All right, perfect. Hello everyone and welcome to another CMSWire webinar. My name is Brenda and I'm here today to help answer any general or technical questions that you may have. But before we get started, I would like to welcome you to today's webinar which is Breaking Down Silos, How Decoupled Architecture Empowers Marketers to Do More Faster. Now here is a quick breakdown of today's agenda. Now these numbers are just rough so please don't hold us to these. Now I'd like to redirect your attention to the right side of your screen. Here you will find a tab that's titled Chat. This is where you can interact with your fellow attendees and today's speakers so please feel free to jump in there and say hello. If at any point during today's webinar you have a question that you'd like to have answered during the Q&A session, you can drop that question in the Q&A tab that's also on the right side of your screen. Now here is a little bit about us over here at CMSWire. We were founded in 2003 and we cover the primary topics that you see here on this slide. Now I won't jump into too many details here but you can read more about our great content, register for upcoming conferences and webinars like today's all by visiting our site cmswire.com. Now today's webinar would not have been possible without our friends over at Crownpeak and joining me today to kick things off is Lucy Nielsen who is the Director of Customer Success at Crownpeak. So Lucy, I will stop talking and I will pass things over to you. Great, thank you Brenda. Welcome everyone, thank you for joining us today and welcome to the first of Crownpeak's Breaking Down Silos webinar series. Today's topic is how a decoupled architecture empowers marketers to do more and faster. So lots of exciting discussion today but before we get into the agenda, here's a quick reminder of who Crownpeak is. So since 1999, we've been helping customers on either side of the Atlantic deliver revenue and efficiency generating tools and services that in turn delight their customers. We have over 800 customers across the globe, over a thousand brands and 300 Crownpeak team members. To support global footprint, we also have over 80 agency system integrator and strategic partners as well. Crownpeak has a diverse platform portfolio with the majority acquired as part of our journey to driving our customers' efficiencies. So the cornerstones of our platform portfolio are content management, search and merchandising, product discovery and tools to help organisations with regulatory, brand and organisational compliance. All Crownpeak platforms share one important property, they're composable. So we hear the term composable a lot in our industry and it's important but today we're going to show you how composability can be used responsibly to create efficiencies for both marketers and technologists which ultimately drive strategic advantages in your market. A little bit about the speakers today, so I'm Lucy Nielsen, I lead our customer success team here at Crownpeak and I'm joined by Michael Tal, VP of product for First Spirit. Hi Michael. Hi Lucy, thanks for the intro. Yeah, hi everyone, my name is Michael Tal, I'm in the CMS business for over 20 years and in my role as VP product at Crownpeak, I'm responsible for strategical aspects of our CMS product line. Paul. Thanks Michael. Over to you Paul Taylor, VP of solutions. Perfect, thanks Lucy, thanks Michael. Hey everybody, nice to meet you, thank you for joining today. I'm Paul Taylor, like Michael, I've been in the CMS world for a long, long time. My role today of VP of solutions at Crownpeak is about providing connectivity between all of Crownpeak's tools and services and the wider ecosystem of vendors and platforms that we'll talk about today. So I find myself in the field with customers and partners a lot, listening to their stories, their problems, their challenges and I enjoy with a team working to put solutions together to solve those in a nice, efficient way. Great to see you all today. Awesome, thanks guys. So lots of exciting stuff for us to cover today. We're going to start by talking about the market. Why does speed and consistency matter? What's happening in the market and where are the challenges and difficulties for organisations that we're seeing? We're going to dive into decoupled architecture and what we mean by this. We hear the term composable a lot, are they the same? What are the differences? We're then going to move into a few case studies of Crownpeak customers where this decoupled architecture has guided them to successful business outcomes that have ultimately created strategic advantages. We'll move on to talk about marketing and technologists and how you can use the decoupled architecture to bridge what has historically been somewhat of a gap to cross. And then we'll pause to answer any questions that you have. So get thinking of your questions, enter them in the comments section below. In the chat and we'll allow plenty of opportunity at the end of the webinar to address those. So let's get started. Let's talk a little about the marketing challenge. Why does speed and consistency matter? What's it all about? What's the problem? And why do some businesses struggle to make moves in this area? Paul, I'm going to come to you. So what's happening? Why is this prevalent? Why is this difficult? Getting more so every day. And really, it all comes down to customer expectation. If we rewind the clock a few years, and as consumers, we'd engage with a brand over whatever channel they