Ep1 – How to Choose Digital Experience Platform (DXP)

[00:00:12] Speaker A: All right, well, hey there everybody. So my name is Tad Reeves and I'm joined here by Raph Winterpack and we have decided to do a little recording here in a discussion on how to choose a next generation digital experience platform. And we're going to go in a little bit to what would go into that. Well, first of all, what even is a DXP or a digital experience platform? How does that differ from a traditional content management system? Why would you want to choose this? What would you want to think of, why is this an important discussion? And give you some food for thought for what is really arguably one of the most important technology purchases that I think that a company can make because of how many things it touches. So I guess some introductions in order. So, Raph, I'll let you go first. You can talk to who you are and what you sure, sure. [00:01:08] Speaker B: The name is Ralph Winterpock. I've been working in the industry for a number of years now, first days as a software developer back in the late 90s actually, and working with content management systems since then and obviously they've evolved over the years. And one of the things that is really interesting here too is that we've mentioned here, what do you do with your corporate site that's running on this ten year old legacy CMS? Right? Well, I was probably there at that ten year ago mark, so it's going to be interesting to talk about that, but recently also acquired a couple of certifications. So became an Adobe sites practitioner and also Adobe Analytics. [00:01:46] Speaker A: Oh cool. [00:01:47] Speaker B: Recertified in those certifications just recently. So feels good to have those under my belt. [00:01:52] Speaker A: Nice. Yeah, nice. I'm going to have to go in that direction. So, Tad Reeves here, I've been working in enterprise infrastructure and related fields for a while. I think I did my first content management type job in 2002, setting up a SharePoint site 2001 SharePoint site back then. But I've done all kinds of different CMS. And then for the last twelve years or so, I've been in Adobe Land, or before that, the Day CQ land, which is a big content management system, and then now a digital experience platform. And my specialty or my focus area really has been how that gear interacts with all the other gear that you've got, deployment processes, DevOps, all that sort of thing. Here we go, let's talk about this. Awesome. So in terms of the goal for this talk, I guess what we had kind of bulleted out as to stuff that we want to go over is if you said you got a company and for the most part, we're talking about larger companies, mid to large sized companies. And you've got a content management system, some sort of a big piece of gear that runs your main corporate website or your main internal website, intranet type of a thing. And you're looking at either replacing it or whether or not you got to replace it. What would you look at? You've heard everything's going to the cloud. Everything is all AI and it writes it all for you and you need something new because your stuff is old. So what would be the things that you would think of and what should you consider when you're going to do that? So I guess you wanted to just talk about a little bit of the state of the market there. We're not going to talk about specific products and try to sell you something. So both Ref and I have been in the Adobe world for a while and our main focus is on Adobe Experience Manager and its role in the company. But we're going to try to stay platform agnostic right now and stay away from that of just like what should you consider if all the options were on the table? If you just want to say, good, I've got something totally new that I'm going to do. And let's just say you're doing something like you're going to launch a new brand and you're going to roll off to the big corporate website. So many things are on the table. What should you consider when going for something new? [00:04:31] Speaker B: Well, I think also in addition to that, there's organizations who are experiencing those kinds of things that I think a lot of us are now taking for granted, right? I mean, obviously marketing groups, they want to take advantage of these new features and capabilities of these big DXPs. But I think also there's those things that we're again taking for granted, right? So I remember the days of having to be up on a Friday night into Saturday morning doing a deployment. It takes hours. We would sometimes meet at the office. Everybody would bring in these snacks and we would have all this junk food on the table and we would deployment process, right? We're not really doing that anymore. But there are still some organizations that are experiencing those kinds of pain points, right? These long deployment cycles. What about when a particular server goes down and they have to restore that from a backup that's a couple of days old and it sets them back? Those kinds of things we kind of take for granted nowadays that aren't really a problem. But there are still some organizations that are experiencing that. So I think that's something worth just mentioning there too that people are still sort of carrying that burden of a legacy system. [00:05:41] Speaker A: Totally. And I think that some of those burdens come down to artificial limitations that you may have put on what's the products that you're going to put forward to your customers, whether it's internal or external customers. And a lot of times that's based on how much gear you could have afforded, like whether or not you did something like some crazy video thing that you really wanted to do you just didn't have enough servers to do it. Maybe because you were hosting it all in the data center, you just didn't have enough storage. So good. We're not going to do video right now because we just don't have room to store all that. Well, if you're freed on those shackles, then would you still decide that or would you do more or do you just not have a team that's capable of producing the content that you would store in that sort of way or what? So it's good to think of. I think the other thing too is that you and I have had these conversations too, when somebody says, well, good, so this one that you guys are working with, is it the best? And then having those conversations, I think it's really similar to when somebody says, well, what's the best truck for what? What's the best thing to I live in Chicago, what should I get? Your answer might be, dude, you need an Ebike. You don't need a car. You don't even have to park it, then that's what you need. Maybe based on the requirements. Or find an Ebike is not going to tow my horse trailer. So good. So maybe it's a different set of requirements. But it's such a diverse market right now with so many super cool systems that can do so many things that I think it bears a lot of discussion and breaking apart what the problem is. [00:07:28] Speaker B: Yeah. And obviously what somebody is using now as well kind of will inform what they need to go to. Right. Migration obviously is a really huge aspect for especially a large organization where they're having multiple websites, multiple entities that are stored in a CMS. Is there