Episode Transcript
[00:00:10] Speaker A: Hey, welcome to Arboy Digital Experiences. This is episode 15 and today we're going to be talking about the definition of what AEM edge delivery is, how it differs from AEM as a cloud service, other versions of aem, and also things that you might want to know if you're considering moving from another content management system such as WordPress, Drupal, anything else like that. Today I'm joined by Brandon, who is relatively new solution consultant for Arbery Digital and. Hey there, Brandon. Welcome. Welcome to our show.
[00:00:42] Speaker B: All right. Yeah, thanks for doing this with me, Ted. This is going to be super helpful. Coming from 20 years in the brains and more of a managerial and leadership background, you know, starting to learn the background of the tech world and everything that goes on behind the scenes that all the rest of us customers see. So this is going to be super helpful.
[00:01:04] Speaker A: Yep, it's. Well, it's. The thing is about this space is that, is that most of the time when you get into a certain system that runs your website, you're into that system and it's just, it's unusual for anybody, even, who's even a pro in this space to know even an adjacent system. So, so it, so it's always okay for somebody to need to ask questions about. It's okay. So, so. All right, listen. What, what is this thing? What is it even about? How do you, how does it differ from something else? You're using a bunch of words and abbreviations as if they're English, which clearly they're not. So. Yeah, so, so fire. Fire at will. And.
[00:01:45] Speaker B: Yeah, no one can know everything.
[00:01:46] Speaker A: No one can know everything. Especially, especially in this space.
But, but hang on. So, so you, but you are, you're traveling right now. You're, you're. So where, where, where are you physically right now?
[00:02:00] Speaker B: Right now we are in Coeur d'alene, Idaho.
My family and I are from Pennsylvania, but we had been in North Carolina, in Virginia for 20 years.
So when, when I hung up my boots and retired, we saw it as an opportunity to take a gap year as a family. And so I'm working from the road. My wife is working from the road. We're, we're road schooling our two sons as we travel around and just really taking the time before, before we planted roots back in Pennsylvania to see as much of the country as we could.
[00:02:38] Speaker A: Oh, that's great. That's great. I bet your kids, I bet your kids are digging this.
[00:02:43] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, they're, they get homesick once in a while, but for the most part they're they've been outstanding and been having a good time.
[00:02:51] Speaker A: Oh yeah, yeah. Nothing like it.
Well, cool. Let's, well, let's, let's, let's dive into this. So what, so I'm, I'm here to answer your questions on this here too. So fire. Fire at will. And where do you want to get started? With this. With this. With this bit?
[00:03:10] Speaker B: Yeah. So I've learned a little bit of what AEM is. My rudimentary understanding is that it defines and contains websites like everything we see as customers that big companies run. That's all.
If the company is using aem, that's all produced in the AEM content management system. But I understand that edge delivery is coming out now and the cloud has been around for a while, but there's still a ton of data saved on servers all over the world.
But now everything is moving to the cloud and we're talking massive amounts of data and performance improvements that come with that. So I started to get a grasp on what AEM is, but now how does edge delivery change?
Content management?
[00:04:02] Speaker A: Sure. Good, great. That's a great place to start. Okay, so first of all, so AEM is a, is so aem, short for Adobe Experience Manager. It's a product that has been around for quite some time, but the product itself has changed over the years. It's a suite of tools that are there to be able to manage large websites, manage all the content problems and content use cases that you've got of all kinds of different data that goes onto a website. Whether you're talking about documents, you're talking about pages, images, video, various experiences that a company may need to be able to produce. You need locators, you have sets of images, you have slideshows, you have translated documents, you have pricing ability to buy something. There's all kinds of things that go into what, what do you want available and also where do you want it available, do you want it available on a mobile phone, do you want it to be available? Same data inside of an app, different data coming out of an app. These are all big kid problems that, that when you first start out and you've got a small business, then you don't necessarily have those problems. You've got, you've got smaller problems, you have, you have the very basic problem of like, let's have an about us page. How about, or let's, let's just write a product brief of, of what we do or something like that. And does it need to be in eight languages? It does not. Does it need to Be a different for, for new versus returning visitors. No, it does not. It just need the new, the basic stuff. So that's where for a beginning website or for just a small business, a local business or something like that, then, then, then a Drupal or a WordPress might suffice.
