The Content Management System Landscape with Matt Garrepy

Speaker A: Foreignasradio mhm. Dot com you you're listening to Run As Radio, the Internet audio talk show for IT professionals with Richard Campbell. This is Brandon wen announcing show 1049, the content management System landscape with guest Matt Garrape. Recorded Monday, July 6, 2026. Run as radio is produced each week by Sound Thoughts LLC. For more information, visit soundthoughtsllc.com youm can follow us on x@x.com.

Speaker B: Hi, this is Richard Campbell. Thanks for listening to Run As Radio today. My guest is Matthew Garoppi, who's an award winning digital leader with a passion for technology and storytelling. He's currently the Chief Digital Officer at Soledadev, a cloud services company where he manages the AWS advanced technology partnership around Soledev, CMS, serverless AI and IoT offerings. And he's also the chief critic@cmscritic.com sharing decades of experience with content management systems and digital transformation projects. Welcome, friend.

Speaker A: How are you, sir? It's good to see you.

Speaker B: It's good to see you too. I mean we bumped into each other at Umbraco. Um, I think we ended up at the same table at some point and realized we were two of a kind.

Speaker A: Yes, I think, uh, the universe was conspiring on our behalf to uh, have us break bread, talk a little bit about what was happening around us. And it was, man, what a show.

Speaker B: That was a fun show. And I think the conspiracy was Irina one of the organizers.

Speaker A: I will give Irina credit, yes. Perhaps not some mystic, but a, ah, human who kind of understood that we would probably be two peas in a pod.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. How did you end up so heavily in the CMS space? That's an interesting spot to land.

Speaker A: Oh yeah. As I will often ask this first question of people, uh, who are in the hot seat on my, uh, different flavors of podcasts. We do a podcast as well.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: Um, not as many episodes as you, but uh, we just started it not too long ago. And uh, I'm also doing something with uh, my cohort Matt McQueenie, uh, who's with an agency called Imedia and we call that the Mat Matt Show. So shameless plug there, but awesome. Point being is that the first, the first right out of the gate, uh, so now we can talk about the real stuff. But, but I. That's one of the first questions I ask, uh, most people who are in our industry who come on our show, uh, because there's never a straight line, we always end up in, in cms.

Speaker B: No, no, it's not like you not like in kindergarten. It's like someday I want to be in content management systems. Like that's, that's not a thing.

Speaker A: If there, if there is, I've yet to uncover it.

Speaker B: I want to meet that kid.

Speaker A: That's a cool kid. Same here. Same here. Um, you know, I think it's for, for most of us who end up in this field, uh, we were either journalists, uh, writers, people who came out of the craft of uh, design. And I think that the creative draw to building something um, kind of ended us up uh, in the lap of CMS because it was really the framework for bringing those ideas to life. Uh, and there weren't a whole lot of tools outside of the more manual things that we had. The Adobe suite of products, um, we had the early installments of Dreamweaver. We had I think instruments that were there.

Speaker B: You didn't say front page yet. So I'm disappointed. But okay, I'm getting there.

