[Music] in this complex world the traditional approach of content management is no longer a good fit and I want to just spend one quick slide for context to explain how CMS architecture traditionally used to work there is a CMS or digital experience platform back-end that is there to manage the digital experience this is where content is created and orchestrated by the pure review happens and all the kind of low-level stuff that needs to happen in a CMS and the second component is the front-end it's also called head or delivery tier and both of these components come typically from the same vendor so you see that these are in this dotted box so they are kind of decoupled they live physically on different servers but they are essentially the same product and the front-end that is there to deliver the digital experiences to the end-user is is baked in it's intertwined with a back-end and it's really hard to make changes in one of these components without having to change the others and that other bit these are the big disadvantages or risks that come with this traditional architecture it is a monolithic design where everything is baked in and intertwined content design and experiences are are very hard to separate and at its core this is a solution that is really designed only for one purpose and that is to run a website and it can't be good at that but as soon as those requirements change that architecture makes it very hard to stay successful the basic principle is super simple again we have the CMS back end where the preview happens where the business users work and the second component here most manufacturers of vendors call that content as a service or casts that is a micro service for content so it is an interface that can deliver content fragments to any other machine to any other system that's asking for content fragments so technically speaking it's a restful content API it said it's an industry standard for exchanging data between systems completely decoupled from that there is the front end application and that no longer sits in this dotted box that can be any programming language it can be any vendor it can be any environment any physical hardware or any software that is fetching the content from CMS and it can do its best to present that content to the outside world so what we see is we have a very clear division of labor where the user experience code lives only in the front-end application and that is developed completely independent from CMS so it's much easier to make a change in the front-end without having to touch the backend simultaneously so if you ever get to write a test on what headless CMS is this is kind of the textbook definition it's a decoupled architecture plus the rest API for exchanging data that is what we call headless architecture in our case a headless CMS doing all of that with one front-end that can in itself already be beneficial but it really becomes powerful when you look at more touch points all right here in this diagram you see that there's the website there's also a mobile application or a PWA that can be a shop digital signage of voice assistance or anything else all of these can fetch content from the content as a service interface and what is important is that all these front ends they fetch the content based on the exact same integration approach so if you decide to add a new touch point which has become important within your customers journey you do not have to touch the backend you don't have to create a new CMS you essentially can tap into the same interfaces and expose that content to the new touch points and also you can do you can use different technologies for each of these touch points and you can use what works best for the touch points and have separate teams working on those and with our customers what we learn is that alone makes it much easier to staff projects because you no longer need experts who can do who have CMS know-how and touch point know-how and know how to manage a monolithic application but you can have specialized teams working only on touch points making updates to the user experience much faster [Music] there's a number of other factors that drives the headless hype and I just want to quickly mention a bunch of these one is mobile apps we've had them before at some of our customers they have even gone so far to say that my desktop website has the second priority so it's even beyond mobile first they say we don't care so much about the user experience in the browser what is important for us is that the apps works just beautifully and like I said earlier and headless approach works great with kind of this mobile application first approach progressive web apps that is a topic that we're going to hear more of later that is the second biggest driver of this hype and in my eyes it's it's even more important than the first one progressive web apps they kind of bridge the world between web or mobile web and the app experience it's kind of best of both worlds it has benefits for the end users but also have has a lot of benefits for organization who want to tap into the power of pwace they can save a lot of work reduce redundancy and their code bases and so on and create great user experience PWA based and we're gonna hear more about that later like I just said third one that is more technical aspects there's a lot of ready to use frameworks you've you might have heard some of the buzzwords that are around like who react vu or angular all of those are kind of libraries for programmers shortcuts to create user experience and many of these are just optimized for headless CMS and that can be a tremendous driver for a short time to market and agility but agility that is the killer argument that is what I see as the focus of why headless is so great it is really super tragic agility you know I want to show you one on one slide why I think that makes such a big difference we've seen customer facing front ends before they can span from the web experience up to let's say packaging insert so that's kind of an analogue artifact that you can also power from from a digital experience platform or from a CMS but what you also see but is not so visible though are the mission-critical back and systems so that is where your business users work and like I said earlier it's typically more than one and we as a CMS vendor we would love the idea of being the center of the universe everything is content and everything circles around content but in reality that is not how our customers operate for them content management is one subsystem of many there is the shop engine that can be the CDP there's the product database there can be legacy application homegrown applications all of those systems are equally important and all of them need to be to be available to be up and running in order to create the best experiences at the front end so what the headless architecture now does is it puts kind of an abstraction layer between the back end and the front end so instead of having to integrate everything with everything there is kind of a handbook for API is that can be leveraged from all of these back-end applications and the people designing the user experiences at the touch points they can virtually look at that hand book and tap into the power of those API is to create great user experiences and that decouples creating user experiences from the backends and vice versa so you could for example run a user test on the web shop or you could update the product database or you could create a team that has a new idea at packaging that needs content and you can try those ideas and short iterations in short sprints without having to wait for a huge monolithic application being pushed through a major relaunch so in the old world some of our customers would only lounge their front-end would only update their front end three or four times a year because there was so much effort into developing and testing and then kind of lifting the whole monolithic block up from one major version to the next but today everyone wants to step away of that people rather want to have hundreds of thousands of updates a year and you can only reach that through decoupling back-end touch back-end systems and front-end touch points that gives you a lot of flexibility in terms of when you update what in terms of how fast you can update user experiences and that is what I think really drives the headless high from kind of an organizational and management perspective I quickly sum up the business values of Y is headless architecture so great what what is in for our customers what's in for you number one it enables content for any channel today or in the future and it decouples back-end and front-end tools technically but also in terms of the skill set that which makes it easier to staff those projects we see a much faster time to market for updating the user experience we all can also step away from Big Bang waterfall style relaunches and instead go with this micro service approach where small incremental improvements are being made everything is data-driven and evidence based and lastly the per it's the perfect setup for agile organizations that can really help you become a faster player in digital business