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Mastering the Poetry of Partnerships: An Interview with Kentico’s Jenda Perla 

matt-garrepy

The Hero’s Journey to Composable: A Conversation with Uniform’s Mark Demeny

There’s a little-known psychological condition called footballis doldrumus that affects millions of people each year.
This peculiar phenomenon strikes around mid-July – the “dog days,” as we say – causing North American football fans to incessantly pine for the pigskin. The hotter the summer, the more intense the craving. And this has been a hot one.
Symptoms include (but are not limited to): listing the season opener as a holiday on your Outlook calendar, leaving messages on refrigerator wipe boards that read “6 weeks left ‘til kickoff,” and waking up from a deep sleep and shouting first and ten for no apparent reason.
It’s a sinister malady that Joel Varty is undoubtedly familiar with, given his own experience on the field. When we met in New York City this past May, he told me about his son’s goal of playing football at the collegiate level, and perhaps one day in the NFL. I learned later that Joel played during college, and has a passion for coaching. 
As a victim myself of footballis doldrumus, talking with Joel was a bit like a support group on multiple levels. I resisted any mention of Tom Brady for fear of getting too off-topic (or sounding like an insipid fanboy), and we focused instead on the real-world challenges impacting the content management game.
In his role as Chief Technology Officer at <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/agility-cms-introduces-simplified-pricing-tiers-for-headless-content-management/">Agility</a> – <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/top-free-headless-cms-platforms/">a headless CMS</a> – Joel is facing a deep bench of competitors with similar strengths on the field. As many platform features become commoditized, executing the right plays to differentiate is essential to win.
When I learned that Agility was releasing new updates to its UI, I caught up with Joel to learn more about his company’s strategy and get his perspective on the marketplace. We talked about how composable is changing the game, why trust is critical to customer experience, and how he’s quarterbacking his own way to victory.
<h2>Coaching the long game in CMS </h2>
Like most content management veterans, Joel’s path to product was circuitous. While playing football at the <a href="https://www.uoguelph.ca/" target="_blank">University of Guelph</a> in Ontario, he parlayed a love of prose into programming and graduated with honors in English and Computer Science.
It’s not an uncommon story in the development world. Some of the best coders I’ve ever worked with started analyzing James Joyce before JavaScript.
Guelph is also where Agility’s CEO, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonvoigt/">Jon Voigt</a>, attended – and the two have been teaming up ever since. They both endured the rise and fall of the dot.com era, and that lead to a stint of website consulting gigs that encompassed the buildout of their own CMS.
“[I think] everyone has said, ‘hey, I can build my own CMS’ at some point,” he recalls with laughter. “We started ours around 2005 and kept doing it because we really like working together. But by 2017, we decided we didn’t want to build websites anymore – we just wanted to build a CMS, and we think headless CMS is the way to go.”
Joel also said that one of the catalysts for this shift in priorities was the maturity of the Agility CMS itself. Not only was it stable and trusted at a foundational level, but it now had enough customers running on it to make financial sense. As a totally bootstrapped company with solid profitability, they were able to sell off some of their existing contracts in 2018 and go all-in on the CMS.
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<h4>“I think where Agility shines isn't in a specific vertical market. It's with folks who have complex, unique needs – and you have to approach those in a special way. We love to teach our partners how to do that.”</h4>
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“It was really hard to let go,” Joel admitted. “Giving [our business] to partners was a double-edged sword, but it was great to stop competing with our partners. We were always the first party vendor building stuff, so we didn't feel it was fair to have a product we have an upper hand with.”
I asked Joel how they made the transition successful, particularly around client care. I’ve heard this projects-to-products story many times, but the failures often come from a lack of top-down leadership and cultural investment – like a self-inflicted form of pass interference. 
“We actually looked at our core values as a company, and really focused on teaching,” he said, “so we took the lessons we’ve learned and started teaching our partners how to do things. I think where Agility shines isn't in a specific vertical market. It's with folks who have complex, unique needs – and you have to approach those in a special way. We love to teach our partners how to do that.”
Teach... or coach? Either way, Joel and his team have made the knowledge transfer a big part of the Agility experience. This includes clear documentation, tutorials, transparent practices, and regular communication with their community of users. 
<h2>Outplaying sameness with service </h2>
At a recent event, I was discussing the headless CMS category with several attendees, and the subject of commoditization came up (as it frequently does). One of the pedaled analogies was that DXPs are akin to “apples and oranges” based on their feature sets, while headless CMSes are more like red apples versus green.
I asked Joel about this swelling box of apples and how he views the commoditization challenge.
“It’s interesting because there's almost more of a move to be enough of the same so that you're recognizable across vendors – like things have to be ‘same enough,’” he observed. “If you're too different, that's not actually a good thing, because it's hard to compare in a DX or composable space. So we strive to be ‘same enough’ while being unique.”
Commoditization is a real threat, but Agility is rising above the challenge by investing in its customer experience. This is embodied by its “White Glove Service,” which assures each client receives human interaction – which Joel admits is a challenge for most vendors as it inhibits scalability. But when the average lifetime of an Agility customer is eight to ten years, there’s value in this hands-on approach.
This felt like a key differentiator to me, so I asked if it was a key selling point for Agility.
“We haven't been using it enough,” Joel said. “We need to listen more to that part of our customers’ reactions. Our product was built based on customer feedback, and that's how we decide what we're going to do. It's 100% customer driven. We spent a lot of time and effort tracking what people say and want regarding features. And that's how we decide what we build into the product.”
To that end, Agility continues to provide transparency around its roadmap, engaging with its users via <a href="https://roadmap.agilitycms.com/tabs/3-launched" target="_blank">roadmap.agilitycms.com</a> around ideation. Joel said developers are very vocal within their community, but Agility strives to ensure that marketers and business decision-makers have a voice. That’s important, given the critical role of content operations within most enterprises.
“Our ideal customer needs to understand the value of content,” he explained. “Sometimes it's the developer, an information management role, a head of marketing, a CTO – maybe even the CEO of a smaller company. But if they can get the value of that content… then that’s going to be a good fit for Agility.”
<h2>Tackling the composable hype-cycle with trust</h2>