Speaker A: I know you're a Microsoft guy. I'm getting there. I'm getting there. But I think that those tools kind of laid the groundwork. But um, ultimately the idea of a content management system was about providing an easier way, way for agencies to be able to manage their cache of customers. Right. I think they all started in a garage somewhere, uh, effectively the side project of agency practitioners and developers. That resulted in a few companies adopting it in a meaningful way. And I think that then rolled into the idea that it could be a product and sort of a self sustained ecosystem of products. For me, uh, I started very early on. I came out of that journalism storytelling piece. I graduated from college with a seemingly useless art, uh, history degree, um, a penchant for the arts and creativity. Um, but I always kind of thought of myself as a storyteller and code to me, uh, when the Internet was first kicking up was just another way of telling stories, just another language and framework. Uh, I'm sure you've heard that before but uh, for me it was that pathway of I can develop and build and then utilize these tools to now start to build governance and constraints around how I manage things at scale, put multiple customers onto it. Uh, and I'm one of those rare birds that I have the agency background. I own my own shop for 17 years.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: Uh, worked uh, almost exclusively in Silicon Valley with a lot of big companies and I got to experience cms I think at a large scale at places like IBM, uh, where for the better part of four years I worked with their GTS division using something called Stibo which was their internal content management system. Um, they had a very internalized, uh, culture around how they would manage, facilitate the publication of white papers. So I kind of understood that process in a really big organization, really big, uh, division of an organization like IBM, and then saw it similarly in places like Microsoft, um, where big internal mechanisms were the wheels of motion that would grind, kind of create that compliance. And then, you know, outside of it, it was seeing how at the same time, mid to late early 2000s, um, seeing the, the, you know, the birth and adoption of open source at the same time and seeing this flock downstream of organizations being able to build more of these tools and features, uh, on their own terms, contribute as coders to a bigger ecosystem. Uh, and I just loved it. I loved how that was creating this flourishing, um, kind of ecosystem or temperament around how people could work together, democratize it and build something on their own and then use that to effectively monetize their own businesses. But, uh, have a say in how they were crafting the tools. So I come at it from that sort of big picture. Um, I've used it myself, um, contributed to building it myself, worked on the product side at soledev to manage it, saw the cloud transformation of it as we moved into SaaS. Uh, and then I think this last chapter of my life has been dedicated to looking at how all the tools are working out there in the ecosystem. What are the similarities? How do organizations better evaluate and make better decisions about how they buy these tools? Uh, and then also where are the smoke and mirrors? Where are the uh, challenges, where the issues. And I think that is unfortunately hyperbolic now in the age of AI.

Speaker B: Well, yeah, you know, we got to get to AI at some point with just as. Do all these plans get blown up when these new tools arrive? Because once upon a time the argument was I can just make web pages, I'm a web dev, why do I need a cms? M. Right, right.

Speaker A: Well, I think, you know, that's, that's actually a great point and maybe a, I mean if we're turning into the dark alley of AI, let's just do it. But that's, that's a great point you just made because I think, um, last year, uh, there's a great CMS called Sanity that tends to be more of a developer focused tool. Again, I say that with a, um, modicum of, um. Let me throw a little salt over my shoulder here. All of these tools claim to be, um, something that will appeal to both marketers and developers. I think that they deliver on that mission on some level, um, some are a little bit more marketing forward, some a little more, uh, developer focused. Uh, I would say by and large they're all drifting more into that marketing direction. Uh, we can again attribute that to AI and the ability to, as Karpathy said, English is the hot new programming language. The ability to do more of what we're doing at scale with a prompt window.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, but last year, um, it was interesting to see this, um, Cursor, I think, said, um, maybe it was midway through the year, uh, that they were very publicly dropping sanity, uh, as a CMS and they were going to build their own cms. Um, they set a goal. I think they ended up spending $286, don't quote me on this, but I think it was somewhere in the $200 range. Uh, committed, maybe just one developer to doing most of the work. Um, and they were going to use markdown and raw code to effectively manage their own website. Uh, and they did this in a public way and drew a lot of the ire and attention from the marketplace of CMSs because this seemed count, which

Speaker B: was probably the intent. Right. It's like of course, all presses.

Speaker A: Let's call it what it is. Yeah, let's call it what it is. So, um, but, but at the same time I think they were, they were, you know, focusing the lens around the reality that vibe coding and as we refer to it. But really what is it? It's the, the ability to um, abstract, which good software always does. It abstracts more of the complexity and they were able to abstract enough of it and say, hey, look, we're going to use our tool and the knowledge we have under our own roof to manage what is a website that doesn't require a lot of, you know, a workload that requires a lot of compliance or um, you know, is carrying a lot of E commerce. Um, it's something that I think was a good candidate for that type of a transformation. Um, but there was a big healthy debate about it on LinkedIn. Um, and what I was seeing was that, you know, there's a universe where all of these arguments are going to coexist.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: You know, where this, this route is going to work for some companies, uh, but for others that require say, um, you know, high degrees of accessibility, um, they require a, you know, HIPAA compliant, um, form experience for visitors to their website or as I mentioned, they have a big worklo, uh, requires lots of E commerce, uh, lots of transactions, PCI protected, uh, healthcare information, uh, all of our favorite three lettered Acronyms. I think that those are still going to largely be the domain of the enterprise leaders that have those locked down and they can be part of the compliance solution that companies are buying. I don't think that when you make a decision about buying a CMS or really any enterprise software that you're buying, you're just thinking about the functionality.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: You're buying trust, you're buying the promise that this is going to enable you to meet the requirements. Um, and check the boxes. Uh, but there's also this whole idea of having a single throat to choke.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Someone who's accountable. I, uh, can pick up the phone. I've got a global help desk. Those intangibles are still very important part of the decision making.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: So I don't view it as just, you know, just the sort of foundational, functional pieces of it.