had available, some via the website, some via a mobile app, some in-store only. And this was fine. We understood. And while not always happy about it, we accepted the narrowness of the engagement and moved on with our day. But some crazy things happened to all of us since then. And now we've had a seismic shift in our expectation of how we're going to engage with a brand. Today, we're all used to interacting with a brand or shopping experience across any channel that we choose. And we want to do this on our terms, not the brand's. Look at some of the channels on this slide. It doesn't matter whether these are online, offline, in-store, or in-app. The brand better be where we are or we're going to the competition. And it's not just about the channels that we engage over. It's also about the experience on that channel, whether that be brand consistency or performance. Take Amazon, for example. Way back in 2006, they concluded that every 100 milliseconds in added page load time cost them 1% in sales. Fast forward that to today, and you're looking at $5 billion or so for every 0.1 of a second in lag time. At the same time, brand consistency is so critical to grabbing those sales. A study by in 2019 told us that 81% of consumers buy on trust. And in many cases, we can link brand consistency and trust together. Now, while none of us are likely competing directly with Amazon on a day-to-day basis, whether we're a B2C, a B2B, or a B2B2C customer, we're all selling to the same consumers in Amazon. And so the expectations they have of a multi-billion dollar global company are the same expectations that they apply to your business's digital channels. Interesting. So customer expectation has changed for the better. But why is this so difficult for some organizations to overcome? Surely it's just a matter of time investment. Well, yes, yes and no. I think certainly throwing time and effort at a problem, even one that's as critical as this will get you there in the end. But who has unlimited sums of time and money to invest in this challenge? I guess we need to take a look at the problem and why the current technology choices available to vendors aren't necessarily helping the situation. Let's look at the evolution of the CMS landscape. Many of us have been in this space for a long time, Michael, myself, you. We've witnessed many platforms come and go. Ignoring the custom-built CMS platforms of the late 90s, we've seen both commercial and open source platforms weave their way through the marketer's needs, morphing from CMS to WCM or web content management through DXP, digital experience platforms, and back again to CMS. But the thing that has fundamentally changed everything for the marketer was the birth of the headless CMS in around 2015 or so. This was the first time that the focus of the CMS changed from the marketer to the technologist. And if you think about it, is a strange one on face value, as the entire purpose of a CMS platform is to make a technically complex task simple for the marketer. But however, the market grasped that paradigm. Now, fast forward 10 years, and according to Chief Martek, there are now over 14,000 vendors in the marketing technology space, all popping up at the top of your email inbox, trying to grab a slice of your composable world. And all, of course, with their own innovation, roadmap, and of course, AI. But an interesting point to note, that despite all of this interconnectivity, according to Q&Q research, only 45% of those marketers are fully utilizing their marketing technology investments that they have. And so this means what? Were they missold? Did they really need what that vendor had to offer? Or are they simply searching for the right tool to solve their overly complex channel problems? Interesting. So, clearly, there's a problem. We'd expect to see CMS vendors, I guess, solving this. How are they doing that? Well, the majority don't solve it at all. In fact, they can actually make it worse. Let me explain. According to Chief Martek, there are around 400 CMS or DXP vendors on the market today. And for the majority of these vendors, there are only two fundamental publishing architectures, the monolithic or traditional architecture, where the same vendor serves both the CMS authoring UI and the end customer experience. And then there's the headless architecture, where the platform offers a series of APIs for developers to suck content from. Now, I must admit that I borrowed this diagram from the great Preston So. For anyone who doesn't know Preston, he's one of the leading voices on global CMS architectures. You should absolutely go and check him out. But what this diagram is depicting is the complete separation between concerns, by both of those CMS architectures. The monolithic CMS platform, which, by the way, typically forms the cornerstone of most global organizations' content management strategies, is aimed purely at the marketer. It gives them a very strong set of tooling to help them create, deploy, and manage digital experiences all from within a single box. Whereas the headless CMS platform is aimed exclusively at the developer, giving them flexibility to architect and build digital experiences from the ground up as part of their technical programs. The problem with every CMS being one of these two types is that, on their own, neither will give enough flexibility to an organization who is trying to meet their customer across every channel. The monoliths are simply too technology restrictive, cumbersome, bloated, or costly to deploy. And