As a headless CMS, I asked Joel what he thought about the growth of composable and the advent of <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/wrestling-with-category-confusion-in-the-dxc-slackdown/">DXC (digital experience composition)</a> and other categories emerging in the space. On the one hand, DXC vendors like <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/uniform-raises-28m-in-series-a-funding-round-for-composable-dxp/">Uniform</a> are solving the visualization challenges for headless CMSes. But are these TLAs (or “three-lettered acronyms” for the unindoctrinated) helping or hindering our understanding of the composable space?
“My opinion is those acronyms are holding us back as much as they bring us forward,” he said. “They give us something to talk about, but you always have to go beyond that. There's always some explaining that has to happen when you're talking to someone who actually wants to use this in their business. I think it comes down to having more trust between people.”
That trust is hard-earned, as Joel explained. <a href="https://www.cineplex.com/" target="_blank">Cineplex</a>, one of Agility’s customers since 2007, has relied not just on its CMS, but on the expertise of a team that understands their business imperatives. Over the years, trust in Agility has guided the cinema giant’s digital transformation, from site rebuilds to infrastructure changes. This ingredient of trust has shaped Joel’s perspective on composable, which is as much about the business considerations as the technology posture.
“I think the idea of enterprise software should mean long-term ROI, not just fast ROI,” he said. “How can you take a piece out and put it back in, or fix something that you don't like? That, to me, is like the best of composable.”
I probed further about the importance of composable standards and the rise of the <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/the-future-is-composable-a-conversation-with-new-mach-alliance-president-casper-rasmussen/">MACH Alliance</a> over the last few years. The organization has advocated for best-of-breed technologies that meet the rigid standards of MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS, Headless). Are relationships with vendors in DXC, e-Commerce, search, and other categories becoming an important growth channel for headless CMS?
“Yes, and the long-term goal is to have a combination of technology and relationships accelerated, where it's like a pre-built stack or grid that everyone knows works,” he said. “So CMS is going to be hosted here, and it will have this for search, this personalization, and this for commerce. We know how it all works together – and everyone trusts it.”
Joel admitted that we might be three or four years away from any broad market buy-in, suggesting that it’s still a hard sell given the institutional culture of some IT departments. This is why the efforts of thought leaders within the MACH Alliance community have been key to advancing the growth of composable.
“They won’t get it until they trust it,” Joel punctuated.
<h2>Agility’s new UI delivers more than a fresh uniform</h2>
I heard Agility’s plans for its new user interface some time ago, well before its scheduled GA. While modernizing a UI is an accepted part of any software lifecycle, it offers as many opportunities as challenges. Most people loathe change – so any modification can be met with temperamental responses. That’s why this UI "refresh" is as much about empathy and sentiment as it is about systems and processes.
I wanted to hear how Agility approached this undertaking, and what stood out for Joel.
“Interestingly enough, we started this new UI project about 18 months ago,” he revealed. “The last time we redid our UI was in 2015, and Jon [our CEO] and I knew that you always do it once and then refresh it after everyone's already had a chance to see it. We started base testing with cohorts of new or existing users, and we actually brought design in-house – which, for a smaller company, was a big deal. We also have this amazing person who A/B tested different things and conducted interviews to determine what makes [users] feel better. And we focused as much on that as we could and tried to be very consistent about how we handled content.”
As Joel detailed the process, it was clear his team didn’t cut things out or remove extraneous elements just to satisfy the simplification goal. To his point, CMS users claim to want all the features – even if they won’t be using them.
“There's a real balance there,” he continued. “But overall, we wanted things to be faster and easier across the board and ultimately make people feel better.”
I had a chance to peruse the new UI while comparing it to the classic version (which will continue to be available to users). Right off the bat, the visual design system is cleaner and more streamlined, offering a modern lightweight experience that feels more like an app. The main navigation panel provides more contrast, aimed at reducing eye strain during prolonged use. The authoring tools are still intuitive and familiar, a staple of Agility's previous UI. 
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/07/agility-new-ui-2023-1024x692.jpg" alt="New Agility software UI" />
You can read about the full scope of features <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/agility-unveils-refreshed-design-system-in-ui-delivering-enhanced-user-experience-and-accessibility/">in our previous post</a>, but a few stand out, including new filters that offer augmented search. Users will find the new org selector handy, and there’s a slick heartbeat indicator coming that will provide greater visibility around specific events and tasks. Also noteworthy are the drag-and-drop model editor and the table column reordering, both designed to simplify and accelerate tasks.
You can check out the UI for yourself by creating an Agility account at <a href="http://www.agilitycms.com">www.agilitycms.com</a>. While Joel and his team are still fine-tuning some details, scope creep has pushed the original launch date into late July – a frustrating reality of software launches.
“But I think it will be worth it,” he said. “Our company anniversary is July 19, so I'm kind of thinking maybe that's a good day.”
<h2>Keeping the game fun – even with AI on the field</h2>
I’ve already waxed extensively about Joel’s affinity for football. But that affection is grounded by a deep gratitude for his family and their shared pastimes. Much like his dual pursuits of literature and computer science, he blends a love for athletics and a passion for art and scholarship in his life outside Agility.
“I am super blessed with two really, really cool kids,” he said glowingly. “My son plays football, and I've been a dedicated ‘dad coach’ for that. But my daughter is super into theater, and I love directing, being on stage, or getting involved from a community standpoint. It's got nothing to do with technology – it's just having fun.”
As we rounded out our time together, the subject of AI meandered into the conversation. What does Joel think about the advent of this technology and its impact on content? He has, after all, helped shape the CMS space over the last two decades. What does the world look like now that ChatGPT is a growing fixture in the creative process?
“I look at it like this: ChatGPT needs us,” he said. “It copies ideas. Nothing comes out of thin air, and someone has to come up with the ideas.”
Kind of like a quarterback audibling on the field. Sometimes, human instinct takes over – no matter how rehearsed the play might be. And while AI may prove its worth as a key automation tool, it’s heartening to hear from a content veteran that people are still core to the process.
As a headless CMS in a densely-packed market, Agility is executing in all the right ways. And with so many seasons under its belt, the platform and its people have proven resilient in the face of change. That speaks volumes about its vision and go-to-market strategy, which gives it a strong position in the new composable game. 
I still reserve the mantle of GOAT for Tom Brady, but Joel definitely has my vote for the “CMS Hall of Fame.”