Speaker B: I never thought that the, the web page generation part was the important part. It was all the governance pieces. It's uh, a. Is we have an accessibility standard. Are you complying with that? We have a, uh, graphical look and feel. Are you compliant with that? Has this been reviewed by more than one set of eyes? Like all of those workflows and things really are what you get into a CMS for.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, great, great point. And I think if we go back historically, what did it really start as? It was a, uh, content repo that allowed us to store all these different assets that we would assemble on the server side and then a single point of publishing that the core concepts were, uh, pages, templates and modules for effectively reducing the complexity for a marketer to log into one of these modules and manage content. Um, so it's a very elegant definition of what it is. And I think the one part of that hasn't changed is the um, is the idea of governance around how users and groups are managed in a system. So it's a large system of users. Um, how do we maintain control at a sort of a single point of administrative oversight? Um, how do we grant permissions to different people?

Speaker B: Uh, based on their control, those privileges.

Speaker A: Exactly. So I think it's one thing to

Speaker B: be an editor, it's another thing to be a librarian. Like there's all these different roles and.

Speaker A: Agreed, agreed. I mean, what's your experience with cms? I mean, we were both at Umbraco. Obviously you were doing a different pitch from the stage. But just to kind of put you in the hot seat, what was, what's been your experience?

Speaker B: I mean, I've always been on the administrator side, so I didn't. And I was going to bring this question to you too because to me there was this very distinct how do we manage our intranet and have the various teams within the company contribute their information to that site that the employees depend on as opposed to the more marketing and uh, E commerce outwardly focused cms where you do want to have a marketing person be able to experiment with different content, do AB testing, bring new products online without needing a developer like those to me seem like very different dynamics. I don't know if you see it that way.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think there's um. So you got to bring this question to me. That's good. This is what we wrestle with because I think there are CMSs who um, their teams would gladly take on an intranet project. But are they architected around the interests of what we would call enterprise content management, the internal interests of teams? There are subtleties. I think there are nuances in the way that certainly uh, from a UX perspective but then if you structurally think about how uh, the internal mechanisms of a company function, it's not the same as a marketing team that's publishing content nowadays. Um, let's say the past 10 years or so that we've seen the rise of headless cms.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: Uh, which was more singularly focused on being able to create that backend functionality. Developers could control how they build very easily build these modules for publishing content to multiple channels. Whereas with the intranet uh, the use cases were much different. Uh so I think even the evolution of CMS outwardly as an industry we're changing meanwhile uh, that you know the share points of the world and again I'll pay homage to Microsoft but the sharepoints of the world that have, they're just completely indoctrinated into organizations at such a fundamental level.

Speaker B: Oh sure. And to be clear, you talk to anybody working in cms and call SharePoint a CMS, they will punch you.

Speaker A: I have felt it through the screen

Speaker B: many times but at the same time a tremendous amount of content flows through SharePoint. So often it's like this is the easiest way to represent that data and you do have some workflow management and so forth. But they came at the CMS from a document managed perspective, not from a uh, you know, building a site perspective. And goodness knows Public facing SharePoint is always a mistake.

Speaker A: But it's good it exists in the wild. It's still out there. There's so many companies that are.

Speaker B: It does because we need examples of what not to do.

Speaker A: I know but I Think we are an industry too that is just um, plagued by uh, a lot of fiddling and toiling and people kind of rolling up their sleeves and saying, I'm doing it my way. Open source I think has been a great destination for a lot of that where developers have wanted to just do it on their own terms and own all these facets of the experience. Uh, one, one thing that comes up frequently at the events that I speak at or attend is um, the build versus buy. You know, and for a CMS vendor in any room to hear a company get up on stage and talk about, and I keep hearing this, even this year, somebody gets up on stage and says, um, we're building our own cms.