the headless vendors require a complete experience build from the ground up every single time. So what does this mean in reality, in real terms, for organizations trying to reach every customer across every touchpoint? Well, it's not great news. As this quote from Taylor and Francis Group highlights, many of them end up investing a lot of time and effort into designing and executing digital transformations, with the majority of those who never actually realized the dream that they set off to discover. In my experience, many organizations end up with multiple CMS vendor platforms deployed across their org. Typically, that's the result of having a single strategic platform. But because of the architectural limitations, bottlenecks, and or maintenance cost, it results in markets going alone with their agencies on more agile, open source platforms, potentially. And ultimately, what that does is it creates a governance, a process, and a cost headache for that organization's IT and management. Okay, so we're getting to understand about these two opposing CMS architectures, solving problems for different teams within the organization, and the fact that these don't always play nicely with the marketer's vision of true omnichannel delivery. So what is different about the Crown Peak platform? Yeah, let me take that. So that's a very good question, Lucy. And of course, one that our customers ask us all the time. But let's get started with the fundamentals. In most monolithic CMS platforms, the same system that provides authoring UI also delivers a customer-facing front-end. And this is what we call a coupled architecture. In most headless CMS platforms, an API exposes content that can be consumed in real time by developers. Now, what makes Crown Peak different to those other platforms is how we separate content management from content delivery. In this diagram, we can see this horizontal dotted line. And this is where the Crown Peak platform stops and where the digital experience takes over. And the only way to get content across that dotted line is to publish it from the CMS once workflow has been successfully passed. Imagine a mail merge, if you will. Content managed by marketers is managed into templates created by developers. And then the files that are the output of that function are sent to any location worldwide. In fact, unlike traditional CMS platforms, not that you would, but you can actually switch off the Crown Peak platform, and the customer-facing experience will continue to function. Such is the level of decoupling. Interesting. And I can see some of the advantages on the marketing side. But what does this mean from a technological standpoint? How does this help the technologists? Really, it's all about flexibility. Flexibility to be able to publish content in the form and structure with the technology or framework of your choice, and then being able to deliver that content to any location in the world. In complete contrast to the monolithic platforms, Paul discussed that earlier, that rely on a single technology for their customer-facing channels. With Crown Peak, for instance, you can deploy content to any channel, even ones that have been considered legacy for some time, bringing a breath of new life to them, or even for technologies or frameworks that have not been invented yet. Wow. And what does this mean for marketers? In more granularity, what can they achieve with a decoupled architecture that was near impossible with traditional headless platforms? Fundamentally, organizations using a decoupled architecture can achieve more with less. So let me explain. The diagram on the bottom of the screen shows a typical project implementation using a traditional CMS. As you can see, there are multiple topics that must be addressed, from capacity planning, infrastructure sizing, deployment, development of the primary digital experience. And once you're live, which might be in one to two years after procurement of the platform, you then have to maintain the platform with updates to the underlying system or changes to each digital experience. And every change to the platform that is rolled out across all channels costs time, money, and staffs' productivity for marketers. Contrast that with decoupled architecture, the diagram on the top, it doesn't matter whether this is using Crown Peak's decoupled architecture or any other vendors, the benefits are huge. Firstly, the separation of management from delivery allows you to design and build each digital experience without honoring the constraints of the last. So if you suddenly need to target another channel, for example, wearable technology, all you need to do is understand how the content is expected and where that content must be delivered. This lets you deliver content to any channel, not just some, and at the pace of your customer's expectation. Secondly, you can build in parallel. So there's no waiting for the previous project to finish before you can start creating the next. And in this way, an organization can run parallel teams, agencies, or markets at the same platform, either in full transparency or each one separated and hidden from the rest. This way, more teams can get more stuff done in the end. And thirdly, you can build with performance and security in mind. So the ability to choose the way you deliver content means that when you come to design the specific experience, you can deploy what you need and only what you need. And there is no need for the typical CMS bloat that slows down your experience. So