Playing to Win in the Headless CMS Game: Interview with Joel Varty, CTO at Agility

It turns out an “ING” can be quite a thing.
Case in point: the role of a Chief Marketing Officer. For most of us, the word “Marketing” in this mantle concisely explains the individual’s responsibilities.
But drop the “ING,” and it’s a different story. Well… sort of.
In my conversation with <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifergriffinsmith/" target="_blank">Jennifer Griffin Smith</a>, Acquia’s new Chief Market Officer, we discussed the distinction between these titles, and why the leading DXP added her – and this new role – to its roster.
We also covered what she sees on the roadmap for <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/acquia-taps-its-modular-open-source-legacy-to-drive-the-composable-future/">Acquia</a>, how composable is shifting the conversation, and why she’s excited about showing customers the “art of the possible.”
<h2>A marketing trailblazer in tech</h2>
Jennifer joined me via Zoom from a comfortable, unassuming home office. Originally from Europe, she’s been in the States for quite some time.
“As you can tell by the accent, I'm British,” she said. “We came for two years, and here we are 14 years later.”
For more than two decades, Jennifer has focused her superpowers on marketing for technology companies, with a deep focus on go-to-market strategies for both public and private companies. In her previous stints, she served as Chief Marketing Officer at <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/hyland-acquires-alfresco-focuses-on-cloud-and-global-expansion-of-enterprise-cms/">Alfresco</a> (acquired by Hyland), Software AG, and <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/progress-launches-sitefinity-dx-14-0-enhances-digital-experience-delivery-with-global-scale/">Progress Software</a> – which owns the Sitefinity CMS.
In her most recent CMO gig at <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/brightcove-video-connector-will-bring-video-content-to-sitecore/">Brightcove</a>, Jennifer led the video streaming platform’s global marketing organization. This included product marketing and strategy, customer GTM programs, and new business, brand, and marketing communications. 
Given her legacy of leadership at content and digital experience vendors, I asked her what made the Acquia opportunity so enticing.
“I've spent some time with Acquia as a consumer, not just as a marketer or a business person,” she said. “I'm fascinated by the changes in how we want to purchase, learn, and engage with content. And I think, the way I live – my life – has changed so drastically in the last five years. Most of that is obviously through the pandemic, but just in my own need for time, and levels of service I expect, whether I'm researching a college, purchasing a shirt, or a car. Whatever it is, my expectation has changed. Then I look at the demographic of my 12-year-old son and the younger generation, and it will change again. I'm genuinely fascinated by digital experiences, and how we can bring it together as a consumer.”
<h2>From Chief Marketing Officer to Chief Market Officer</h2>
Getting down to brass tacks, I wanted to understand the new role of Acquia’s Chief Market Officer. How did Jennifer see it – and more importantly, what signal is Acquia sending with this expansion to its C-Suite?
First, it’s worth noting that the rise of the Chief Market Officer is a relatively new phenomenon, much like Chief Experience Office, Chief Revenue Officer, and Chief Growth Office. In a <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimberlywhitler/2020/06/06/a-new-c-suite-role-the-chief-market-officer/?sh=7325514b6d9c">2020 Forbes article</a>, Christine Heckart – then the CEO of Scalyr – noted that “heads of marketing must, first and foremost, be chief MARKET officers, not marketing.”
Jennifer reflected on my question but started with a caveat: “Each CMO position is unique, and it's based on where the company is, and what the board and the CEO feel like they need. So it's hard to compare, because companies are different. But in my experience, most of what’s required in marketing is about the execution, right? And it gets into ‘how do we get the best return on our spend? What's your CAC? What's your ROI?’”
Again, the “ING” is the key here – and for most organizations that have embraced the Chief Market Officer role, it delineates the focus on tactical marketing execution from the strategic market objectives and KPIs that drive growth.
“Now look,” she continued, “everything results in pipeline, bookings, revenue – however you want to measure it. But I think over the years, we’ve become too focused on the execution piece. When we first had our conversations, I loved that Acquia reflected what I've learned in my many CMO roles: you cannot be successful in any of your program execution if you don't understand your market.”
The relentless creep of the marketing team ecosystem also stymies this execution. To Jennifer's point, we’ve accrued a range of discretely focused areas like product marketing, communications, brand, field marketing – and most are solely concerned with execution. And as Jennifer pointed out, most of these marketing professionals have never consumed the product, nor understand what a customer does with it.
So back to the question at hand: what does it mean to be a Chief Market Officer at Acquia?
“For me, the Chief Market Officer is hyper-focused on the market and the customer and how we can really help them,” Jennifer said. “But then it spans a much bigger role across connecting different teams all for the outcome of the customer, and making sure everybody understands what we're building. Because we're not building it for us.”
What seems clear about Acquia’s decision to hire a Chief Market Officer is that it has reached a pivotal point in its growth – one that demands a deeper commitment to the market while maintaining the execution of its marketing. With Jennifer, they get the winning balance of a seasoned marketer with an analytical mind geared toward growth.
<h2>Riding the composable wave </h2>
Jennifer assumes her role at a precarious time in the digital experience industry. The term “composable” has become a bit of a hot potato as <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/top-free-headless-cms-platforms/">headless content management systems</a> align with other technologies to provide flexible, best-of-breed solutions to build their own DXPs. Organizations like the <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/the-future-is-composable-a-conversation-with-new-mach-alliance-president-casper-rasmussen/">MACH Alliance</a> have gained traction by providing a membership ecosystem of pure MACH (Microservices, APIs, Cloud Native SaaS, Headless) solutions – partially in response to “headless hybrid” platforms and all-in-one monoliths.
At the same time, enterprise DXPs have endeavored to position their offerings as more composable, taking a product-based approach powered by robust APIs. Acquia’s open source <a href="https://www.drupal.org/" target="_blank">Drupal</a> heritage already embraces tenants of the <a href="https://dri.es/the-assembled-web" target="_blank">modular assembled web</a>. So it may have a key advantage in the market mele.
I asked Jennifer what she sees as the biggest challenges for Acquia as it positions itself within this narrative.
“Composable to me, in my world, just means flexible, right?” she said. “It means I can build something that will be unique to me. But some of our customers of a certain size would be frightened off by that because they don't have the resources to build it – and they want something that is very easy to use, secure, and scalable, but gives them the solution right there.”
Jennifer also explained that utility is essential, and data is the key to everything. This applies to the broader tech stack of integrations that Acquia is building value around, from CMS to CDP. “I love our CDP,” she noted, “because it goes way further than any other marketing campaign reporting analytics tool that I've used and seen.”
Knowing she’s new to the job, I probed gingerly around the topic of <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/from-chatbots-to-contentops-how-ai-is-coming-to-your-cms-whether-you-like-it-or-not/">AI</a> – which is firing like a bullet heard 'round the DX world. While she said Acquia is pioneering more solutions on its open source roadmap, she reinforced the litmus test around value.
“How do we offer a usable AI technology that makes a difference to [customers]? What do they need to move their business, right? What do they need today, and what will it be tomorrow? And not in a way that is so futuristic that we just talk about it. We need to deliver something that brings value to them.”
<h2>Showing customers the “art of the possible”</h2>
If there’s one thing that Jennifer is resoundingly enthusiastic about, it’s community – from employees to customers to partners. In her short time at Acquia, she’s already experienced how Acquia is differentiating in the service category.
“Honestly – and I'm not just saying this – I've never been in a company where I've met so many customers and partners, and not had a complaint,” she said. “I went to my first customer and partner event in London, and I got to sit and talk to so many different people, and just hear what's important for them. Everything from a financial services company to a software company, even a university – and they actually shared what they've learned more broadly with other customers."
Quite a testament, and something that Jennifer is looking to build on. In her mind, this positive community feedback is manifesting into momentum for the company, demonstrating how they can support customers in attaining the impossible – and realizing the “art of the possible.”
“I'm excited about using our community and our customers to really tell these stories,” she expressed eagerly. “And unlike some of our bigger competitors, we can do it nimbly – and make it real, quicker.”
<h2>Building a culture of diversity and inclusion</h2>
At the recent <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/mach-two-conference-wrap-six-takeaways-from-the-composable-event-of-the-year/">MACH Two</a> event, I was inspired by the emphasis the <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/mach-alliance-expands-advisory-board-launches-new-mach-book-resource/">MACH Alliance</a> places on diversity and inclusion as core values. Technology companies have often embraced a more progressive stance, but it’s one thing to say it – and quite another to lead by example.
As a woman who has served in multiple C-Suite positions, Jennifer continues to shatter the silicon ceiling in the DX industry. She was quick to point out the importance of “talking the talk and walking the walk,” but this has always been an important focus of her work, and she’s managed to blend her corporate responsibilities with the growth and advancement of her teams on a human level.
“At one of my jobs, I was Chief Marketing and Culture Officer, because myself and the CEO had a fundamental belief that brand is inside out,” she said. “This was an open source company, and if we couldn't build a culture of people excited about what we're doing – if we couldn't nurture a community internally – we had no hope of building it externally.”
Jennifer also talked about Acquia’s focus on its people. This includes a Day One program where Acquia plants a tree for every new employee. It's just one of the company's many commitments to ESG initiatives, personal development, and nurturing diversity across its team.
We also reflected a bit on the impact of the pandemic on the work environment, and how Acquia is preparing for its next growth phase with a distributed team across the globe. Jennifer shared how Covid put everyone on equal footing, allowing people to achieve greater balance in their personal and professional lives.
“Acquia is a fully hybrid working environment, and my team is all around the world. I love that we can work very well virtually. Don’t get me wrong – I like seeing people face-to-face, too. But I really believe that Acquia walks the walk. And because of that, people are open. We might not all agree on everything, but we just have this culture of being in it together, which is so refreshing. It really is.”
Refreshing indeed. With an “ING.”