But as soon as you start to have larger problems, more complicated problems, you need a piece of software that is able to go and solve for those. And then, and then, and then once you've solved those problems, how do you get it to solve it at an acceptable speed? That's, that's another thing too is because sometimes, sometimes a piece of software might solve it and like can you do this? Well, yes, you can do this, but maybe your page load time is 10 seconds a pop or something like that. Or you can't, you can't update anything on the website or else the website's going to go down. And those are, those are those, those are the bigger problems that then, then require, you know.
[00:06:25] Speaker B: Well, I feel like that's, that's such a significant factor for content design and content management and, and web design is how fast does it get to the customer. Because I think people are running out of patience for slow loading sites and that simple factor could drive customers away from a company if their site literally isn't up to speed in 2024.
[00:06:52] Speaker A: Totally. And so that was a core tenet really that the Adobe folks had when designing like basically some of the, some, some of these mad scientists that created AEM in the first place all the way back in, in, in the early 2000, the early aughts, this is where it's kind of came out of and they're like okay, well if we were going to do this again, if we were going to make a content management, a world beating content management system, but we're going to design it now and we have all the resources that we have, we have the talent that we have. What, what would it be? Well, one of those, one of those things is, is it would be, it wouldn't just be acceptable in terms of speed. It should be the fastest.
You should be able to, if you are a major brand, you shouldn't have to settle for. Well, we've, we're having to solve all these problems so that somehow justifies we've got a sluggish site, but look at all the things that it does, right? No, it should actually, it should do all those things and it should also be the fastest site on the Internet. And so that's, that, is that, that's One of the core things that edge delivery can bring to the table. The other piece of this is though, and this is one of these things that seems like, it seems like a paradox, seems like two things that can't really just cannot exist at the same time is it should be able to do all those things, but it also shouldn't be a royal pain to develop on. And that's, and that's one thing that, that has made.
Well, it's been, it's been like I, I, I make my living on Adobe Experience Manager but at the same time I know that one of the pains, pain points is that it's a very expensive platform to develop on. Yeah, it, it takes a lot of very specialized talent. It takes people who have been in the business for a really long time.
These are not bottom of the line resources that, that you have working on an AEM site. And as a result of that choosing, sometimes choosing to, to make the jump of like, let's say you've got a smaller business where you're used to like when somebody says let's do a website redesign and they're used to that being like a, you know, $1200 line item or something like that. And you say well, good, well what about this? Well, how much, how much is a brand new implementation? And then somebody says well, it's, you know, half a mil. And you're like I'm not, I'm not that big. Yeah, so I guess I, yeah, I guess so. When you have something that is, that, that does so many things, how can you make it be done by people who don't maybe don't have 15 years of experience in this and are the highest end architects possible. How can you but, but get, still get an acceptable result, not even acceptable result, a high speed capable result that is maintainable. So this is one of these things. It's like you can't, how, how are you supposed to have all those things at the same time?
[00:09:36] Speaker B: Yeah, but that's where, that's where next gen AEM is going. Right? It's solving, it's actually solving all those problems. Speed being one for edge delivery. Right. So how do they do that?