when we bring that back to the basics and what matters for marketers, that's all about speed, agility, and consistency across each digital experience. Yes, but it's that and more. It's also about empowering teams to be faster to market, like less blockers, more flexibility, more touch points, and more consistency. And in turn, these help you to reduce campaign friction and reduce cost of delivery. And so everyone wins. Brilliant. So now that we know what's possible for marketers, Paul, I'm going to turn back to you. Can we bring some of it to life for those of us where the mind is starting to wander? Yeah, absolutely. It's a lot of life, really, to understand the power of this. A few customers spring to mind. I think I've got four or so here. Let's start with one global financial services customer who we've worked with at Crown Peak since 2017. This customer had been on quite the acquisition journey. At the point we started working with them, they had five separate business units, all merged together, but each with their own technology strategy and CMS. So a lot of bloat across the organization. Now, as you can imagine, it created a nightmare scenario for their global marketing team who didn't really care about the technologies that they used. They just wanted to get the message out to their customers in a consistent and cohesive way. So the architecture of a Crown Peak allowed us to prove to the business that they could have a single CMS platform with a single marketing interface and use that to drive content across each digital touch point in a way that was consistent with their differing technology strategy. And of course, as their technology strategies evolved further, the marketing team would be isolated from any disruption of their customer experiences, changing technology standards. Amazing. And having come into Crown Peak customer success at the same time as the customer in question, I've been able to see how this has evolved in the past seven years and address some of those challenges. In fact, it's something that we see across many organizations faced with this challenge and just simply not think about doing it this way. They'd probably not even really consider that this option existed. Yeah, 100%. don't know you have the problem until you actually realize the bloat that you have across your organization. And we could simplify it. Let me give you another financial services example. In this case, we have a global insurance provider. This provider wanted to give the same omni-channel experience to their existing customers that they did their new ones. The only problem, their customer portal was a legacy system. It was built using WebSphere and it hadn't been maintained for many, many years. Now, in most cases, deploying new content look and feel traditionally requires a replatform. And that in turn potentially can cost millions of dollars. And that's millions of dollars that we don't really want to be spending today. But luckily for this customer, they'd used Crown Peak CMS for their existing web presences. And so simply creating a new project to deploy existing content to a different location was a breeze. We worked together with that customer to determine how their existing WebSphere platform was used to receiving content. And then we simply mimicked it. The result of that is a brand consistent, customer portal showcasing the same content to an existing customer, a repeat buyer as a new one, but with overlaid personalization, which is based upon what we know about the customer's account profile and needs. And by the way, then we used our headless API as well to deliver exactly that same content to their customer facing native mobile device application too. So it's not just about new and shiny digital channels and experiences, but also tackling issues with existing ones. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, that's where many of our customers realized the true efficiency gains by extending the usable life of their legacy platforms. If you think about it, the cost of replacing one of these pillars of a business can be in the millions. And with this decoupled CMS architecture, we simply include it as another channel. And then we can use that investment dollars, pounds, euros, whatever it would be elsewhere to delight our customers instead with engaging content. Let's take a look at a customer in the retail space because it's not just financial services insurance. This is a case study where Crown Peak helped a customer migrate their entire front end stack without needing to change the marketing focus. This customer, again, had been working with Crown Peak since 2017 and had a tight integration between Crown Peak and one of the monolithic commerce providers. And this drove their global portfolio of websites and online stores. But in 2022, this customer began to realize a revision of their technology strategy. And it was one that embraced composable delivery stacks. Now, in most cases, a redesign of the technology stack would result in the redevelopment of the entire ecosystem supporting it. However, the decoupled architecture, again, allows the customer to focus on simply replacing their front end delivery tier without having to change the underlying product marketing process at all. In fact, they didn't even have to duplicate any work. They simply created a new project in Crown Peak and chose to publish content from the original project in a different way. Working with that decoupled CMS platform in that way basically future-proofs any organization