Acquia and the Art of the Possible: Interview with Chief Market Officer Jennifer Griffin Smith

Headshot of Jennifer Griffin Smith next to the Acquia logo

As a self-diagnosed cinephile, I can’t deny the power of <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000131/" target="_blank">John Cusack</a>.
He’s just… well, he’s John Cusack.
Talk about a body of work: in addition to his brief appearance in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088128/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" target="_blank">Sixteen Candles</a>, Cusack would go on to star in comedic hits like <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0146882/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" target="_blank">High Fidelity</a> and <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119229/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" target="_blank">Grosse Point Blank</a>. He later dabbled with Westerns and psychological thrillers and even produced a string of veritable rom-coms.
And, of course, who can forget the modern classic <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1231587/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" target="_blank">Hot Tub Time Machine</a>?
IMDB listings aside, Cusack is perhaps most revered for his role as Lloyd Dobler in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098258/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" target="_blank">Say Anything</a> (the one with the boom box). It’s the last wave of 80s celluloid, set against the backdrop of a proto-grunge Seattle – and it singlehandedly crystallizes the teenage angst of the era.
I recently saw Cusack in person at a local film festival, where he accompanied a screening in a small, intimate theater. After the show, he was interviewed on stage, where he talked about the massive transformation engulfing the film industry – and how today’s tools enable anyone to tell stories with just an iPhone and an idea.
Despite this degree of newfound accessibility, Cusack also expressed frustration with large corporate studios that still own the mindshare in the market. He said they’re too risk averse, banking on “superheroes in tights” over independent films. At the same time, these large studios are producing and distributing epic work on a scale that smaller studios can’t compete with.
Across the CMS market (that’s content management system, not “Cusack Movie Syndication”), there’s a similar plot playing out. In a composable world where newer headless and decoupled technologies are powering choice, larger integrated platforms continue to provide an abundance of benefits. Organizations are making decisions based on a bevy of factors, such as complexity and vendor lock-in, but there seems to be more confusion in the script than ever.
That’s why people – both on the customer and the vendor side – continue to be important to the educational process, particularly as buyers weigh a shift towards the complexity of composable.
I recently caught up with Rich Chivers, CEO of <a href="https://www.zengenti.com/" target="_blank">Zengenti</a> – the company behind <a href="https://www.contensis.com/" target="_blank">Contensis CMS</a> – and we chatted at length about the confusion and challenges that the terminology presents, and why customer experience is still the star of the show. He also gave us a sneak peek at what’s coming from Contensis.
<h2>Coming to terms with the “composable” term</h2>
Since I last spoke with Rich in 2022, composable has taken center stage, particularly from a marketing perspective. While Contensis pitches itself as a platform that is beyond headless and more than hybrid, the company also provides some modicum of hands-on implementation. This gives Rich some unique optics, and I wanted to learn how he viewed the composable explosion through that lens.
“If we go way back to web 2.0 with Ajax, this [composable] stuff was being done – it just wasn’t branded in the same way,” he said. “I think composable is becoming something that people can hang on to. And it's a nice term that describes what we've been trying to get to forever. But for us, it's not really new.”
This reflects what I’ve been hearing from other CMS and DXP platforms up and down the spectrum. In fact, at the <a href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmskickoff23/program" target="_blank">2023 Boye &amp; Company CMS Kickoff</a> in January, several established vendors reinforced their use of APIs for over a decade, allowing them to integrate with third-party systems and power headless strategies.
Granted, this was before the Wild West of omnichannel, where CMS was primarily focused on the web. As <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/deane/" target="_blank">Deane Barker</a> of <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/optimizely-partners-with-google-cloud-to-take-experimentation-to-the-next-level/">Optimizely</a> observed <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/deane_do-you-really-need-a-headless-cms-activity-7051550183737757696-j-9O?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=member_desktop" target="_blank">during a recent podcast</a>, if you buy a web CMS today with a good headless API, you can solve more than one problem.
Rich echoed these sentiments. “We don't believe the CMS should be a CRM or an e-commerce platform altogether. It’s actually about getting the [customer] the right tool for the job – and integrating those services in the right way is how you should do things. Fundamentally, we've been delivering that for the last five or ten years.”
As Rich went on to note, composable is a great idea that solidifies what Contensis has been working towards – and in his words, it's fundamentally about APIs.
<h2>Is headless a kind of CMS… or a feature of CMS?</h2>
“It’s a really interesting question.”
After bouncing back and forth around the benefits of APIs and the Contensis position as a hybrid platform, I asked Rich how he felt about the moniker of headless. This was a heated topic of debate at the CMS Kickoff as well, bringing multiple POVs to the podium.
“If you think about what headless means, ultimately, we're saying that a developer can gain access to their content through an API in a meaningful manner – so of course, to answer the question, yes, you could quite happily say any CMS offering a great API can be headless. I don't think it's monolith versus microservice, the same sort of scales that move both ways all the time, becoming the separation between pure content and visualization. There's this constant sort of, ‘we want pure content we can deliver in any way’ versus ‘build a landing page and have it look like this.’ And, you know, we're curating. So going back to the headless question, yes – I think ultimately, it could be described as a feature of a CMS platform.”
But there’s more to it than that. As Rich detailed, Contensis is platformed for its headless capability, but it came from a heritage of head-centric features – and that was fraught with challenges.
“We effectively took what we had as a monolith provider and started again. I think for [any] monolith provider that's been used to delivering web content to a page with their templating system, they almost have to start again, because there's too many concepts wound up otherwise.”
One of the best observations Rich made was about the nature of CMS and what it means in a market of DXPs. It’s not clear – and to some extent, the emergence of visualization tools and other technologies to aid headless are further adding to the morass.
“There's all these sorts of gray areas,” he said. “Literally, where do you sit? Where do you position yourself, right?”
This is why listening to the customer is so essential.
<h2>Tipping towards growth with headless</h2>
Like many of his leadership contemporaries in the CMS market, Rich has a rearview mirror of experience that helps inform his vision. While the idea of a pure headless CMS is still relatively new, he’s been working with APIs for quite some time – and that brings some unique perspective to his outlook. 
I asked him to characterize the use cases that Contensis is seeing in 2023 and where headless fits in. His answer was resoundingly clear, but there was an interesting caveat about market maturity and persistent confusion.
“I'd say 95% of the opportunities we see today have definite requirements that you couldn't deliver without headless CMS from our end,” he said. “However, there’s a lot of misunderstanding out there. We bid for a Canadian university last year, and the tender process was actually cancelled in the end. They wanted an API first platform where they could do this, and they could do this. But then they wanted to drag and drop interfaces to do X, Y, Z. So they want both, but it's impossible to achieve because they're fundamentally different, right? We see a lot of people who come to us that still don't understand what [headless] actually means.”
Because of this knowledge gap, Rich and his team continue to engage with people to help them through the process. This is where a higher-touch, more consultative approach continues to prove valuable – particularly in the public sector, where Contensis serves a number of customers.
“We don't necessarily see us having massive growth in that area, but certainly from a business perspective, we're starting to see much more engagement from organizations who are properly understanding the problems, and then going, ‘yeah, how can we do this?’” he remarked. “But especially in the public sector, that need for handholding is really [essential to] the process. We're selling the idea of headless and the benefits it can bring, and helping them get to that place where they can realize it.”
<h2>Expanding beyond Blocks to Canvas</h2>
Rich and his team ushered in 2023 with a bang, introducing <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/contensis-launches-blocks-new-container-first-website-builder-qa-with-richard-chivers/">its new Blocks platform</a> – a container-first way for developers to package and deliver code while managing releases through a familiar Contensis interface. A “block” is essentially a package of code built as a Docker image that runs on the Contensis cloud infrastructure, allowing site owners to deploy and manage easily. It’s still early days, but he seems bullish about it.
“Blocks is giving us the ability to be to take a full philosophical approach to headless,” he said. “You can use any stack for development you want, but you still have a management layer around it. You have all of the benefits of whatever frontend stack or backends you want to use, and deliver it through this new way of working.”
From a developer’s perspective, Rich said the company is seeing what they’ve been dreaming up for the last few years come to fruition. This includes a new feature called Canvas, an editor they’ve built from the ground up for creating long-form content in a really elegant, connected manner that will enhance the writing and creation experience. It’s slotted for the platform’s next release at the end of May.
“What’s different is it's an object-modeled format, so it's still JSON,” Rich said. “You write a blog in long form, but you can also decorate and attach. As a developer, you can consume this and use the parts you’re interested in, throw away [other] bits, and still use it as a full object model. Sometimes, people just want that slight bit of extra flexibility.”
In terms of the rest of the platform, Rich said we can expect big changes ahead. One big area of focus is the platform’s <a href="https://www.contensis.com/help-and-docs/user-guides/content-modelling/site-view/an-overview-of-the-site-view-interface" target="_blank">Site View</a> interface for powering navigation.
“Think tree navigation per CMS,” he said. “It's very common in the monolithic world, but not very common in headless. We create an API, which people can consume, to deliver all that. But we have some big changes coming around permissions and different bits and pieces, and we've had to do a complete rewrite from the ground up to make that possible because of performance. We’re almost providing this… composable platform within a platform.”
<h2>What’s next for Contensis? </h2>
In addition to its upcoming release and platform enhancements, I asked Rich what’s on the horizon as the composable debate rages on. I wanted to know the key differentiators in a shifting world of technology stacks – and how Contensis is positioned to compete for mindshare in a crowded market.
“I think the one big difference compared to a lot of other vendors is that we actually do get close to the problems,” he said emphatically. “We make sure we can solve those problems in a really elegant way because we’re connected – and we see them. For example, if we’ve got an engaged customer and they have an issue they’re just not sure how to solve, they can pull in one of our product owners or development team members to take a look with their own eyes rather than it just being ten problems they’re trying to solve in a lab. When it comes to delivery, we do deliver for our customers.”
As I mentioned earlier, Contensis and Zengenti bring a sort of “rare bird” quality to their position, allowing their team to support a product while engaging with customers in a meaningful way. This speaks to the company’s culture and the leadership that Rich provides. At the same time, he’s an early-rising, self-professed code fanatic that loves solving problems and making complex things simple – and seeing what customers can create.
“Some of this Blocks stuff we’ve been doing, there are examples where people have done certain things that we just never expected. You look at it and go, 'Wow, we never considered that as a way you could use it or what you could do.'”
As Contensis continues to write its own script for headless and composable, its proven commitment to customer experience will be an important part of the company’s evolution and how it will shape its place in the market. Giving customers the right tools to solve problems is a critical part of its promise, and it sounds like Rich and his team are hyper-focused on this goal.
No one knows what the future looks like, but having insight from the past is what great leaders rely on. Unfortunately, there’s no Hot Tub Time Machine to get you there – you have to experience it, learn from it, and keep expanding the story.