Speaker B: Yeah, we're rolling our own.

Speaker A: I see eyes roll back in people's heads like why would you do this? I mean there are, there are tools

Speaker B: that are proof such a solved problem.

Speaker A: Exactly. And yet there are obviously parts of that problem that um, the internal stakeholders are looking at saying, you know, this is a better fit, better use case for our team's capabilities. Um, you know, we see the road to actually building it and owning it, uh, from, from a long game perspective as being one that we can maintain we're better uh, outfit for it. And again this goes back to that cursor case of you know, can we manage this on our own? Can we, you know, do we have the knowledge to do this effectively and is it, are we the right fit for that kind of endeavor? And that's why I think we live in this sort of plurality of different solutions, which is kind of beautiful. Right. I mean there's so many different ways to skin the cat. But at the same time when it comes down to maintaining compliance and maintaining uh, the integrity of it, particularly if you think about a migration to a new tool or the complexity of being able to integrate other tools, which we're eroding some of that complexity with MCP. But even that, I think the arguments around APIs and MCP as being like this skeleton key that unlocks everything, um, I've yet to see in all of the many use cases I've been on, uh, the Mock alliance, which is an industry standards, uh, organization that's been around Since I think 2020 m and we've been focused on composability like largely developing standards around how different technologies can work together in an ecosystem. Um, and we've kind of moved now into in agentic phase of the story where we're trying to create standards around how do agents function, how they, how do they interoperate. Long story short, I, I've been judged. We, we have an awards program every year and I look at, you know, dozens and dozens of, of entries and I've yet to see one that feels like it was just, you know, off the shelf, like it just worked. Yeah, um, out of the box. And I think that's the, the trick around how we market these solutions is that um, marketers frequently want to use the word seamless and out of the box but in fact there are always going to be customized use cases. I think CMS might be one of the dirtiest uh, ecosystems when it comes to that. There's so much customization.

Speaker B: I think you're right. That's absolutely true.

Speaker A: I think the internal as well Richard. I think uh, for the sharepoints of the world, how it's been customized around specific companies use cases creates a lot of tech debt.

Speaker B: Oh, it's unbelievable. You're absolutely right. And Matt, I can interrupt for a moment for these very important messages. If you've ever built something with Power Platform or wished you understood it better, then you need to know about the Power Platform Community Conference at the MGM Grant in Las Vegas, Nevada October 25th to 30th, 2026. This is the one event every year where the global power platform community comes together in one place. Microsoft leadership and engineers, makers, developers, IT pros, architects and business leaders all learning how to get real results with Power, bi, Power apps, Power Automate and Copilot. The sessions go beyond slides. You'll see real customer stories, practical demos, hands on learning and deep dives you can actually use when you get back to work. And just as important, you'll meet the people behind the tools, the Microsoft product team leaders, MVPs and community experts who live and breathe this stuff every day. Whether you're just getting started or running Power Platform at scale, this conference will level up how you think and what you build. Listeners to Run as Radio can get a discount on registration by using the code runas@powerplatformconf.com the Power Platform Community Conference is at the MGM grand in Las Vegas, Nevada October 25th to 30th, 2026. And we're back. It's Run as Radio. I'm Richard Campbell. That's Matt Garoppi talking a little bit about the landscape out here of the content management system. And I gotta you were talking about this before the break, but let's hit it square on. Why is this market so fragmented? You know, in many other product spaces you have a dominant player and I just don't see one in the CMS landscape.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's one of the central questions. I think that the answer to this lies in some of the buildup that I did at the beginning when we first got on that um, it's perhaps not as heavy a lift to build a CMS um, and take it to market and effectively as an agency have a ready to buy set of customers, if we go back 10, 15 years, customers who weren't very mature, who were looking at solutions out on the market that were probably very expensive and complex, um, and very complex to implement. Great point. So I think that kind of morass of considerations, um, plus that again I can't stress that enough that having an agency practice with maybe 10 or 20 customers that um, were ready to buy, or perhaps even just following the advice of the agency that hey, we'll put you on our tool and manage you on our tool, provided the Terrafirma or the foundation for that first step into the bold landscape of being a product. And there were fewer competitors back then, so I think it allowed the optimizely sitecore which was episerver, ah, um, um, just before the uh, um pandemic when uh, they merged with Optimizely. But I think you see the Adobes and sort of the bigger players in the market have had um, a pretty firm leadership hold. Um, and there have been a few that have, I think raised up to the level. And again, if we're using the sort of the analyst grids as a measure of M success, which I would take that with a grain of salt as well. But objectively, in what I study, in the conversations I have with cmss, um, there, there have been lots of opportunities for uh, many of these tools to make a stronger play. But I think it's. I don't want to say it's been impenetrable, but it's been very difficult for them to build um up enough of the customers that have come along as legacy players. Um, and then I think the final piece of it is building, which I don't think you can do now. I think it's just going to be too difficult to do it.