[00:09:48] Speaker A: So, okay, so I, I guess I could start by kind of defining what edge delivery is. So, so, so this set of technologies that was developed at Adobe was, it's, it is a set of, a set of technologies that, that allows for pages to be composited, designed and, and, and, and created basically in the, in the basis of documents. Like, as opposed to having everything ground into one big Database in the same ilk as like a, like a WordPress right, where you're everything's coming out of MySQL kind of a thing. Or if you've got AEM where everything's kind of ground into, you've got this big thing called a Java content repository which is what everything was in or is in in traditional Adobe Experience Manager. Instead of that, your source of documents for the website is literal documents. In many cases it has the ability to author things in Google Docs, in SharePoint, in Markdown, in Simple HTML and so forth. So these are, these are allow people to use tools that they're super familiar with already. Like anybody knows how to author something in Microsoft Word. So if you say okay, good, here's how you set up a document for pages and Word, it's got a title. If you want a table, how about dragging a table? There's a table there. You want a picture, put a picture on there. It's, it's, it is a lot simpler to get people up to speed with this. It sounds simplistic, it sounds, you know, it almost sounds dorky. Like hold on, you're going to author, author or website with Microsoft Word. Like I said no to that in 1998, you know, with, with.
[00:11:24] Speaker B: But now here we are, here we.
[00:11:25] Speaker A: Are and it's happening and that's the process.
And. But because of the way that edge delivery sites are created, the documents are created in a very simple user interface that allows people to author them and use them, non technical folks or marketers alike to be able to use the features that are these powerful features that they need to be able to use. And it's separated entirely from the styling and the presentation and the interaction which is done in very simple CSS and JavaScript and it's commodity CSS and JavaScript which makes it really accessible for people who don't have a ton of AEM experience.
And that then gets pushed into a set of edge, like an edge content delivery pipeline which composites that into stuff that is pushed out as far as possible to the user so that it can be retrieved and served in such a way that it is as fast as it very possibly can be.
[00:12:26] Speaker B: Yeah, so yeah, we were talking about that the other day and I like the analogy that you used for what, what it means to have the content as close as possible to the customer. It started to make a little sense in a digital sense. But I'm an analogies guy and so when you use the five guys analogy, suddenly it all became clear that hey, you know, they come up with fresh ingredients. They don't freeze any of their ingredients. And the only way to do that is to source the ingredients from nearby to the, to the actual store.
[00:13:04] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:13:05] Speaker B: And so that, that's a pretty significant factor in the five guys analogy, like for a restaurant. That's their marketing, that customer preference. Like, I want to eat fresh ingredients, even if it is a cheeseburger, it's, it's a better and fresher cheeseburger than.
[00:13:24] Speaker A: Right. Or I want a really good one. I want a really good one. And, and I'm not willing to wait 45 minutes at a store for, at a really nice fancy restaurant for that. And I just won't, I just won't have that thing. And so it's one of these, it's one of these things where if you, if you push that as far to the end user as you possibly can so that when he's retrieving it, no matter where he is, he's got, he's got a fast experience. And that's, that's the whole idea of, of edge delivery.
[00:13:51] Speaker B: And in a digital sense, that, that's exactly where we're at with edge delivery now. And that's what the cloud offers, is pushing all that data as close to the customer as possible.
[00:14:01] Speaker A: Right. And so, and that's, I guess, where you get into some of the, some of the differences between what the traditional AEM is and really also how this differs from.
So AEM is similar in a lot of ways to other competing offerings. It's like if you look at something like your optimizely or sitecore or something like that, a lot of the ones that are similar to AEM are also have, have a, have a big heavy set of technologies that are, that are, they're in servers that are either located in the cloud or located at a customer data center. But in either case, these are big servers that, that require a whole bunch of expertise and so forth to run. And then if you're either running them or you're not, it's not particularly, like, composable. You can't say, well, I would like, I would like this one and I would like one of these, and please give me one of those two. And if you stick that together, then that's the solution that I would like. It's not really. It's. You're kind of like all in. And once, once you're in that world.
And that was another thing that has been really challenging about designing solutions around AEM before is, is that somebody say hey, 1am and say wait, we're going to take this big thing. I'm going to, you know, it's like, it's, it's like it, you're, you're, you're all into this thing and you're like, well what if I don't want everything into, into this? Well, sorry, you're in man.
