By Janus Boye
Karim Marucchi at Crowd Favorite (top) interviewing Tom Willmot at Human Made for a recent podcast on scaling enterprise WordPress and open source
The mission for Scale Consortium is quite simple: To inspire more enterprise companies to choose WordPress.
The Scale Consortium is a newly formed group made up of representatives from some of the most prolific and successful enterprise WordPress agencies. It was created to address the evolving landscape of the enterprise layer of WordPress and formed just last year in 2023.
It makes good sense for the WordPress community to work more formally together, but specifically getting agencies to collaborate through ups and downs remains tricky. From the customer point of view, it’s long been confusing to navigate the immense WordPress community and we’ve often heard from group members that getting the implementation right remains tricky, in particular for those complex challenges faced by large, global organisations.
Since being formed, several other enterprise agencies have joined the Scale Consortium, so that as of writing 10 agencies are a part of it.
In a recent members' call we heard from two of the founding members Karim Marucchi at Crowd Favorite and Tom Willmot at Human Made. The conversation started with the problem they are trying to solve, so let’s dive in.
Below you can find notes from the call, some additional context, our take and finally the entire recording.
What’s the problem that Scale Consortium is trying to solve?
WordPress’ strength lies in its massive adoption and diverse ecosystem, but this also presents a challenge. The fragmented approach to the enterprise market can be confusing and less than ideal for enterprise buyers. Other platforms have historically had an edge due to their consistent messaging and positioning.
The Scale Consortium exists because the founders believe that it’s crucial for enterprise agencies to collaborate and bridge the gap between WordPress as a platform and the needs of their enterprise customers.
As Tom mentioned in the call, WordPress doesn’t always show up where it should. Despite the fact that WordPress is by far the most widely adopted platform in the enterprise, many enterprise buyers still shy away, and with each and every WordPress agency producing their own best practices, white papers and other material, the platform doesn’t stand as strong as it could.
Also, as a buyer, where do you go? Commercial and proprietary vendors receive industry analyst coverage and they also offer streamlined partner programs, which as a buyer enables you to easily find…, say…, a Gold Partner in Toronto.
So, in summary: The Scale Consortium is a kind of marketing alliance for WordPress agencies. This is also shown by some of their recent deliverables, like these two recent posts Why WordPress is the Preferred CMS for Newsrooms or How WordPress Scales for Sudden Website Traffic Surges. To be fair, it’s also more than marketing and while the Consortium remains newly formed, it seems quite focused on being a shared educational offering, much more so than a place for WordPress agencies to solicit more business.
Navigating WordPress in the Enterprise
In the call, we also talked more broadly on what enterprise WordPress really means and how these agencies collaborate with Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com as well as WordPress VIP, which also positions themselves as Enterprise WordPress and offers hosting. As mentioned earlier, it quickly gets confusing.
There’s also hosting firm WP Engine, which also offers Headless WordPress. Companies like Pantheon and Platform.sh offer web operations helping customers with deployment and automating infrastructure tasks. In addition Pagely was also mentioned in the call for their Managed WordPress services.
There are many more players out there in the crowded WordPress ecosystem and from an analyst perspective, the collaboration in the Scale Consortium is a clear sign of progress. It seems very much in the open source spirit to not just collaborate unofficially based on a few key relationships and this alliance of agencies will hopefully take their efforts further over time, e.g. looking at certifying modules/plug-ins which is something that was mentioned in the call.
In the big picture, customers are looking for their digital platform to reduce risk and to deliver on their expectations for a modern experience - they don’t want to keep replatforming and they know that when agencies can’t collaborate, it can become risky, as you easily get locked in.
Learn more about the Scale Consortium
For a recent list of highlights of what has already been done from the agencies that are in the Scale Consortium, see Enterprise WordPress Showcase: Summer 2024.
The consortium does have some similarities to the hyped MACH Alliance (read What’s the MACH Alliance all about? from 2021), which is more on the vendor side. Then there’s also the newer Open Website Alliance between Drupal, Joomla, TYPO3 and WordPress. It also seems likely that some future alliance could be formed around Universal CMS, let’s see.
In the big picture, open source is having a moment these days. We had a previous call on free and open source in 2024 and our friends over at CMS Critic recently wrote about how Switzerland is making open source the default in government.
The conversation about WordPress, selecting the right CMS, open source and how agencies collaborate naturally continues in our peers groups and conferences. In Europe, don’t miss the Boye Aarhus 24 conference in November, where we have a dedicated CMS Experts conference track and in January it’s time for CMS Kickoff 25 in Florida, where Karim will also join us in person.
There were no slides presented in the call, but you can lean back and enjoy the entire unedited recording below.