a migration effort that has to happen for that? Is it an entirely new system? What does that look like? Can they retire old content? Are they keeping it around just for compliance reasons or regulatory reasons? Right. When I worked at a bank a number of years ago, one of the requirements that they had is that they had to show what a website looked like to a customer at a given point in time. So you can imagine what that version history might have looked like given those kinds of requirements. [00:08:14] Speaker A: Oh my goodness. [00:08:15] Speaker B: Build that system that supported that for, like I said, those kinds of requirements. But nowadays I think we have, again, one of those things that we take for granted. We have all this version history, we have all these different tools that you can use to bring back systems and bring back content the way it looked on a particular day. It's pretty amazing. [00:08:36] Speaker A: Yeah. Before we dive hard into requirements. So how would you define, I guess, the difference between what is a content management system and then what is a digital experience platform? And once I got to get it off my chest, I really do loathe the term experience on this because I feel like it's one of these meaningless pieces of marketing jargon. But how would you define the difference between a content management system and a digital experience platform? [00:09:04] Speaker B: Yeah, and I think a content management system or a CMS is sort of an older kind of legacy term that we've been thrown around for a number of years now. And really what a content management system was or is still is a set of tools that lets somebody who's nontechnical make changes to a particular website or an experience, if you want to call it that, without involving it. So that was sort of the goal of a content management system. Now that we have digital experience platforms, it's not only encompassing that content management system, but now you can also manage content or experiences for various channels, or actually all of your channels. So you can manage things like pieces of content that might be delivered on a kiosk or print or some other that isn't necessarily a website. So that's kind of how I see a DXP versus a CMS. It's an evolved platform that's all encompassing for your content. [00:10:01] Speaker A: That's right. And these days too, in the early days of a CMS, you could probably say that 95. Take something like take the state of CMS in 2007, right before the proliferation of smartphones. Almost everybody who's accessing your content is doing it on a desktop or laptop. So they're on a big rectangular screen and they're interacting it with a keyboard and a mouse at the office. Yeah, either at the office or at home. And the people who are putting stuff into it are all doing it at the office, they're not doing that at home. And then fast forward to today and you've got so many different lenses that are looking in at your content, from a mobile app to mobile websites, tablets, desktop, desktop at work versus desktop at home. Then you've got all the different personas. You've got a logged in experience versus a not logged in experience. You've got a returning customer, you've got all these ways of tracking that stuff in real time without having the person's identity already. So that's a huge difference between just managing the About US page and then the pretty picture of your corporate headquarters. It's a lot deeper set of things that you have to be able to manage. [00:11:24] Speaker B: Right. And I think something else that's evolved too over the years is that back in the early days of content management systems, at least the one that I used to work in, which was enrollment team site, it was really hard to build a true preview of what content might look like for a user. Right. I think nowadays they've gotten much better, so they have a true preview. Like you have an actual way to see the content as if it were actually live on a site, which is kind of nice evolve there as well. [00:11:54] Speaker A: Right, and then you have this other idea too, of an experience that you create. And by experience you're talking about something like a way of interacting with data that you have. Let's just say take something like take something that everybody's used to like. Take Zillow. Right? Where you've got the view of here are the properties in an area. Here are the ones that are for sale, for rent, or recently sold. Here's how I'm going to pop up and drill into it and see what schools are nearby and so forth. That flow is going to be the same. They've obviously made it basically the same on mobile versus desktop. So if you go into it, you're going in with a common set of expectations of how you're going to interact with this just ridiculous volume of data that Zillow is then presenting through to you and being able to manage those other smaller experiences from place to place. Like whatever. You got a restaurant locator or something like that. You design a restaurant locator and you've got a lens for interacting with that data and you want that to be on more than one place and you got to make it touch and tablet friendly or something like that and stick it someplace else without having to recreate the entire page and reprogram it from scratch. [00:13:12] Speaker B: Right? [00:13:17] Speaker A: I think we've got a little bit of the difference between a content management system and an experience platform because in this case, something that would enable one to be able to manage all those different experiences and not just being a place. I mean, a lot of times too, we've seen this again and again, that companies will buy a digital experience platform and they're still just using it as a CMS. They're really just putting pictures and text into it and making a bunch of pages. They're not really using any features that weren't already out in 2010. Yeah, go ahead. [00:13:58] Speaker B: I was going to say something else that we can probably talk a little bit more about too, is when we're talking about content, what exactly are we referring to? Because that's something that's important too. Right. We usually think of as text, right. But then you also have imagery. So we have digital assets that's obviously made its way into becoming sort of a main component in some of these digital experience platforms as well. But what about other things like the smarts behind it? What about analytics? What about things like search engine optimization? What about personalized experiences? What do those all look like, all those smarts behind it? I think that's sort of another sort of piece that we can define into what is content, what's being stored in these massive repositories as well. [00:14:44] Speaker A: That's right. And then when you get into that, then you go right into the slippery slope of how is all of that then generated? Is that all generated just by people who are manually uploading things? Or are some of those pages not only are they automatically generated from things like a schema, like a taxonomy, where you add some images and some text and they can automatically build a page of like here's recipes that contain cheesy french fries or something like that, but more importantly, something that would be analytics driven based on. So we