Contensis CMS Writes New Script for Composable and Headless: Interview with CEO Rich Chivers

<h5>TL;DR – Recently, there was an epic but friendly debate in the Boye &amp; Company CMS Experts Slack channel about the confusion surrounding DXC as a category. We asked the three main voices in the conversation – Rasmus Skjoldan, Andrew Kumar, and Sana Remekie – to discuss their thoughts on Zoom. Matt McQueeny helped moderate the conversation.</h5>
<hr />
Of the great mysteries that scientists, philosophers, and theologians grapple with, one question is often overlooked:
What, exactly, is professional wrestling?
I’m not referring to school leagues or Olympic competitions – I’m talking about the <a href="https://www.wwe.com/" target="_blank">WWE</a> and its brand of sportstainment. And I don’t mean to be glib or insulting with any comparisons; heck, I’ve been to a live wrestling event many moons ago, and it was kinda fun (particularly the people watching). 
But really, what is it? Is this a legitimate sport replete with feats of athleticism? Or is it truly just performance art following a well-oiled script? If you ask <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulk_Hogan" target="_blank">Hulk Hogan</a>, the iconic figurehead of the modern experience, he might say, "Well, let me tell you something, brother…" and launch into a dissertation about sport versus stage. 
As humans, we’re classically conditioned to put things in boxes so they’re easier to understand. Sometimes, that’s not so simple. This has long been the case in the software industry, where confusion often precedes clarity when new ideas takes the mat – like <a href="https://www.boye-co.com/blog/2023/1/whats-the-real-story-about-digital-experience-composition" target="_blank">Digital Experience Composition (DXC)</a>. 
A short while ago, members of <a href="https://www.boye-co.com/groups/cms-experts" target="_blank">Boye &amp; Company’s CMS Experts</a>, a peer group focused on content management, were treated to a sort of WWE-styled “Smackdown” in the community’s Slack channel. In truth, it was a friendly exchange of ideas, with no bodyslams or half-nelsons to report (those are wrestling moves, BTW).
Still, it was spirited. And for several days, this epic “Slackdown” generated significant interest from across the DXP and DXC spectrum. It all started with a simple, poignant question from <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/rasmusskjoldan/" target="_blank">Rasmus Skjoldan</a>, Chief Evangelist at <a href="https://www.magnolia-cms.com/?mgcid=19746730468&amp;utm_campaign=&amp;utm_content=&amp;utm_campaign=brand-protect-jf_us_2023&amp;utm_medium=cpc&amp;utm_source=google&amp;utm_content=19746730468&amp;utm_term=magnolia%20cms&amp;gad=1&amp;gclid=CjwKCAjw0ZiiBhBKEiwA4PT9z53dpcpsB0M2J-tIRhHdpnwYRHUwbjghkhAGI6_Azq8wWtHBU4ic8xoC4N0QAvD_BwE" target="_blank">Magnolia</a>, a leading DXP:
“I feel like some of the Digital Experience Composition positioning going on isn’t super helpful to customers, to be very blunt about it. What’s genuinely in it for them?”
This drew several DXC defenders to the ring, but the most vocal participants were <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewkumarxyz/" target="_blank">Andrew Kumar</a>, VP of Customer Solutions at <a href="https://uniform.dev/" target="_blank">Uniform</a>, and <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/sana-remekie/" target="_blank">Sana Remekie</a>, CEO of <a href="https://conscia.ai/" target="_blank">Conscia.ai</a>. It was entertaining to watch these adroit leaders wrestle with a red-hot topic, but it was incredibly informative for the fans in the stands – so much so that I partnered with <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/critics/matthew-mcqueeny/">Matt McQueeny</a> at <a href="https://konabos.com/" target="_blank">Konabos</a> to take the show on the road.
A few days later, we invited Rasmus, Sana, and Andrew to join us for an informal follow-up on Zoom to wrestle down some answers.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/04/dxc_boye_debate_debrief_720.png" alt="Zoom photo of Matt Garrepy, Matt McQueeny, Rasmus Skoldjan, Andrew Kumar, and Sana Remekie" />
<h2>In this corner… DXP</h2>
<a href="https://www.forrester.com/analyst-bio/joe-cicman/BIO14164" target="_blank">Joe Cicman</a>, an analyst at Forrester, has been on a quest to decipher the Digital Experience Platform. As he noted <a href="https://www.forrester.com/blogs/dxp-you-keep-using-that-term-i-dont-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means/" target="_blank">in a recent blog</a>, DXP is still misunderstood from a compositional perspective. The definition can be nebulous based on whether it’s delivered by a single vendor or assembled by an enterprise – or, in some cases, both.  
I like Joe's observation in the same post: “Every day I asked myself, ‘How is it possible for one vendor to create one product that works across multiple industries and grows in scope as a company’s digital remit grows?’ After talking to the vendors, turns out … it’s not possible.”
That might be the vein Rasmus tapped: confusion is everywhere. While DXC is emerging, DXPs continue to evolve in their own space. As he pondered in Slack, would it not be better to reenergize, modernize, or even reinvent the more established DXP label and category than trying to teach customers about another new acronym?
Add this to the confusion: Magnolia was included in an early DXC report by <a href="https://www.gartner.com/analyst/56850" target="_blank">Mike Lowndes of Gartner</a> as a vendor in this emerging field. So how does this color Magnolia’s positioning?
“When I speak to our composable die-hard customers, they are much more passionate about getting projects done, getting rid of the worst legacy apps, and reaching business goals than they are in the vendor/analyst-centric views on what’s in or out of categories,” Rasmus said. “Magnolia is seen as a DXC by some – which is fine, of course. We definitely cover that space with our own twist. To me, it just feels more like a use case than a real software category.”
That might be true. But vendors and buyers still refer to those MQ reports with biblical reverence.
Gathered in our cozy Zoom room, Matt McQueeny asked Rasmus why he felt compelled to engage with the community around these opinions.
“I'm very focused on looking at all this from the customer's perspective,” he said. “Every time I see a proposal for a category change, I'm just always asking myself, 'okay, who's actually behind this and who's to benefit from it?' Even for DXP, I sometimes have question marks around whether that really helps customers. So I felt that introducing new variations would be a significant sort of – not a disruption – but more confusion. And that's what I’m quite passionately against because I want to keep the focus on what has real value for customers.”
<h2>DXC enters the ring</h2>
TLAs (three-lettered acronyms) might be the bane of our technology existence. When I was consulting at IBM GTS, we were unpacking a catchy new triptych every week from across the cybersecurity theater. Heck, even “IBM” is an acronym... it's a bit like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inception" target="_blank">Inception</a> with TLAs. 
I asked Sana Remekie about her take on this acronym acrimony – and how she perceived Rasmus’ call to quell the challenges by refocusing on the established DXP category.
“There's lots of three-letter acronyms popping up all over the place,” she said. “I think the movement towards composability and having that best-of-breed architecture is real. Customers are asking for a choice in terms of all the packaged and business capabilities that they need to build their overall architecture, and there's agreement across Gartner and Forrester on that. They may call it different things, but everybody’s starting to agree that we should give customers the ability to create and assemble their own solutions.”
So how does this momentum towards composability and DXC impact the more traditional definition of DXP – particularly as an established category? 
“Some folks are saying very clearly that a single DXP – what they call a monolithic DXP – should no longer be a thing at all,” she added. “Customers should be able to create their own DXPs by picking best-of-breed applications from across the ecosystem. With this phenomenon, we're now giving choices to the customer and power to the SIs to make those choices for the customer. Sometimes it's an IT team within the organization making those choices with, hopefully, the business in mind. And sometimes they say, ‘alright, Deloitte, Accenture, Valtech, go make that choice for me – go directly to those vendors and put together a solution that is composable.’ That happens a lot as well.”