[00:15:20] Speaker B: Yeah, well then that drives up costs too.
[00:15:23] Speaker A: Drives up costs. And, and that's where, that's where. So, because previously for, for, for a big implementation, this is one of the things so, so you got, yeah, the pieces of doing an implementation is you've got find, you've got purchasing it. A lot of people get hung up on the licensing and I know as somebody who has to buy things, when someone tells me a big licensing cost, they go, wow, that's really big. I'm not going to buy that. That's so expensive.
But that's not even the big part of any one of these implementations. The license is expensive in a lot of these cases. But it's no nothing compared to, well, what if you need an architect for a full year or you need an architect in perpetuity or you need an architect but they're so expensive to get and you train him up and as soon as he's really trained he jumps ship for something else and now you got to train up another one. Now you're starting to talk about expensive.
You know, added to the fact that how many developers do you need to get onto the platform and then how many developers do you need to reliably just keep it up, keep up with production support and then add new features? As somebody from marketing comes over and says hey, wouldn't it be really nice if we could do the session such. And it really is terrible when as a company you have to say yeah, that'd be really cool. Except for we are, you know, we don't have the consultant anymore and you're just going to have to get in line. We have one developer and their backlog just fixing broken stuff and that's not.
[00:16:56] Speaker B: Even their expertise either.
[00:16:58] Speaker A: Yeah, so that makes sense.
[00:17:02] Speaker B: You were mentioning earlier that the new AEM design reduces some of that requirement. It obviously doesn't eliminate the need for a knowledgeable, well trained architect.
But where my mind started going when you were talking earlier is like if I'm a small business, if I'm in the C suite of a small business, which I think goes up to $10 million or a medium sized business, and I'm thinking about scaling what was once out of Reach for the licensing and the architect and the long term cost of AEM might actually be feasible now. Am I understanding that correctly? With the new improvements and making it more user friendly, I think that if.
[00:17:52] Speaker A: You'Re a small business, AM is still out of reach. I think it's still, it still wouldn't make sense. The. I'm just if you look at the smallest possible implementation that you could do, it's still not, you're still probably going to be better served with something, you know, something from WIX or something like that, but not necessarily WordPress with all that drama going on. It's just, that's rough. It's really rough. I mean I've got plenty of Word WordPress sites myself and I'm sitting here right now thinking about how can I get off of them because there's a lot of drama. There's a lot of, a lot of drama and uncertainty and. But the thing is, is for folks who are that next step up medium, medium sized businesses, you know, you're a national business, you're, you're, you, you and you're, and you've got, I mean, let's just say you're on like, like, like if you're comparing it to something like WordPress, if you're already paying for like WP engine or WordPress VIP or something like that, you're already got a managed hosting contract, you already have lots and lots of custom plugins and so forth like that and a lot of customizations, then you actually, whereas I wouldn't have said that you're a customer for AEM with this stuff, I would say that you're a customer that you could really honestly consider that because when you get that and then, then you're really in the door of. Because Adobe's got some super powerful other marketing stuff that you can, you can leverage once you're on the stack and, and, and there's ways of, I mean really the edit and deployment experience right now is so nice. I mean we're finishing up an edge delivery, an AEM implementation right now and it is, it is such a breath of fresh air. This, this, this imp. It's like one of these things where I, I'm super proud of it at the end because I know that I'm, I'm turning over something that the customer's really, really gonna like and they're gonna.
[00:19:50] Speaker B: Like and that's the first instance of document, of using document authoring, right?
[00:19:55] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:19:57] Speaker B: Oh that's, and Arbory is the first to do that.
[00:20:00] Speaker A: It is actually we were, we. I mean, our blog was first launched on it, but, but this, this will be one of the. I think this will be the first non Adobe site that is, that is launching on this.
And I could talk about this a little bit. So it's.