got people who are coming in and they're first time visitors from Thailand, then this is what we're going to show them. Because analytics wise, this is what has performed better. And you can go and have pages that are dynamically rearranged based on that or a B tested based on that. [00:15:33] Speaker B: Right. I think the example that I've always seen in terms of that too, is if somebody lives in a Wintry sort of environment, you're not going to show them beach wear necessarily. Right, right. Those kinds of personalized experiences I think are important to call out there too, but they've become even more personalized now, especially with things like developing content that is used for things like real time CDP. That's a big one there too. That's been around for a little while now too. But I think there are a lot of people that want to get on that bandwagon as well. [00:16:04] Speaker A: That's right. [00:16:04] Speaker B: Delivering that truly one to one personalized content. [00:16:07] Speaker A: That's right. And have a much faster feedback loop than what people are used to. Because from all of us that have been used to being digitally marketed to for a while a lot of times used to feedback loops of like I said, I don't want to be on this mailing list a week and a half ago and I'm still getting email sort of a thing. Or you're still getting advertised for a product that you bought two weeks ago. I don't need to be told to buy this product, I already bought it. But more stuff of how I could use it or a service that I could use to get more out of it or something like that, that's what I should be being marketed to. But driving all those campaigns and messaging that's on the website and so forth and tying that all together, it's deep. Yeah, okay. I guess one way that I want to kind of go about this then, is let's take an example, or more than one example of two different kind of use cases of where a company might be and where they might want to go with this, or what they might want to think about. Because almost nobody's so you take a big content management system or a big experience platform like AEM or Sitecore or Equia or any one of these right, like and they're going to try to sell you on good. You should build this thing on Drupal. The problem with that is it's not like buying a new Tesla or something like that. It's not just a drop in sort of a thing where you can just say good, I'm going to take this piece of software and uninstall the old one and install the new one and put some things in it. And I'm up kind of a thing because of aside from maybe finance systems in big companies, I don't know of anything that generally ties into more individual parts of the company. On average, like your average big corporation, your content management system that's driving the website has its fingers in ERP systems, in ordering in your sales pipeline and all these different things. So there's a lot more thought that needs to kind of go into it, whether you're just trying to upgrade maybe, or you're thinking of spinning off a brand and doing something totally brand new or something like that, or ejecting yourself out of corporate data centers, and that gives you an opportunity to go and consider something new. [00:18:37] Speaker B: Yeah, there's sort of that aspect of it when you're deciding on which one to go with. So it's the size of the organization in some cases. What I've seen, at least in my experience, is that you have a small group of people, a small group of either marketers or they're in a particular group, and they want to use this shiny new tool. They go out and buy it, they license it, but they don't talk with all the other groups. So the other groups catch wind of this and they're like, oh, that's really cool, I want to start using that as well. How do we get on that platform? So I think one of the things about and this is maybe not necessarily something that's inevitable, but it does happen. So if that's the case, you want to look at something that's very scalable, right? You want to look at something that sort of grow with those kinds of evolutions in an organization where you have that kind of growth, really, right? [00:19:25] Speaker A: Yeah, indeed. All right, good. Let's take a couple of different use cases because then we can take some of these questions and things that you should ask yourself. Or if you were going to do let's just say you're going to do a project to really say, good, we're going to rip out what we've got right now, or we're going to replace what we've got right now and we're going to get something new. How would you then go and structure that? Let's take one example of something similar to a company that shall remain nameless, but how about you get something like a manufacturing company, somebody who's got one of these big F 500 type of a company, relatively big footprint, international footprint, international website. So they're already translated. They're in multiple languages. They do some ecommerce, not maybe a ton, it's not Amazon.com or something like that, but they do some ecommerce on their site. But they've got a global audience. They've already got a let's see and they've got it tied into all different things in their company, right? So you take something like that and they're on? Let's just say they're on premise. Let's just say they're in corporate data centers right now, so they're thinking about moving to the cloud. So that gives them a pretty broad bunch of things that they should consider, right? Yeah. [00:21:02] Speaker B: So they have a lot of products, right? They're a manufacturing company, so they have. [00:21:05] Speaker A: A lot of products. [00:21:07] Speaker B: They have a lot of information about those products, right? So that product comes down to things like its metadata, things like its imagery, things like its description. There's all these different attributes that are associated with that particular piece of content, let's just say. Right, so the sheer volume of it is something to consider. How does that change over time? So I think if they're looking at choosing a digital experience platform, I think that they want to try to do it or try to look at a system in such a way that content can carry over various versions of it. It can be upgraded easy enough. So that's one thing to look at as well, right. I don't think they want to go through a painful upgrade every other year either. I think that's something that these bigger organizations have experienced. So that's one thing I would look at in a DXP as well, is how future proofed is my content if I go into this particular system, right? [00:22:04] Speaker A: So let's just talk about that right there too. Because this comes into both, I guess, sometimes the disparity with how a content management system or DXP gets sold and what ends up happening on year three of that thing being in use. And a lot of times there is a wide disparity of how did it really shake out. Because, okay, so let's just say you got a company. Let's just say they're on an old team site, or let's just say some old net nuke or something old, right? Something that they definitely want to not be on anymore, right? A SharePoint site from 2006, something that they're so fine they're going to get all the way off of it. They're going onto