from an uncertain future, whether it be changes in technology strategy, merger and acquisition, indeed, other market pressures. Bringing this to life with our kind of case studies and customer stories is really where we're seeing our customers recognize the value of this flexible approach. And certainly, in my team, a core of what we are helping our customers to achieve. And this is over and above many of the kind of core features and functions that many CMS vendors offer. So give us one more. What about life sciences? We work with several customers. In that space, there's lots of regulations surrounding life sciences and healthcare. So how does a decoupled CMS help in this world? Yeah, I mean, let's take a look at one more. Actually, if you think about the Crown Peak business, most of us started in the life sciences and healthcare spaces. And really, it was about helping them get to market quickly in a way that was in compliance with the highly regulated world in which they operate. If you think about the ways in which the life sciences industry has been driven forward by the advancements in things like wearable technology over the past few years, they really need an architecture similar to Crown Peak to stay ahead of the patient and keep winning in their fields. Not only do marketers need to keep the website, kiosk, digital signage up to date and relevant, but patients also now have wearable devices to track their health. They have drug-specific mobile device applications that they use to send their vitals back to their MD, their GP, or their healthcare provider. And keeping the message consistent and controlled across all of these touchpoints, and they are still exactly that, customer touchpoints, of course, is vital. And with that in mind, many organizations would historically build separate content management platforms or frameworks to serve content to an increasing number of touchpoints without even considering what they already have. And of course, that decreases consistency across every touchpoint. So assume that you have a decoupled CMS that can deliver content across all of those channels. You can increase content control, consistency, and indeed the number of channels you can deploy. Two in that way. Brilliant. Thanks, Paul. Okay, so into our final section. After we conclude here, they will be taking your questions. I see a couple have already popped into the Q&A area. So please continue to add those. Have a think about what we've talked about, how it might apply to your business, and add those questions in. Michael and Paul will be around to help answer the questions and help you apply these theories to your own organizational challenges as well. So to finish, how can a decoupled CMS foster collaboration between marketing and IT functions in a way that empowers marketers to drive consistent performance experiences across every touchpoint? And Michael, I'm going to come to you on this. Sure. Yeah, let's take a look at Preston So's diagram again, the one that Paul showed earlier. The opposing challenges that are solved by each of the two major CMS architectures. On the right-hand side, you have the monolithic or traditional CMS architecture. Powerful authoring capabilities that are almost exclusively focused on the marketer. Really easy for the marketer to use, but challenging, costly, and inflexible for the marketer. And obviously, these opposing characteristics cause conflicts between the teams. Now look to the left. Headless CMS architectures solve flexibility challenges for technologists, but typically lack of sophisticated capabilities that are required by marketers. Again, a cause for conflict between these teams. So let's take a look at how we at Crown Peak see these teams. Here we go. We provide all of the capabilities that you would expect from a typical CMS aimed at the marketer. Visual editing, live preview, workflow management, multi-site, multi-channel experiences, AI support, and much more. And we do this regardless of the channel that you are targeting content to. Same applies to the developers. We provide them with everything that they need to do their job in their business. The best way possible. We give them the ability to use the technology or framework of their choice to deploy content statically, dynamically, or to use our REST and GraphQL APIs. We give them full control about the definition of content types and how the content is used inside an experience. In addition, development teams can work highly efficient on different projects and experiences separately and in parallel. For this reason, we offer built-in It's not there to create organizational bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and stagnated messaging. And that's why at Crown Peak, we don't think of marketers or developers as first-class citizens on their own, but of the content itself. Content should be the thing that we empower. The delivery of engaging content across every channel, consistently at the time the customer expects it. And thinking about it, this way allows us to help our customers to drive their teams to do more with less. Developers set the rules, marketers play within them, and customers set the playground that they want to play in. And at every point, Crown Peak supports the organization's growth. I want to finish on a final slide from Preston So. As organizations race to delight their customers within budgets that are typically getting squeezed more and more every day, they must shift to a CMS paradigm where the CMS platform works for and not