Listen to my conversation with Jim Howard, CEO of CrownPeak, a leading software-as-a-service provider of web content management.
In this podcast, discover the challenges website managers and marketers face in keeping pace with developments in social media and the mobile Web, and learn the role that SaaS and cloud platforms can play in helping to speed project completion times.
Listen to or download the 8:12 minute podcast below:
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PW: Jim just to position for our listeners, how would you say CrownPeak differs from other web content management companies — because it's quite a crowded field isn't it?
JH: It is a crowded field, but I would say there's one very obvious differentiation we have, and that's that we're a software-as-a-service, or an on-demand provider, of web content management. So we'll have those very obvious advantages: the faster to deploy, less expensive, tend to be much more flexible and integrated than the other applications in the sector. And then we've concentrated on web content management very specifically, so we're not a document management provider, we're not a digital asset management provider, we're web content management. And as such, we've developed a lot of capabilities for web marketers, as you can imagine.
Right. Yes, where of course the ability to move fast is crucial. And I think all companies find a challenge with web content management today. It's a fast moving target: there's always new capabilities coming along; website visitors expect more and more functionality on the site; and I think the last thing businesses want to be doing is wasting time reinventing the wheel, isn't it?
Oh, I think that's right. We've put a tremendous amount of effort into making this application rapid-to-deploy, but also in enabling our customers to have really highly functional websites and be highly functional for the mobile Web as well — as we're seeing mobile become an increasingly large percentage of web traffic. We're estimating that about half of web traffic's going to be mobile by 2012.
I can't say that surprises me, Jim, because I've just actually been on a trip myself out to the US and my iPhone — was doing a lot of web browsing on the iPhone and using it as a really important source of information and keeping up-to-date.
Oh yeah, it's tremendously important. And so, in that regard, we've put a lot of effort into creating widgets for our customers, and even pre-configured websites and micro sites and landing pages for customers, to very rapidly roll things out. And when a customer is sitting down with us and saying, hey, we're doing a calendar, or we're doing a searchable database, or we're doing a search application, or any sort of interactivity — that needs to be able to operate for a web browser using a traditional computer, but it has to be able to operate for the mobile Web as well. So we've rolled out hundreds, these days, of different widgets and front-end models to enable very, very rapid deployment and cross-platform abilities for our customers.
Is there a special trick to making these design elements and functionality into sharable, repeatable assets? Because it does seem that there's a lot of people who do craft their own stuff all the time.
Well, there is a bit of a trick to it, and that's that we're building on top of a platform. So the beauty of the widgets and models that we've created are that they operate. And they operate within the platform. So that all of the content that gets updated in those systems is automatically updated and managed in the widget. But then, if you want to think about all the other places where content lives around the internet and around the mobile web, that's the other critical piece.
So let's say a customer of ours has many locations — and many of our customers do. When they update a location, that should automatically be updated into the Google Local directory and the Google Maps directory, so that it's going to pop up right then on your mobile device showing the correct address, the correct hours of operation, the phone number, any promotions that are available at that local location — those should all be automatically integrated. Likewise, that should work with LinkedIn, with Facebook, with Twitter and so on. So we built our content management system to handle all of that content in one place and then deploy it around the world — around the digital world, around the functional world.
And of course, that ability to integrate into different functionality and different places where data is stored is becoming increasingly important, isn't it?
Yeah, well integration is critical. So we started our life as an enterprise-level application. And in the early days of software-as-a-service and cloud computing adoption, we really found ourselves in the mid-market. Interestingly, we've come back full circle, so that in the last three, three-and-half years, we've seen huge adoption in the enterprise sector. And as such, working with enterprise customers, integration is absolutely critical. So we come pre-integrated — standard integrations with the big CRM packages, with the big email packages, with the big analytics packages, and now we've just rolled out integrations with the testing packages.
So we have a native testing application. But we have a lot of customers that are working with the Omniture testing tools, the Test&Target tools. We just rolled out — I think we were the first content management system in the world to roll out — the integration with the Google Web Optimizer. So those integrations are critical, and likewise all of the content integrations. So the ability to integrate content with the social media applications, with the mobile Web, those are absolutely critical.
So, with all of this complexity that website managers have to deal with, have you got a word of advice for companies who are looking for agility, faster time-to-live for website projects? What one word of advice would you give them?
Well, so this is a bit of a self-serving answer, but I think software-as-a-service is a very, very rapid and very simple way to get these projects done. We're already operational. Our application lives out in the cloud. All of our dynamic publishing is done through the Amazon cloud services, so these are automatically — these things operate effectively and efficiently in a global environment. We've already solved pretty much all of the problems that our customers are coming to us with. We already have them licked.
So we have these pre-configured models to get the front-end pieces done. We have a very usable application and that application is being used to manage thousands — we're now managing over 3,000 major websites with this application for large organizations. And we have an insurance company, a large global insurance company that came to us and had to change their brand after an acquisition. We had their website live with the content management system embedded, and the training done for the customer, in five and a half weeks. So very rapid deployment times are possible with applications of this nature. That's one of the reasons why SaaS and cloud computing have had such huge growth.
Right. Well, I think that's true. We're seeing people being able to move very fast by using SaaS and cloud platforms. And actually, interesting to hear that you're also using Amazon as a backend. So in a sense, you're eating your own dog food there.
Yeah, it's interesting. We're — effectively we're a software company, and so for us to build our infrastructure would be silly. So we're able to take advantage of an existing infrastructure, an existing global infrastructure that Amazon's making available to us. And one of the very nice things about that is that by going into a customer and saying we do all of our dynamic content delivery via the Amazon cloud, that answers a lot of questions that otherwise would be popping up about our infrastructure. Amazon's just solving that for us. They're providing it, everybody understands what they're providing, and so it's enabling CrownPeak to jump all the way to the top of the market from an infrastructure standpoint in one step.
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