So document authoring is a new user interface and basically it's kind of like a, It's a little bit difficult to put it all in a box and say it's one of these because there's really not many other things like it. But it is a, it's a document user interface that's based in edge delivery and it's for edge delivery sites, which is there for creating and managing all of the content that you have on an edge delivery site. It handles things like the back and forth to your asset management system. It handles rollout for translations so that if you have multiple regional versions of your site or translated versions for your site, it handles the ingest, the compositing of all the things that you need to translate and roll out, sending it off to a translation provider and having it come back. So it does all this and it does, and it's, it is the fastest CMS I've ever worked on. It's very, very fast. I don't know of a faster one. I don't, I am not aware of a faster cms. It's, it is, it's extremely fast. It's got real time preview inside of it. It's got collaborative editing so that you can go and have. I mean, we tried this. We. So I was at a conference not too long ago, which is Adapt 2 in Germany. And at the, I gave a presentation at the conference and as a part of that, I had the entire conference. There's 200 people in the conference, said, good, why don't y'all log into this and just. You can edit at the same time. We never tried it. I wasn't sure if it was gonna explode. The Adobe, the, the Adobe person who wrote the collabor, the collaboration bit was in the room, you know, probably, you know, biting his nails, but totally held up. Um, but, but yeah. So collaborative editing, real time previews got built in versioning. So it's like super bulletproof. Like you could have, you could set anybody loose on this and say, I don't care. Edit the homepage. I can revert it. Like it, it's, it's, it's pretty nice.
[00:22:06] Speaker B: And that's where you were talking earlier, that it's all done in recognizable platforms, right? Like Google Docs.
[00:22:14] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:22:14] Speaker B: Microsoft Word. SharePoint. So it's things that you know, non technical people still know and are familiar with. So that's, that, that's how you can say things like hey you non technical person, go ahead and update the homepage.
[00:22:30] Speaker A: Oh yeah, yeah. And it's, yeah, it's all, it's all tables and cells and a lot of the structured data is in basically an Excel spreadsheet and everybody knows how to do an Excel spreadsheet. So it's, it's, it's, it's a very easy setup to learn. But the user interface and the interaction like I said, is all also in just really commodity CSS and JavaScript. So it's, it, it, it, we, we've taken people who've never touched this before. This is obviously their first implementation. So that you can't say I'm an experienced Edge developer first because there's nothing to be experienced in. There's something you've ever seen before. So they, but, but within, within weeks people are like, oh I, I, I know, I know my way around this. I'm making meaningful, yeah, me and me of where people were. Just you get people instantly productive. So, so it's nice in that way. And then, but here's the big thing too and this is, this is the part that has, that has kind of plagued me and been one of these things of like where I, I want to do good work. I also want to, you know, keep my, keep my family afloat and so forth. And you go, okay, good, you do a big job for a company and you go, I know for a fact that after we leave that you won't be able to keep this website up by yourself and you're going to need to hire me again.
And whereas with Edge Delivery, we know that with a very limited set of local developers that they'll be able to keep things going.
And that's the part where I really enjoy what, what has been created. Now I'll say this though, it doesn't, it doesn't take out the need for an architect. And, and because that's, that, that's some of the, that's some of the bits that kind of have to be worked out because a lot of this is not, it's still, it's still. We're, we're, you know, we're, we're building, we're building, we're, we're building the submarine while it's in the middle of a dive. So it's, it's, it's, it's kind of there, there's A lot that's changing in this world right now. And, and so it's so, it's so even so. But here, let me, let me, let me show you actually a bit about how this all fits together. Because I think anybody listening or watching this could probably benefit from this. So this is, this is an architecture diagram I've got of our, basically a customer setup for running edge delivery with document authoring and how it might plug into an AEM setup.
So this big gray bit in the middle here that you see, that's, that is the document authoring setup. That is the, that is this, this what we call da.
That is, that's where you do all of your authoring. That's where all the pages are kept. That's all this versioning. That's where you, you can visualize what you're, what you're creating and then do your publishing and previewing and so forth. Right?
