for enterprise. Each product had a unique set of features suitable for different marketing teams and companies. Both were helping you tell stories that change the world. Both empowered you to deliver a better customer experience.
Kentico has grown from a one-man show into a company of more than 270 people from 10 different countries who love working for Kentico. Now, Kentico is a global company with branches in the US, UK, Australia, Benelux and Germany, all playing an important role in the content management software market.
The old Kentico is gone, now we are two separate companies
Until July 2022 we were one company – one vendor with two products. From July 1, 2022, we became two separate companies: Kentico (Kentico Software s.r.o., the DXP vendor) and Kontent.ai s.r.o. (the headless CMS). This split was driven by entrance of investors into both companies that are still owned by Petr Palas.