<h2>Finding the right place to “poke the DXP bear”</h2>
As the wrestling match commenced, we turned to Andrew Kumar for more insight on what ignited the debate on Slack. He took us on a brief trip in the wayback machine to his days at <a href="https://www.telus.com/en" target="_blank">Telus</a>, where the company assembled what we now call a composable or <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/the-future-is-composable-a-conversation-with-new-mach-alliance-president-casper-rasmussen/">MACH</a> architecture. 
“There weren’t these sexy marketing terms that exist today,” he said. “But in 2016, we [already] had this concept, and we created our own internal site builder on top of Contentful – and that's now part of DXC.”
Andrew also talked about the importance of the different roles and responsibilities that DXC needs to support and the tendency to lump the audience of potential users under a generic “business user” mantle. This might be a limiting descriptor, as the pool could include a wide range of team members from marketing, content ops, merchandisers, UX designers, product managers, or even data analysts.
Clearly, there’s room to improve the positioning and messaging around the DXC terminology – to find the right TLA, so to speak. And this confusion makes sense when we’re still in the early growth phases.
“Adoption and demand are still very, very nascent, but it's starting to get viral,” he said. “Despite being so nascent, it is disrupting and really ‘poking the bear’ on the big players in DXP. It's really shaping and adding maturity to headless and MACH – and these kinds of technical terms are now growing in maturity.”
Poking the bear sounds dangerous, but that’s what market challengers do. TLAs aside, Andrew went on to say that he would not recommend a “rip and replace” from DXP to DXC, but to take incremental steps towards composable.
“There are some bridges in place,” he said. “Uniform has one that can help Sitecore and AEM customers start to make those leaps. But there’s still a place for a DXP.”
<h2>What’s old is new</h2>
By this point in the match, we had wrestled multiple messages from our participants. Without question, DXC is the shiny new object blazing trails. At the same time, DXPs are evolving their posture to remain marketable. Andrew noted, “They’re decoupling and decomposing themselves, playing ball with others and having that multi-manufacturer style where you can build with OEM parts from all over the place.”
Pivoting back to Rasmus in the DXP corner, we inquired about his response to Andrew regarding the long history of APIs connecting different platforms – and how there are even use cases of Contentful feeding into Magnolia.
“I can totally back up that it's not really anything new,” he remarked to Andrew. “Magnolia has been producing a solution that is fundamentally a composable DXP for a very long time, since 2013 or 2014. We've had clients compose platforms out of multiple best-of-breed applications they put together in a joined platform for a long time.”
While Rasmus reinforced his criticism of a new TLA being injected into the ecosystem, he did express his support for how the narrative was being projected.
“If I look at some of the stuff I felt Uniform did super well, it was just a very clean story they came out with,” he said. “I totally love that. And it felt like a really novel spin that they would be the glue between all these different applications and allow the marketer the freedom to assemble, curate, and aggregate all their content and put together experiences based on many different services. I do see really good stuff about DXC. It's just not a category – and I don't think it will become a category.”
OK, so if it’s not destined to be officially blessed, where do we go from here? As Andrew pointed out, the roadmap might rest with user behavior.
“In some enterprises, there could be 60 times more technical folks that don't write code, but they're still making meaningful contributions to digital experiences. That is a huge user base. And that's where the DXC is really going to make its mark, and really going to – and this is probably an unpopular opinion – start to take over the DXP. It's serving so many more users in a more democratic low code, no code interesting way. It's empowering to that user base.”
<h2>A DXC by any other name is a… DXCP? DXO? EDP?</h2>
While pondering the future of a DXC category, Andrew quickly pointed out one basic flaw with the acronym: <a href="https://dxc.com/us/en" target="_blank">DXC Technology</a> is the name of a well-established global agency (which happens to sponsor <a href="https://dxc.com/us/en/manutd" target="_blank">Manchester United</a>). To that end, he feels “DXCP” might be a more suitable mantle – which Uniform has already been using across its communications.
He also talked about the long shadow cast by large competitors and the importance of establishing authority as a new category. “It’s really a challenge for new players to enter [the DXP market]. There's just so much <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/adobe-experience-cloud-adds-new-headless-cms-capabilities-updates-to-commerce-integration/">Adobe</a>, <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/optimizely-partners-with-google-cloud-to-take-experimentation-to-the-next-level/">Optimizely</a>, or <a href="https://www.magnolia-cms.com/" target="_blank">Magnolia</a> dominance. They've been around for so long. There’s no space for new entrants without a large insurmountable challenge.”
Sana also shared her perspective on the DXC category conundrum, which echoed my recent conversations with other vendors under the DXC umbrella. While <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/occtoo-dives-deep-to-unify-data-and-kill-integrations-a-conversation-with-ceo-niclas-mollin/">Niclas Mollin at Occtoo</a> is positioning around the Experience Data Platform, Sana is building a beachhead for Conscia as Digital Experience Orchestration.
“Conscia's not a DXC, even though we're playing in the space,” she explained. “There's a lot of confusion, so we said, you know what? We don't want to call ourselves a DXC because that would mean that we're tied too closely to a specific front end. So we’re going to act as the central piece of the composable ecosystem, which connects all the dots from the back end to the front end and is agnostic of both – and we’re able to orchestrate API's and experiences.”
<h2>And the winner is…</h2>
Er… not clear. We’re still wrestling with the answers, and the analysts have yet to canonize anything. But if we can smell what <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwayne_Johnson" target="_blank">The Rock</a> is cookin', we might be in for more confusion as DXC continues to find its footing. 
What’s abundantly clear to us, however, is that DXC is building real momentum, and DXP continues to drive demand. With the advent of AI and other innovations, the DXP market is still predicted to grow to over <a href="https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/digital-experience-platform-market" target="_blank">$30 billion by 2030</a>. While our guests shared strong opinions about DXC's future as a category and the underlying challenges, each seemed committed to demonstrable value over category woes.
At the end of our session, Matt McQueeny noted that we ended up where we always end up: with a clear mandate to focus on the business and the customer. 
The best part of this conversation was each participant's undeniable respect and reverence for one another, despite their competitive position or conflicting ideologies. Collectively, this industry powers millions of websites, apps, and experiences. Yet, the top minds shaping its trajectory represent a tightly-knit community of shared innovation – and we had three of the best participating in this forum.
We'll give Andrew Kumar the final word: “It’s definitely a fun time to be in this space. It can be confusing, but there's a lot of innovation and disruption happening – and it's ultimately for the business and end customer's benefit.”
I can hear Hulk Hogan saying, “Amen, brother…”
<hr />
Big thanks to: 
<ul>
<li>Rasmus Skjoldan. Andrew Kumar, and Sana Remekie for participating</li>
<li>Matt McQueeny for helping to moderate, facilitate, and transcribe this session</li>
<li>Janus Boye for creating a community to host these kinds of debates</li>
</ul>