a completely new platform. That means that they're going to be training up some internal developers. So let's just say they hire an architect who's going to be the main guy on this new system, right? Let's say they hire a lead dev, two lead devs or something like that. That's not the estimation of effort of the project. The project is going to probably be eight developers working for six months, working to go and change this thing over and slurp out all the old content and so forth. What happens when they go live, though, and those contracted hired guns roll off? Are they going to be able to keep this thing up? Are they going to be able to maintain it? Do they have the firepower to be able to make this thing continue to be upgraded and so forth? Is it going to be a continuing parade of vendors that they end up having to go through to be able to keep this thing going. This is something that you and I have seen where somebody goes in am is a beast like that and it's notoriously difficult to hire for. So they get a vendor to come in, do it, and maybe some parts of it are awesome, some parts of it not so awesome. And then they're left with it left holding the ball. And one architect who also is forced to be a manager is not going to be able to keep that up. [00:24:20] Speaker B: Right? And that's one thing that the company has to do, is to hire those kinds of resources in order to maintain that system and look at potentially upgrading it and keeping it alive. Right, but have the case where that system is either end of life and now they're forced sometimes an organization might be forced into a new system because there's no longer support for it. They just can't keep anymore. So that's obviously a challenge that you want to try to avoid. Not that you always have to be on the bleeding edge of technology necessarily, but I think you want to try to stay updated as much as you can. And the system that allows you to do that I think is key. [00:24:56] Speaker A: Yeah, but I think that if you dive into this idea of personnel first, of just of that being a first concern when deciding what kind of a platform you get, let's just say you've got a really strong front end unit. You've got a bunch of strong front end devs, you have the ability to hire more front end devs, you got a lot of good designers, you've got a lot of good UX type people, and maybe you don't have a lot of turnover in terms of back end devs, if you've got that. And the ability to have a bunch of guys who can stand up something on angular or something like that and they can make a big crazy front end that is abstracted from whatever the back end is that's holding all of the content. The number of systems that you could use in that are relatively wide in terms of like if you're just going to run the whole thing headlessly, you could go with one of these very headless first type systems where you don't need to be all in on one of these big platforms and only have all your net developers or Java developers or something like that who are going to be you're going to have to rely on for every single thing that you want to do in the future. [00:26:06] Speaker B: That's right. And that's a really nice separation of concerns there as well. [00:26:10] Speaker A: Right. [00:26:11] Speaker B: Because you can have these back ends which are sort of agnostic from that rendering or however that's being displayed, which is using a different front end sort of infrastructure, which is kind of nice. So all they really are concerned with is that that content is coming, that it's performant, that it's correct. Right. That they can aggregate appropriately. So that, I think, like I said, is a nice separation of concerns. [00:26:34] Speaker A: Yeah, but then not every company is like that. I mean, I just gave an example of a theoretical company. I unfortunately have only, I think, seen one or two of those, like in the last five years, where you have a really strong front end crew like that that could take on a completely new CMS without too much problem. They say, okay, here are the new back end APIs, let's roll with it. I've only seen one or two that even could do something like that if they wanted to. [00:27:04] Speaker B: Right? Well, I guess then the other side of that is the whole monolithic platforms, right? So things like Am where they're the whole package, right? So they do the rendering, they do all the content management authoring kinds of activities. They have various integrations, so they're doing everything right. But then I think what they've been also sort of selling over the years is that they can also be available as a hybrid, sort of a CMS. So meaning that they can do head optional, right? [00:27:39] Speaker A: Right. [00:27:39] Speaker B: So if you have those kinds of resources, but you still have Adm, either because you inherited it or you've been using it for a number of years, you just want to sort of replace what that whole front end architecture looks like. You could do it. Right, because it is available via APIs. So it's kind of nice when you have a system that can do that as well. [00:28:01] Speaker A: Got to tell you that's one of the things that I'm very interested in that's coming up for Adobe Summit is we got some sessions on the project that was called Helix for a while and now is called Franklin. It's just this whole, like, where you can have your content all in a bunch of Google Docs and it basically just comes up and renders headlessly and blazingly fast. And I'm super interested in where that's going. There's a couple pretty big companies that are publicly out there. One of them, which you and I have seen a good bit, that is going to have their stuff in Franklin. But to have the option of either, yeah, you could do it all headlessly, or in some cases, like you've got one of these manufacturing companies or something like that, right. They don't have an app. There's no app that people are going to. So if you said, hey, it'll look great in all of your different applications, almost everybody's looking at this corporate site on their desktop. Some people are looking at on a mobile. But fine, you don't get anywhere with really putting all this work into abstracting it into front end, back end. And having that separation of concerns is more work that way. And so selling only on everything should be. Headless. It's not really the case if you wanted to build something on an existing set of themes and components. Like in the Am world, you've got core components where you can just say, good, I want a drop down, I want a breadcrumb here, I want a menu here, I want some faceted search list this way. Then you've got a lot of that pre built and you don't have to reinvent the wheel to be able to make your website and have somebody who's going to do all this crazy front end work for you because it doesn't get you anywhere, right? [00:29:56] Speaker B: And the hope there is that if you have resources that are specialized in that front end technology, you think that they're not starting from having to reinvent the wheel, right. Hopefully they have frameworks and sort of set of tools that will help them hit the ground running when they're getting content rendered. [00:30:14] Speaker A: Indeed, indeed. Well, one thing I want to talk about too, while we still have some