against them. This space in between the two concerns of marketing and technologies, where organizations can thrive, is relatively unknown, all but for a few vendors. This space is where the decoupled or universal CMS lives, and a space that Crown Peak has been proud to occupy for plus 25 years. The result, customers who are unbound by typical market constraints and who can win their customers' hearts time after time. Brilliant. Thank you, Michael. And thank you, Paul, for the context as well. Thank you, everybody who's attended today's webinar on how decoupled architecture empowers marketers to do more faster. We still have time, and we want to open the floor to any questions that you may have. So I see a couple have already entered the Q&A, but if you have more, please do add them now. Let me start with one of the questions that we have. So decoupled sounds interesting. How might I get started? Lucy, shall I grab that one? Over to you. Perfect. I would say it doesn't have to be as challenging as you think. Sure, there's going to be a purchase in your future, but it doesn't mean that you have to rip and replace everything on day one. Get a decoupled CMS platform and use it to fill the gaps across your digital touchpoints. Connect it to your existing CMS so that you can consume your existing marketing-approved content, and then use that to transpose it across a wider set of digital channels. And then, I guess, over time, as you update all of those major digital touchpoints that you've got, you're going to end up naturally doing that with your decoupled CMS platform instead. So I'd say, start by getting it in there, and then, of course, start working it out across your business at a pace that is right for your organization and ultimately for your customers as well. Great. Thanks, Paul. Another great question that's come in. So one of the issues brands face with CMS marketing today is attribution and ROI. How do you integrate different data sources to prioritize, design, empower relevant and personalized marketing across all channels? I'll give you an opinion, and then, Michael, if you have one as well, you can jump in with a follow-up. I think, for me, I think there's a couple of questions here. There's, you know, how do you integrate different data sources across your organization? But I think there's also one about attribution and ROI, and I think we could take those individually. The great thing about a decoupled CMS platform is that we don't provide everything out of the box, and you must work with it. You know, in a truly composable world, you're free to build your architecture using any of those 14,000 vendors that we saw, you know, in the Martech slide that you choose. And so there are organizations that will provide all of these services together and CDPP platforms that will hold your customer data and analytics platforms that work with it, and, of course, things that will create crunch it together and give you the results. The beautiful thing about that architecture is you fundamentally get complete control of which platforms you stitch together in the journey you have for your customers. So it can actually give you more power and control in doing so. I think coming back to the first point, which is, you know, attribution and ROI. ROI is a really interesting thing, because when you think about a decoupled CMS, it does two things. It both makes you money and it saves you money. It makes you money because it allows you to work across a wider set of digital touch points than you can with many of the other CMS architectures we talked earlier. And, of course, that drives the right message across the right channels, getting the repeat customer time and time again. But, of course, there's also the saving money side. Less bloated or, you know, vector landscapes from content that you deploy. You can reuse the skills and technologies of your development teams or your partners, so there's not massive training exercises to do. And, of course, you can extend the life of those digital experiences across your organization that you previously thought were dead. And so it gives you a lot of options in both, you know, making and saving money on the investments that you've made as well. Awesome. It seems that we have a quality over quantity with questions today. So I think all of our attendees are off to review their processes and see where there's opportunities for improvements. Based on what we've discussed today, I'm sure lots of food for thought for everybody that has joined us. To wrap up today, thank you all very much for joining. We have enjoyed sharing this with you and hope that you have found the content useful. Many fruitful discussions to be had off the back of this, we hope. All of the contact details of the Crown Peak speakers are available on the slide on the screen. So we'd love to hear from you. All of us at Crown Peak wishing you a great start to 2025. And thanks again for joining us today. Hey, perfect. Well, thank you so much, Paul, Michael and Lucy, you know, for being here today and Crown Peak for making our webinar possible. And last but not least, I really want to take a moment to thank our audience for their time and their attention today. Just know that the webinar was recorded. So if you wanted to watch it, take additional notes or share it with your team, that link of the recording will be emailed to you. So just keep an eye on your inbox for that. In the meantime, I'd like to thank you all once more and we'll see you on the next one. Take care, everyone.