This red block here represents the entire stack of what Edge Delivery Services is. This is, this is all the things that take these documents and sets of images, so forth, push them up and then Edge Delivery Services takes care of making web web optimized images and video optimized styling and so forth. So that when, once this is pushed into the browser, it renders as fast as it possibly can.
[00:25:58] Speaker B: And that's just so I'm understanding that part, right? That's where if I'm using document authoring and I'm editing a web page in Google Docs, I select an image, I drop it in and the edge delivery service will automatically reformat that to fit an Android, an iPhone, a tablet or a laptop.
[00:26:22] Speaker A: Yeah, in, so in the olden days, the way that, yeah, in the olden days the way that you had to do this with AEM is that what you would do is you'd select an image and let's just say your photographer just came back with an Image and it's 4,000 by 4,000 or whatever the size of this image is. It's a 16 megabyte JPEG or something, or a PDF or a Photoshop document. So you had to write a workflow in AEM which would say, okay, I want, here's my website and here's all the different sizes that I need. Here's. I need one that's this big. I need a square one, I need a little tiny one for my thumbnail. I need a medium quality one which is going to be the hero. It needs to load fast, but I need another higher quality one that will load afterwards. So you have to pre think of all of this and then make them all rendered out sounds tedious. It is tedious. It is tedious. And it's one of these things too is that you have to do it every time and so you're like, oh God. So, so, so every time you make one of these sites. So there's some out of the box stuff. But. But still it's work that you got to do this does this does almost the entirety of that automagically. And there's tweak, tweakable stuff that you can do with if you want to tweak how it's doing that.
But for the most part it's usable out of the box. We're using 99% out of the box and it does all the optimizations where like, oh, load a. Load an itty bitty one, load a bigger one. It's doing all that behind the scenes anyway. So, so that, that part's really nice and it's pretty incredible. And it's close to the per. Like physically close, like geographically close to the, to the person's browser. So if some. So this is also something. As an infrastructure guy, I spent most of my life as an infrastructure guy.
You'd be going, okay, you'd be having these conversations with a customer the first time. Where are all your customers? Oh, you got some of them in England. Okay, good. You sure we don't want to make some servers in England or in Amsterdam. So it's close to your. Like. So we. We'd be physically deploying things like with people who are there making stuff. Right. Blinking lights, plugging stuff in. Like. So that, that is now. Now with the fact that. So see this cdn, that content distribution network that is. That's all a part of it. You get it for, you know, as a part of the service where it's all pushing that out.
That, that CDN also is configurable. Does some really fancy stuff that I talked about on one of my bike riding podcasts. But the. You can use it as what fancy pants people like me would call an application proxy where you can say, well, I want everything coming to Edge delivery except this, this, this, this and this, which have to go to my old backend servers that are sitting in the basement on prem at our hq. And those aren't going to move. And you know, the CTO says they can't move. And so, so, you know, company.com old stuff still has to go to old stuff in the basement.
[00:29:27] Speaker B: So what are some of the reasons you would Want to keep that in place. Like I'm thinking compliance and data security.
[00:29:33] Speaker A: There's. But there's just sometimes where it's just not even practical to move it. Like you might have, like it might be just like there's some ye old database that is like, let's say you have a company, like a manufacturing company, you've got 50,000 SKUs of parts that you've got and, or you know, you make paint sprayers or whatever. You know, it's like you got all these parts for that are 30 years old that you've got in some database that some guy wrote in 1985 and it's still there and it's the only place where they all are. And it's a website that runs. Okay, great. How practical is it to move all that? I mean it's going to be a real pain. Like do you want to have to move that when you move your marketing site? You don't. So, so you say good, well can, can you know mypaintsprayers.com old stuff. Can it just go to the thing from 1985 and it just, just that's still in the basement and that's okay. And then the rest of everything is here. So that's what, that's what this allows you to. Gives you the flexibility to do stuff.