time in this too, we've talked a bit about content. When you're choosing one of these platforms too, you can't really get out of also talking about asset management because so much of making an experience is dealing with all of your assets, as we've seen when going and doing evaluations of different platforms that you could go to. In some cases, maybe it's great at rendering things headlessly. But if you have to, then go and purchase and run and implement a completely different solution for managing your hundreds of thousands of graphics and product images and experience like fragments of things and videos and videos for internal and external consumption and where those videos going to be utilized and so forth, that is its own really inextricable question. To be able to have then for each one of these platforms, what do you look for then in an asset management platform? What are some things that you would then go and say, good, what do we need to be looking at? [00:31:36] Speaker B: Yeah, well, scalability obviously is one huge thing because if you have that kind of volume, right. I think also when you have something like a digital asset management system, I would want something that also has some smarts built into it. So I'm a photographer outside of work, right. And when I do something like upload some of my images, it's kind of nice to see that these tags are automatically set on it, that I don't have to go in, tag it with bridge and architecture and Chicago skyline and that kind of thing. I like to see those kinds of smarts built into it. I also like to see that depending on where that particular asset is to be delivered, the system is smart enough to know what particular rendition should be delivered. So it's optimized for a particular channel. That's another thing I would like to see too, and then just it being organized, right. I think a lot of organizations struggle with how they can organize that content in this dam. Right. So you're looking at the central repository, but are a lot of people uploading the same images? Are there ways that the asset management tool can dedup some of this for me? Because there's multiple versions of this particular your company logo, for example. Right. So being able to help me in those sorts of areas is really nice too. And then where is this asset being used? Right. So over the years, it may be included in a number of different website pages. So now I'm going to swap it out. But what other sites am I going to impact if I do that? Right, right. So giving me that kind of ability to see what those insights are into that asset and how it's being used is pretty important too, as a marketing person. [00:33:11] Speaker A: That's right. Or is it still being used? Because if you've got something I used to do work for a major footwear company and you've got things that change around all the time and you've got assets that are still out there in use on maybe some little landing page or something like that that you forgot about. Is last year's stuff still out there or should it be rotated through with something new? [00:33:39] Speaker B: Right. And also is that content being delivered in the most optimized way? Right, yes. So I don't want to be on my phone and pull up this four megabyte image multiple times every time I navigate to the next page. Right. So smart ways of doing some caching and having use of CDNS and such I think is pretty important too. So it being able to work well across from beginning to end in the experience is, I think, also very key. [00:34:07] Speaker A: I'll tell you a story about that. So there's one company that I was working for that was rolling into mainland China and they were trying to debug, why are some of these pages taking so long to load? And they were getting reports from people on the ground that some of these pages, they're just regular product pages, just silly thing where it's supposed to be an image, a couple thumbnails and then know the chrome around the page and that's it. So it shouldn't be anything big. These pages are taking like three minutes to load. In mainland China or in many places in Asia, they were taking just minutes to load, whereas in the US they were taking like 8 seconds. So it's like, what's the problem here? And some of these problems came down to really large images. When you're on the desktop, you didn't see the fact that, yes, you're just pulling in an image that is cache and you're not seeing these bandwidth problems. Whereas you're on the other side of the world, you don't realize that that image, that was a four meg image, or in some cases a 20 meg image. These are like, you could put it on a billboard and they were using it and pulling it in as the product shot. And in some cases even the thumbnail was like a 20 meg JPEG or a ping that was being pulled in. So to optimize all that delivery and also obviously managing all that manually is so labor intensive. If you are having to individually cut all those images, you just want to just have a system that is ensuring that the images are delivered the right size, are optimized. You basically just end up with a perfect lighthouse score sort of a thing when you're all done right. [00:35:53] Speaker B: And the optimization of the assets is one thing. And I think that a system that can also differentiate something like an image from a video, from a document, from whatever other kind of asset you might be storing there too. I don't know where some of these various digital experience platforms are as far as the maturity of how it can help you organize some of that content, but I think in cases you still have to lay out what that folder structure needs to look like and who has access to those various areas, because I don't think that can automatically happen. So no matter what, you're going to have to have a certain level of content architecture that's going to be implementation. [00:36:34] Speaker A: That's right. So another end of this, and this is, I guess the exciting unknown end of it, is how much is AI going to feed into this? Because AI, obviously, it makes for amazing presentations, it makes for awesome keynotes, it makes for these things that make CMOS go, oh, I have to buy this shiny new object because obviously I can fire half of my staff now because AI is going to do it. Or something like that, right. When a lot of that ends up being hyperbole. But still, there are some really legitimate things that are implemented already and implemented well. They're not just future stuff of robots taking over the world sort of a thing they're already implemented and they're already really a thing that people should be considering can be done in both a digital asset platform, but also an experience management platform. [00:37:29] Speaker B: Yeah. And there's even sort of different personas that I think should be interested in this as well. Right. So, marketing side, I would be very interested in AI doing something like automatically creating some product pages that have various levels of information about that particular product. For example, right. Content writing itself by use of AI, but then on the development side, so now I'm a developer and can I tell AI to whip up a function that's going to do this particular thing? I'm going to send it these parameters and I expect this back