By Janus Boye
The usual trouble when it comes to digital projects tends to be around a slower than expected time-to-market for new projects, an unhealthy appetite for one-ring-to-rule-them-all monolithic vendors, and being locked-in on platforms you no longer or indeed never liked. Sound familiar?
Going headless and using content-as-a-service have been major trends for the last couple of years to try to address these recurring pains, but even here at the beginning of 2020, it is not yet mainstream. Actually, among industry pundits, the debate on whether headless is the solution or instead brings more challenges rages on.
San Francisco-based software firm Contentstack tries to tackle the problems coupled with the increasing demands from customers to deliver digital content experiences by taking a different approach than just going headless. With a recent investment round to further enable their global growth, I spoke to Sonja Kotrotsos, who is Head of EMEA GTM & Alliances at Contentstack, to better understand their approach.
A philosophy switch is required to enable better digital content experiences
In our peer groups, we’ve heard about the familiar problems all too often:
Content marketers have plans that they are struggling to execute.
Having run the CMS into a dead end, so that IT resources are constantly plugging holes or firefighting.
Upgrading an old CMS is often too cumbersome.
The feeling of always being 1 - 2 years behind comes at a price as it slows down projects and innovation. In brief: You have technical debt.
Some have made a switch in recent years from buying an all-in-one suite to selecting a curated stack instead. According to Sonja, the goal of going headless has often been to focus on content and to free themselves from a monolithic suite.
The move to a stack also addresses that problem that replatforming in the past didn’t seem to make much sense, e.g., going from Sitecore to Adobe was a costly path to take with few immediate benefits and often questionable long-term benefits.
The real differentiator is not headless
“Headless is the least interesting part of the movement towards modern digital content experiences,” said Sonja in our conversation.
The real differentiators are twofold in her view:
A cloud-native stack, so that you have real software-as-a-service and are not always left behind on old versions. This compared to some vendors who just converted to subscription-based pricing and migrated their on-premise product and put it on Amazon Web Services.
Microservices which gives you the freedom to plug-and-play and switch vendors if need be.
Managing the stack is work for the tech team, but the arrival of vendor alliances makes things easier.
Also, switching APIs is certainly easier than switching suite. This could also be why some members report that those modern vendors tend to look after their customers better.
Those who want to deliver cutting edge experience require an ecosystem
We’ve heard at several peer group meetings in the past, that it’s an extra burden on procurement and project management when you can’t just have a single contract with the one-ring-to-rule-them-all vendor.
In my view, Sonja nailed it by saying that even with legacy CMS, customers typically need to integrate and procure additional pieces of the digital experience puzzle. For instance, as Sonja bluntly said:
“Whilst every CMS offers personalization tools, Optimizely would be out of business if the CMS would indeed offer state of the art personalization.”
Or in other words:
“If you want to deliver cutting edge experiences, you will need to find an ecosystem!”
I agree with that and as Sonja said, that’s been the case for the past 20+ years.
To make this work, you do need skilled internal resources, but in closing, Sonja points to a new role here for digital agencies:
Rather than spending their billable hours on proprietary templates and backend integrations, they now help joint customers to lift and shift the initial transition and help educate on the new agile processes and train people on the job. In many ways, these digital agencies elevate themselves to a much more foundational strategic position than the classic CMS implementers had.
Your next steps
Please do leave a comment below to continue the conversation!
You can also continue the conversation with Sonja and her colleagues in our CMS Expert and Product Management peer groups.