Wrestling with Category Confusion in the DXC "Slackdown"

If you haven’t been to the British Virgin Islands, go. They are a jewel in the crown of the Caribbean. Beyond the sugary sand beaches and predictable tourist bars, a rugged, untamed beauty makes it all feel... undiscovered.
A few years back, I took a snorkeling excursion to the <a href="https://www.bvitourism.com/the-islands/virgin-gorda" target="_blank">Baths on the island of Virgin Gorda</a>, a nature park that offers a labyrinthine journey through a network of caves and secret pools. That might sound a bit daring, but there’s no spelunking involved. Just bring a good pair of shoes.
At the other end of this trek is a spectacular beach called Devil’s Bay. As you emerge from the rocks, it unfolds like a dream, with unspoiled turquoise water shimmering like diamonds in the sun. It’s worth the hike to experience it.
As I explored the crystalline depths, I encountered an octopus. It was a little bigger than my hand but full of vigor. I followed it for what seemed like hours, darting about the submerged rock formations, constantly changing its shape and size.
When I think about the octopus (or plural, octopi – that’s fun to say), the first thought that enters my head is “alien.” It’s not hyperbole: <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/scientific-paper-claims-octopuses-actually-161100373.html?guccounter=1&amp;guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&amp;guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAAlDc3OtmWaNnugy1CE9jDhDNBqXMsAtCICpCq5Kq276uYXmXNInrAgucHJDs2i3qlWggBfdZtzxrRqcvSIiG-VpDK7TZi4l-I2xm-GG4I4B8RcNFZij_oc_JsnQ7l2DVWTeMIuANjQLBrTCH9uhlnNTJZ0nQjIdG4zO9uovndmu" target="_blank">a scientific paper</a> released last year postulates that these critters exhibit "extraterrestrial biological features." If that sounds more like science fiction than fact, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hz1R6tOBryY" target="_blank">watch this video</a> of octopi making spectacular escapes from impossible places. They are cunning, intelligent, and able to reach places other species can’t.
It’s clear why this unique creature influenced the name Occtoo. The etymological allusion is obvious, but I wanted to ask <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/nmollin/" target="_blank">Niclas Mollin</a>, co-founder and CEO of this new breed of business, how this permutation came about – and why it’s so apropos to his company’s ethos.
“We had a lot of ideas,” he said, bouncing around concepts of infinity and its relationship to persisting data. But under it all, the octopus motif seems to align with the company’s values to reach, connect, and unify – like a cephalopod’s long, sticky arms.
As it so happens, a design company located in their shared workspace helped bring the brand to life – and the rest, as they say, is history. Since its launch in 2019, the startup platform has grown to almost 50 employees across 14 countries, with a hub in central Sweden.
During the course of our conversation, I asked Niclas about the murky depths of <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/8-cms-trends-to-watch-in-2023-from-mach-to-metaverse/">digital experience composition</a> (DXC) and how Occtoo is shining through the confusion. We also discussed the importance of the MACH Alliance as a force for shaping the composable landscape and what’s on the roadmap for his vibrant young company.
<h2>Swimming in rivers and oceans of data</h2>
Building businesses from the ground floor is nothing new for Niclas. He’s a steely entrepreneur that exudes confidence, masterfully translating business value into something scalable.
He mustered those traits as a founding member of <a href="https://www.inriver.com/" target="_blank">inRiver</a> – a product information management (PIM) system that simplifies multichannel commerce by making it fast, easy, and visual in nature. The platform enables customers to create, maintain, and distribute product information across multiple sales channels.
inRiver started flowing in 2008, and Niclas spent nearly a decade building it into a powerhouse PIM. Along the way, he saw the opportunity for Occtoo to emerge, specifically as fragmented and siloed data became a key inhibitor to building modern apps.
“There was a big challenge with flowing data and making it available in real time,” he said. “We couldn’t take so long to launch digital experiences. So I decided to explore if we could build something that can help customers innovate faster and launch in a more capable way.”
While not all startups have the good fortune to start with an international customer like <a href="https://www.cartier.com/en-us/home" target="_blank">Cartier</a>, Niclas was able to leverage his network of partnerships to prove out Occtoo’s utility. In the first two years, they landed <a href="https://www.fenixoutdoor.se/" target="_blank">Fenix Outdoor</a> and other leading brands, helping the company reach 500% revenue growth between 2020 and 2021.
This led to an investment by Sweden-based <a href="https://industrifonden.com/" target="_blank">Industrifonden</a> and <a href="https://www.42cap.com/" target="_blank">42CAP</a> for €2 million in early 2021, no doubt buoyed by the rapid acceleration of digital transformation by the Covid-19 pandemic in areas like eCommerce. This continued in November of 2022, with an additional infusion of €4.6M in a round led by <a href="https://newion.com/news/occtoo-raises-e4-6m-to-help-digital-teams-build-relevant-experiences-with-their-low-code-composable-experience-data-platform/" target="_blank">Newion</a>.
<h2>Building customer experiences at lightning speed</h2>
Occtoo is purpose-built around data, hence its claim to the mantle of “The Experience Data Platform.” But therein lies its competitive distinction: Occtoo helps companies build experiences faster by harnessing real time data from internal and external sources – from CRM to ERP, PIM to DAM – and combining it all in a low-code platform. With everything persisting in one place, you can assemble product and editorial content using data from various relevant places.
Sounds cool. But how?
APIs, baby – which, according to <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebecka-l%C3%B6thman-ryd%C3%A5-b8638a55/" target="_blank">Rebecka Löthman Rydå</a> of Industrifonden, can be rendered in Occtoo “as easily as creating a Slack channel.” These APIs also power additional capabilities like headless personalization, allowing for greater experimentation and optimization.
One of Occtoo’s strongest attributes is its ability to tap legacy and siloed data and make it available and reusable across an omnichannel of frontend screens and devices. At the same time, it’s bi-directional, allowing you to collect behavioral data from app users.
Occtoo’s cloud-native SaaS posture makes it a composable play that accelerates everything in the ecosystem, enabling a faster time to innovation – something critical in our rapidly evolving digital economy. Occtoo also offers a visualization UI that allows for simplified management.
On this point, Niclas analogized Occtoo to an iceberg. “We spent the first couple of years building, [figuring out] how to store data, our graph database – so customers don’t have to think about it,” he said. “Now, Occtoo Studio is the user interface. You can see it, activate it, and front-end developers can get the APIs. It’s all visual.”
<h2>The integration killer</h2>
In my <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/is-the-birth-of-dxc-the-death-of-dxp-a-conversation-with-darren-guarnaccia-president-at-uniform/">recent interview</a> with <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/dguarnaccia/" target="_blank">Darren Guarnaccia</a>, president at Uniform – a digital composition experience platform (DXCP) –  he emphatically denounced integration glue code as “the lowest value code.” No disagreement from me, but many SIs subsist on costly, long-term engagements and retainers to manage a hornet’s nest of integration code.