as a result. And it's going to write that code for me. Right. Different ways that you can use this AI? Potentially, I think it's exciting, it's scary in some ways, like you said, does CMO all of a sudden fire a bunch of people because it doesn't need them anymore because we have AI. Right, but I think what we know about AI, it can be good, obviously, but then there's also the ways that it can be misused, I think, as well, for example. [00:38:26] Speaker A: That's right. But I guess what I would be excited about if I was a CMO or if I was a smart one, is to not think about how many people can be fired, but to think about how many the capabilities, maybe the five years ago capabilities of the platform that they could now actually have the personnel bandwidth to try to use. Whereas before you're just on the bare bleeding, just the bare minimum of like, okay, we have at least the right sizes of graphic uploaded here, and we've got graphics for every product, and we don't have typos all over the place or whatever. They basically just the bare minimum of running a CMS. And you're not saying, well, how are you changing your experiences for new versus returning customers? And are you giving a different experience for these different age groups? Are you giving a different experience for West Coast versus East Coast or Florida versus Minneapolis? Sort of a yeah, no, we're not even there. That'd be great to go there, but we're not there. Obviously, with a little bit of AI assistance, then you could get out of that a bit between the AI assisted writing or just things like AI assisted translations. A lot of companies would love to be they do actually have publix in all kinds of different countries and they're selling all over the world. And yeah, their corporate website is still in English, and it's only in English and maybe English and Spanish or something like that. And the Spanish one's different because they just haven't gotten around to translating it right. If they had some help there. [00:40:09] Speaker B: Right. And I think it could potentially be more automated now, too. So with the translation workflows that typically happen, you have to have somebody of an actual human who does those translations because they have to be aware of things that are culturally appropriate. For example, right now, can AI do something like that? That's pretty interesting, too. That would be a very interesting use case to see that a little bit more automated. [00:40:32] Speaker A: Yep, that's right. Because at that point, too, you're not talking, hey, Google, or hey, Bing, or whatever, write my resume, cover letter for me so that I get hired. You know what I mean? You're not trying to have it do generative AI like that. You're just trying to just say, give me the right phrase for more help, click here, or something like that. You know what I mean? You see, it's this long in German, and it was this long in Dutch. Do you need all those words? Is that right? [00:41:07] Speaker B: Well, it's because in German, it's all one word. Right. So as far as AI, so I think there's a couple of organizations that have been using AI already. AI and machine learning, right? So Adobe I know they have Adobe sensei. And I've seen that being used in things like their digital asset management tool. I'm curious to see where some of the other big players out there are going to be using it as well. And does that come into a factor when somebody's choosing a DXP as well? [00:41:37] Speaker A: Right, exactly. Because obviously you've used Creative Suite or Creative Cloud for lots of things. There's amazing uses of Sensei that are already there for things like Content Aware erasing and things like that. Or these remix things in Premiere Pro where you can say, I've got these cuts and here's my music, cut it so that when the big hit comes in the techno, the guy is going off of the jump, or something like that and it does it for you. [00:42:06] Speaker B: Stuff like that. [00:42:09] Speaker A: Sorry, go ahead. [00:42:10] Speaker B: No, I was just going to say the AI that I've been using in that Creative Suite, specifically in Lightroom, right. So the latest version that I'm working in, and this is sort of a side project that I did recently, I created a bunch of corporate headshots for people, right? So what the Lightroom application did for me is that it automatically selected the people's eyes, their teeth, it whitened them automatically. It enhanced their eyes and smoothed their hair. It did all these different things that normally I would have manually had to do and it just did it for me. It was fantastic. So that really improved the workflow. So I'm pretty excited to see where in things of content management world, what are the next things we're going to be seeing here? Maybe not necessarily content writing itself, but at least it being optimized, for example. I think that'd be fantastic. Those are some great next steps, I'd say, right? [00:42:58] Speaker A: Yeah. But that's where you get into also where that feeds into your asset management platform is because you take something that's a personal project, like me making family mountain biking videos and you with all of your amazing photography, but you take that same yeah, it's really good. I should have used your photographs for the background here. But you take something like Photoshop, right, where you've got something that's super labor intensive. Like, let's say you've got product shots, the product, let's say whatever, you got a sneaker and they got a box and something, right? So you got words that are on something and the words got to be replaced. You can do all that in Photoshop. And you know, you can do that in Photoshop. You could probably script a Photoshop action to do it on somebody's desktop or something like that. Okay, fine. Then doing Photoshop actions on somebody's desktop, that's not the cloud. But now Photoshop is in the cloud. There's a whole Photoshop API that you could script into Adobe Experience Manager's assets to go and say, good, I'm going to upload this thing. When this PSD goes up, then you're going to go and you just run these sets of actions on it. You're going to go and replace the background here. You're going to do this thing. You're going to put the text here. This translated text goes here with a drop shadow, and good, turn it around and then save these images out on it. That sort of thing is huge at that point, too. Then you're taking a designer and a designer who was previously overworked and some other developer who was previously overworked, and next thing you know, they're turning out work that would have taken a whole team. Like, you would have just said, hey, we're only going to do English images. We just don't have the manpower to do anything besides English images. Because a lot of times, this is how it shakes out. It's not just, oh, they're going to fire just there's work in the company that just doesn't get sorry. Everybody gets English images. Sorry. But now you could actually put localized images with localized descriptions with even a local background. You have a dancer who's showing off some outfit or something like that. That dancer could be in Portland, Oregon. That dancer could be in Bogota. The dancer could be in Venice. Dancer could be in Johannesburg. You