[00:30:34] Speaker B: Like that reduces clutter in your new system.
[00:30:38] Speaker A: Exactly. And also reduces requirements because sometimes, sometimes. And I've had this as an architect where you're designing requirements about all around the most complicated use cases that are there. So you go all through the use case and say what was all the stuff that your thing has to do? And you say well I'd love to move you to my fancy new thing, but I can't because my fancy new thing. Your, your, you know, old stuff doesn't fit in the fancy new thing, so we're gonna have to use old thing. Um, so, so if you do this like you can split it out in this case you can also then use, you can also use certain technologies for what they're really good at, which is if you look over in the corner in the middle there, I've got these Adobe logos on the right side. So those ones if you got. So take, take a product like AIM as a cloud service. Assets. Assets is a, is a really robust system that lets you do things like, oh, let's see that agencies that come in every so often and design ads for you. You don't, you don't want to give them access to all your backend stuff. You Just want them to drop the new ad that they created or the new creatives. Good. This allows you to do stuff like that. You want, you've got furniture and you want to use the new Adobe Firefly stuff to throw in AI backgrounds.
So if it's a gray piece of furniture, it has this color background. If it's a blue piece of furniture, it doesn't still have the gray background. It has the, this background or something like that. That's fancy pants new stuff that you can just do with this. You don't want to have to have make your CMS do that. Which is previously what you had to do is you said, oh, I want, I want this new cms. I have to use the asset management system that comes along with it or the other way around. I want this great asset management system. I guess I have to throw my stuff into the CMS that's way more expensive than I want. Now you just, you compose the solution that works for you, which I think is, I mean again, we're making stuff that really, that people love to use, which is nice.
[00:32:42] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that sounds pretty incredible.
[00:32:45] Speaker A: Yeah, but and the rest of this too, this all just kind of goes into composing, composing a complete system because again like, like Adobe doesn't have their own translation system. That's not what they do. So you're going to pick one. And so in this case you can pick something like Smart Link. Smartling is a big global translation translation vendor. Smartling. It's going to plug into all this just fine. Or just going to use Google Translate or something like that that plugs into that and rolls it out. So, so anyway, in this case too though the yes, there's still going to be licensing cost. AM isn't free and it's not cheap either. So it's so it. So but the thing is is it's also you don't if, if you want, if you want best of breed because nobody, nobody comes to their, to their new technologist decisions and like let me get, you know, not the worst, right?
[00:33:46] Speaker B: Yeah, you get what you pay for.
[00:33:48] Speaker A: It's true. I mean I, I, so I had a, I had an E commerce business for a little bit and, and so I made a couple trips to China as a part of this and went to factories to go and see about getting people to make stuff for us and, and always was like, you know, we had this really groovy container thing with this crazy mechanism that opened and sealed it and stuff. I'm like, okay. Except for it's a little, it's a little expensive. Can you make it a little bit cheaper? And the guy at the factory is like, you don't ever ask that question because we can absolutely make it cheaper. But you don't want us to, you don't want us to honestly say that because we'll make it cheaper.
[00:34:25] Speaker B: You don't want to see what that'll look like.
[00:34:27] Speaker A: Yeah, we'll make it cheaper.
So that is the thing too with this is that yeah, you can get a lower end system that does less things, doesn't integrate well. But in this case this is really, it's really classy to work on and so I'm excited for what this is going to bring.
[00:34:47] Speaker B: Yeah, but it seems like Adobe has really pushed into a new, new field, new area where yes, you're going to pay for it but it's going to be faster. You're going to provide a better customer experience and internally to your company. If you run this, you're going to have a team that can use it better and faster and is easier to manage that in the long term. Like you were saying, requiring very specialized high dollar architect pay on to make sure in perpetuity.