Like Uniform, Occtoo is appealing to both enterprises and SIs with the practical equation of time = money. By eliminating the friction around combining and activating data from any source, you can effectively kill the reliance on costly, time-consuming integrations that can sometimes take three, six, or even 12 months to build.
I know enterprises are seeing the benefit, but I asked if SIs were on board with "anti-glue code" solutions like DXC – and if they’re already seeing potential with these tools.
“Yes,” Niclas said unequivocally, “because glue code isn’t fun. The amount of time spent on projects is becoming an issue, but SIs also need to do something with their offerings, as there’s more than just commerce. We need to be asking, 'how can we help with the customer journey?'"
He also believes the SIs realize they can deliver their first DXC-powered project successfully and will be positioned to deliver more projects – and Occtoo has the perfect solution to make that happen.
“If you have Octoo in the offering, you can spend more time working on the dynamics of project cost. That creates more dollars to reallocate to do more – and that’s incentive for the SI. We have all the data needed in Occtoo, and launching the next digital initiative is five times faster.”
Five times faster. Not too shabby when considering time to market. Or your bottom line.
<h2>To be a DXC, or not to be… is that the question?</h2>
Earlier this year, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/kellygoetsch/" target="_blank">Kelly Goetsch</a> – Chief Strategy Officer at <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/commercetools-acquires-frontastic-adds-composable-frontend-capabilities-to-headless-commerce/">commercetools</a> and co-founder of the <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/the-future-is-composable-a-conversation-with-new-mach-alliance-president-casper-rasmussen/">MACH Alliance</a> – hosted a sort of DXC Family Feud on LinkedIn. The purpose: bring some definition to the emerging “digital experience composition” category. The contestants included Niclas, <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/uniform-raises-28m-in-series-a-funding-round-for-composable-dxp/">Lars Petersen</a> (CEO of Uniform), and <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/from-legacy-to-composable-whats-the-best-way-forward/">Sana Remekie</a> (CEO of <a href="https://conscia.ai/">Conscia.ai</a>).
The word “family” is apropos because everything about this webinar felt amicable. As Sana observed, this was her first time amongst frenemies. Kelly further amplified this point, suggesting all three panelists might be competing for market share – but only after a category, Wave, or Magic Quadrant had been codified. 
As I shared with Niclas, my experience with each of these leaders has been one of true composable ambassadorship for DXC, where rising tides lift all ships. He agreed and took it one step further.
“Lars came out of CMS, Sana out of search, and Occtoo out of enterprise data,” he said, noting the different layers of the stack. “When we talk to each other, we’re not competing at all. We’ve even pitched together [and] provided elements to help Uniform build cool frontends.”
That camaraderie sounds great, but the big challenge plaguing these innovators is a continued lack of clarity. While Gartner mentioned DXC as an important trend in its recently published Magic Quadrant for DXPs, the lack of “category guardrails” can still confuse potential buyers. Add to that a parsing within the proto-category, from Occtoo's "Experience Data Platform" to Conscia's "Digital Experience Orchestration." 
Niclas didn’t seem troubled by this, perhaps because of his clear focus on data.
“CMS is great, and you need to have that. The commerce engine has its purpose. But you have to include PIM data, enterprise ERP data... and this is where the magic happens [with Occtoo]. We want to help take care of the real business data, the kind that resides in internal facing systems. Persisting the data, the ability to unify data from different sources, and the ability to make it available from one API.”
I asked Niclas where he sees demand. Are RFPs specifically calling out DXC or Experience Data Platforms as a requirement?
“We’re in the early days,” he said. “but now we’re moving towards [being] a best-of-breed solution.”
And with a customer list that includes Cartier, Marquet, and other leading brands, they’re already carving out demand for their service.
<h2>MACHified for a composable world</h2>
As a member of the MACH Alliance, Occtoo has undergone a rigorous approval process to meet the organization’s certification benchmarks. Additionally, Niclas serves on the <a href="https://machalliance.org/insights/staying-focused-why-we-re-expanding-the-mach-alliance-advisory-board" target="_blank">Executive Advisory Board</a>, which is helping to shape the future of the Alliance and serve its growing member community – which now includes 80 vendors, SIs, and enablers.
I asked Niclas what the MACH Alliance means for Occtoo and the industry at large.
“It has a fantastic role to play,” he said. “It puts a light on it, and it would be hard to do [this] alone. The collective power is amazing and the team has done an amazing job.”
Niclas also reinforced what I’ve heard from multiple members and outside analysts: that the Alliance needs to continue its investment in education and certification, so it doesn’t dilute its value. This will continue to be a challenge as more monolithic DXPs shift to composable offerings and focus their marketing on the hype.
As Niclas created one of these MACH-certified composable solutions, I probed to see what he thought of these chess moves by more monolithic DXPs.
“It’s good – they recognize they can’t have data locked in,” he responded. "This is a tricky topic, but I believe that a DXP needs to be constantly evolving to include new technology and approaches – hence, interoperability is going to be key, even if this is a suite bought from one vendor or multiple vendors. The MACH Alliance is important to validate which vendors adhere to MACH principles."
The good news, as Niclas predicts, is that DXPs can use Occtoo to aid their transition to a modern posture. "This is the path moving forward. We can tap into legacy players, and it works – if they admit they are good at one part, and not another. DXPs have strengths.”
<h2>Eight arms towards the future</h2>
Design has been an important attribute of Niclas’ entrepreneurial makeup, from brand to business value. I asked what the roadmap looks like for his still fledgling company and what it takes to design an entirely new category – especially at a time when the economics are, shall we say, rattling the cage.
“You need to be a little crazy to do it,” he said, bending a wry smile in my direction. “When I left inRiver, I [swore] I would never build a category again. I love the building part, but it’s frustrating. Change is hard, and there’s a lot of resistance.”
Resistance may seem futile, but not to this business builder. He is undeniable in his quest to "empower people with data," and he’s focusing his passion on the possibilities – as crazy as they might seem.
Maybe those risks are less daunting when you have more time to explore. As we parted ways, Niclas shared how his two kids (a daughter and son, 20 and 18) have left a wake of space, allowing him and his wife to travel, hike, and even enjoy a glass of wine in the middle of the week.
As I think about Occtoo and its future, I’m reminded again of the octopus. In some ways, its otherworldly abilities to change form and reach impossible places are the very essence of being composable. DXC may feel a bit like wading into alien waters. But a new world of potential awaits below the surface – and leaders like Niclas are taking us there.
If you haven’t yet explored it yet, go.

Occtoo Dives Deep to Unify Data and Kill Integrations: A Conversation with CEO Niclas Mollin

Occtoo featured graphic with headshot of Niclas Mollin and Occtoo logo

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