know what I mean? You could just go and flip out the backgrounds, save out all the images, and they go correctly into the right languages in the right mean these things. [00:45:26] Speaker B: Would be and, you know, this is know, what comes to mind is things like integrations. Know, you can have all these different photoshop actions. You have all this content automation that's happening, this creative automation that's happening. But then can you work in some of those insights as to what's the image that works best? Is the one with a starry background or the one with a sunshine work better? And does that even vary by location of where it's being delivered and rendered? Right. So taking those kinds of insights and sort of upping the potential conversions is, I think, a pretty key element there, too, to consider. So those integration things like analytics, right. I think it's pretty important when looking at something like a DXP. [00:46:10] Speaker A: Totally. All right, well, sum me up where we've gotten so far. So we talked a bunch about asset management, AI features, some of this low code, no code type stuff of being able to have AI write code for you. We talked about who is your existing staff that you already have and factoring that into your decisioning. Do you have the staff? Will you have to hire them? Do you have enough to be able to make the project successful? Will you have enough in the long term, or are they always going to be mercenaries? Is digital asset management a part of it? How big is it in the decision? Do you have lots of them? Do you have only a little bit of assets they have to worry about? And then also, what are your priorities and what is your presence like? Are you on everything? Do you have multiple apps? You have a super curated mobile experience? Do you have multiple mobile experiences where you're a hotel chain with multiple apps for each major hotel or something like that? If we're one of these big Las Vegas hotels, you've got a lot of experiences to then care for, because a lot of these big Las Vegas hotels, you've got an app, you've got maybe three apps, you've got mobile desktop, and then you've got screens. You got screens all over the hotel that then have to be branded. They have to have up to date information and so forth. You have screens in people's rooms. You have 7000 screens in a room or something like that. What is it driving? So that's another thing that we've talked about. One thing I don't know, that we've touched on quite enough is too if you were going into a company asking about, okay, good, so they're saying they want to go and upgrade their or choose a new experience platform. In terms of integrations, what kind of integrations are you concerned with or do you care about? What ones do you want them to tell you all about? [00:48:15] Speaker B: Right. And I think that is an important one. So integrations with things like a CRM system or maybe it's your commerce back end, something like the commerce integration framework. We've talked about that a number of times. And the other thing too, that is important are the things like the analytics and targeting. So those are sort of the foundational kinds of integrations, I think, right? There may be other integrations as well. So that's obviously something to consider. What I like to see in a platform is sort of its being agnostic. So are they using standard sorts of APIs and authentication systems and tokens in order to make those integrations happen? Is it one way? Is it two way sort of synchronization that's happening? Or is it something that's a little bit more one way? And is it in batch? Is it done over a 24 hours period? Then I'll see my change. Maybe I want to see things a little bit more real time. So I think those are the kinds of integrations, the different factors behind those integrations that I would like to see. [00:49:23] Speaker A: You talked about CRM. There's the relatively deep subject of forms and the different types of structured information that have to come in off of a website and go someplace useful. And how much of that do you have on your public facing website? And that's one of these ones where it can take something that, oh good, you fit very nicely in this box. You can buy this one product and then suddenly it just all goes to hell because you've got like a bank or something like that, or an insurance company or somebody who processes home loans, or somebody who processes do you qualify for a 0% whatever, this crazy car deal or something like that. There's so many different ways that that structured information is going to either have to be in an official form, it's going to have to go to somewhere in particular, and it's going to have to get registered as some deal. It has to be something that is legally signable to that person and come back as a form that can be legally signed and then that information that was in that form can then go someplace. So all that sort of thing is a huge part of what is the site supposed to do. Because in some cases you're just like, let me show you the new 6000 Sux and here's what it looks like. And look at it in the inside, look at the outside. It's all done right. But in some cases the person has to really execute a much more complicated transaction. And what systems does it then have to interact with and that'll change your mind on what kind of system you can then use. [00:51:11] Speaker B: Yeah, and that's one area that I kind of like where Adobe has gone with this too. Because Adobe has the forms add on that you can have, in their experience, manager offering, I had some opportunity to work in that. As you know, the way that they treat forms is something as it's authorable content. So an author can go in there and they can build out these forms for various purposes. They can even make a wizard out of it with the various panels. They can build different behind it. So they can show or hide information based on the entry of another form element, for example. So I really like the direction that they've been going with that. And they do have integrations that you can build out for doing things like pulling information from a service and then having that populated drop down, for example. [00:51:51] Speaker A: Exactly, yeah. [00:51:52] Speaker B: So that's the kind of thing that it's kind of nice. It's a nice add on. It doesn't come, I think, out of the box with AEM, but it is something that you can pursue if that's something that your organization does, which is a lot of work in forms. [00:52:02] Speaker A: Right. That's a deep subject, though, I think, in terms of what sort of actual structured input and output does the system do? Do you need to be able to import a list of device specifications that have to be able to be shown right. Like a public example. This is not a site that I've worked on, but a public example that is running on Am would be Intel.com. If you go and you search Core I 712 ADP, just Google that, right? Comes up with a system that has pulled in a bunch of structured information on intel processors and tabularizes them and so forth. How do you then keep that up to date? Things like that. That's a big deal. Yeah. Wow, okay, good. It's a lot to go through then. We even talked about actual brands to consider, you know what I mean? You know what