[00:35:24] Speaker A: Yeah, and that's the thing too is that if you're an architect you want to, you want to architect, you want to design. Like imagine if you had to have an architect full time for your house, right? Like no, they're supposed to, they're supposed to design it and then leave. Like so it's, it's very similar. You know, you want somebody to help you design this and so to be fair also this isn't a silver bullet, it's not something that is worse. It's not for everything. There are definitely use cases where it does not fit. And so this is something again where some architecture helped some back and forth and so good. Does this make sense? Does this do everything? Because there's going to be times we say well we've got this use case where got this form thing that it does and it needs to be able to you authenticate and then it has to talk to this backend thing and like can your thing do that? And you want to be able to honestly say yeah, it, it maybe could but it wouldn't be good. So maybe that's something that you want to have on aem. There's other cases too.
[00:36:30] Speaker B: Go ahead or have the wherewithal like you were saying earlier. Like yeah, we can move most of your website to edge delivery but the rest of this should probably stay either because it's outdated or it's better for compliance.
Yeah, you need the expert architect to be able to identify that and say that that's right.
[00:36:51] Speaker A: And there's some, and there's. So there, so there's some cases too where it still doesn't make sense. And there's some cases too where for example, so financial services notorious for this in that you've got requirements for data residency where yes it can be, it can be in the cloud as long as the cloud is in Switzerland.
You know, like things and those are just legitimate requirements that if you brought edge delivery to the table and you say well we want to put an edge delivery like that, you can't guarantee that this will only be in one country when you design this. So that's, that's not a thing. There are other really in depth requirements around things like China. China is a, is a underappreciated challenge that I think, I don't think a lot of people understand how big that place is and how many people, how many, how many people with money, with means could buy your stuff that are in China that they don't do it because your website takes a minute to load.
[00:37:51] Speaker B: Right.
[00:37:51] Speaker A: And I think anybody really, I mean I've done a few China, China, mainland China website optimization projects of getting, getting the loading speed up to snuff and, and before we started the loading speed, it took a full minute to, to load a broken page.
[00:38:09] Speaker B: Yeah, no one has the patience for that in 2024. No one's going to stick around for that.
[00:38:13] Speaker A: No one. No one. I don't think every, I mean I think the last time anybody had patience for that was 1994.
It's the. So, so there are things like that where you, where, where you, where it's not, it's not the silver bullet for the problem. And there's other things you need to do a lot of times too when you have dynamic data. So we, we've been there, there's, there's, there's other solutions that need to be brought to bear for that. Um, but for a lot of marketing sites this is pretty exciting tech because it's, there's, there's a lot of times where we used AEM to solve a problem and it really was like looking around. What do you got? I got a screw gun. Good. Everything we got screws then, you know, and, and, but in this, in this case we can, we can break it apart. Um, so if you, you have some things where you say oh well this, this document based thing is super great, but we've got really stringent governance requirements where we don't want people editing this, this, this, this, and this. And we want them only doing this, this, and this.
This is one of these things where that might call for something that has a lot more knobs and buttons and levers and stuff, like old school aem, where you can say, good, we're going to make something that does exactly that. So that. So that. So. So again, doesn't do everything. It does a lot of stuff really well, though.
[00:39:34] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that sounds excellent. Yeah, yeah, that's.
Well, I have a much better understanding now.
I appreciate all the explanation and I'm gaining and now have a full new appreciation for what it actually takes to make all the things we see on the Internet run and all the things that happen in the background and all the design and data residency that it takes to really provide the best experience that you can.
It's a lot.
[00:40:14] Speaker A: It is a bit, but it's fun to be a part of that.
[00:40:18] Speaker B: Yeah, no doubt.
[00:40:20] Speaker A: All right, well, thanks. Thanks for being on the. On the podcast, Brandon, and I hope people got something out of this. You got something more that you. You want to learn about how this tech all works or things that it may or may not be a right fit for the right tool for the job, then give us a ring.
[00:40:37] Speaker B: Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me. I'll see you around the water cooler.
[00:40:40] Speaker A: All right, good. See you guys.