there's and here's another thing that I wanted to make sure we touch on and this gets back to my sysadmin roots and this gets more technical, which is so Am a lot of times is running big brands, big public facing brands. A lot of people use Am internally and there's been a lot of internets internal. It's a super dated term and it makes me seem old when I say it, but a lot of internets are running Am and in a lot of cases you've got sensitive information that goes on those intranets and sometimes they're internets and sometimes they're extranets. Where you've got it's, it's a log, it's 100% logged in experience. It's only available to people who are either authenticated or they're on this particular network. And you want it to be locked down because it's got whatever. Like, let's just say you're a big shoe company and it's next season's shoe. And if that gets out, then suddenly you got people who are always trying to find out what next season's shoe looks like. And if it gets out in the world, then now it's not new anymore. Now you got to redesign it so that it's new. So it has to be super locked down. So security requirements like that are kind of a big deal. And there are some systems that, from a technical perspective, if they are totally shared tenant you're relying on how good is this scrappy little company at keeping my data separate from other people's data? And there's no actual physical separation between that, then how confident is your chief security officer and all your other security folks going to be to putting all of this relatively, in some cases, truly sensitive information on a shared system, on a completely shared tenancy system that may or may not be able to be completely isolated? Like can you set me up a thing? And it's got a VPN device in front of it. Maybe I'm in the cloud, but it's my own little section of the cloud sort of a thing. Or it could be that your chief security people say sorry, no public clouds, no shared stuff for us, no SaaS platforms because then you have a different set of requirements then of like what platforms are not SaaS? What platforms can you get that? I own the whole thing where I could go through, I can't you're saying it's PCI compliant or whatever. I don't totally trust you. So what platforms are now available if you have those types of security requirements? [00:55:59] Speaker B: Yeah, no, that's a really good question and I would probably look at the different compliance levels that these organizations meet that these vendors meet to inform my decision on am I actually going to store it or am I going to keep it with them? Right. And also their reputation, do they have any kind of history of things like certain security break ins, that kind of thing? That's the kind of thing that I would look at as well. When something like that, in some cases, it could be that they have to stay on premise. I'm not the security expert necessarily, but I think going to the cloud is obviously there's a number of benefits to that. And I would think from a DevOps perspective as well, there are some benefits to it because you don't have to physically maintain these systems right offload that to the organization that's hosting it, which is I think great too. But again, the security concerns, that's something that's obviously important, but then also that could vary by regions as well, I think. Like certain countries. [00:57:01] Speaker A: Exactly. Yep. Data residency is a huge so the biggest market for many things in the world is mainly China, which has extremely unique It requirements. So there are a lot of platforms out there that are just right out. They're just like, oh, so you're doing business in mainland China. You're out. Can't do it. Some of my favorite analytics platforms you can't use like one of the ones new Relic. I love new relic. New relic's. Awesome. I think am I still running? Yeah. Got a new relic shirt on. So they're great, but they're not in China because their gear can't run. So that is another thing that you have to consider of. Are you going to sell your stuff to people in mainland China? That really limits your options on what you're going to do because then you have to have your e commerce gear that's there. If you're collecting personally identifiable information of Chinese citizens, that law's gray as know, is it possible to store some of that information outside of China? In some cases it's really not a good idea. You could get blacklisted immediately. So those types of it, you can't only just go with a new shiny object. You also have to look at some of those really mundane but could change everything type things of data residency. [00:58:28] Speaker B: And I wonder too how that information or how that data can be structured in such a way where some of it resides locally, but some of it can also reside that's cloud based or externally hosted, for example. So are there ways to aggregate that content? Don't meet the requirements that you have with things like security? [00:58:48] Speaker A: Or do you have to do the really undesirable thing and bifurcate your whole platform and say everybody else is running on this? China's running on this, or China and Russia and whatever other place has a specific requirement for where their data goes that goes on this platform. All the other stuff goes on this platform. Sort of a thing all. Right, well, coming up on an hour here, so I think we've at least set the stage for being able to talk through a shootout or a showdown between different experience management platforms. I think we got to do that at this point. Make a theoretical showdown of saying I'm company A, I'm company B, and what would make me want to choose in a given way, because that's kind of naturally the next step at this point because we've thought about a lot of things. We basically have set up anybody who's going to go through everything we just talked about to do, whatever, a ten week discovery just to get through all those questions, right. [00:59:52] Speaker B: And you know what, I know that the platforms that are out there, they're obviously not all created equal, right. Have advantages that the others don't. But in some cases I think too, you have to look at what are the different technologies that you have internally. [01:00:09] Speaker A: Right. [01:00:10] Speaker B: If you're an organization that specializes in Java, for example, you're probably not going to want to [email protected] offering, for example, or the PHP based one. Whereas if you're a net shop, then maybe something like sitecore is going to be more favorable because those are the expertise that you have and you can make various customizations or build out certain things for your groups that are going to be much less impactful than something like having to learn Java, for example, which is what Adobe is offered. Which is what it's based on. So I think those are some of the considerations too when looking at something like a DXP. [01:00:47] Speaker A: Yeah, that's indeed. All right, well thank you for having this conversation with me. Even if nobody else watches this, then feel like reexamining. This is always helpful. [01:01:02] Speaker B: Yeah, it's been great. [01:01:04] Speaker A: For sure. Well, good. Well, until next time. Until round two then. [01:01:09] Speaker B: Awesome, thanks.