Speaker B: Um.

Speaker A: Never say never, but I don't see um, any other CMS coming along and building the size and scope and depth and loyalty of a user community, meaning enough practitioners out in the marketplace who have become part of MVP programs, who have developed the skill set, uh built entire agency practices that focus on um, building with that tool. So the relationship between the agency, the implementer, the system integrator and the tool itself has been one that's unique in the market. Um, and the parsing of professional services away from the product has, you know, created, created a gap, created an opportunity. Um, but that's why I think it's, we don't see a lot of significant change. I think some of that has started to erode, eroded a bit with headless players coming to the market.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And we saw that with like Contentful and Content Stack. But I don't again I think that the composition of everything is very unique to this marketplace. And um, now we face, I think and even more difficult challenge with um, CMS as being even easier to build than before. And the last thing I'll say about this is, uh, just recently Cloudflare launched something called M Dash, which they marketed as the spiritual successor to WordPress.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker A: They created um, this open source CMS that in many ways feels a lot like the UX of WordPress. I think they claim to have done it in just a couple of weeks with maybe one developer. Um, again that speed, that efficacy, how quickly can I get to market with a complete system, uh, then how do I bring customers in? I think that's where the rubber meets the road. I could introduce a new CMS tomorrow. How many people are trusting it, um, to run their big e commerce workloads, to run the scalable kinds of uh, use cases uh, that depend on HIPAA compliance, Fedramp, all those things that we talked about earlier.

Speaker B: Yeah, sure. And I guess if you're going to count WordPress as a CMS then yeah, it is a dominant player because it's a monster. I just see it as so diverse that uh, it barely in my mind doesn't even register as a cms. There's just so many crazy things you can do with it.

Speaker A: 43% I think of the market and it holds steady. But again, how much of that is enterprise? It's a smaller slice. That's enterprise, sure. Um, I think the vast majority are the single landing page, the small micro

Speaker B: site, how many $6, uh, WordPress sites are there out there? You know like it's, it's kind of nuts in that respect.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: And what do you attribute the headless CMS thing to? Is this because the dev wants more control, that they, they just approach it from a different point of view?

Speaker A: I think in 2016, um, there was a, you know, kind of a, a conscious move towards um, you know we saw the emergence of the cloud, we saw a lot of focus on DevOps. We saw a much more technical play in how we were delivering, how we were building. Um, and also this idea that the development of front end frameworks could actually accelerate, um, the delivery of content, but at the same time provide a lot more flexibility for builders. Uh, when it came to the experience layer, uh, headless CMS emerged as a way of decoupling the concern so that um, whatever was being published on the front end was um, separate from what was being managed by the CMS on the back end. So um, it was no longer an assembly of pages that I was viewing and using the cms, which I think broke. Uh, and this is, I'll attribute to um, Preston so who's a big um, thought leader in our space. Um, he many years ago talked about this being a broken social contract.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: You know, the idea that marketers were kind of left behind in this race to what we call the modern web in 2016, 2017. Um, and the other, the other thing that was going on was this idea that Omnichannel was going to become much more important, uh, that you know, brands were interested in, you know, that just in time reach with a, with a, um, personalized message to a targeted audience. How could we better, uh, manage all of the different dimensions of how a brand is able to deliver that content, uh, publish that content across all these different uh, panes, uh, of glass. And I think that's. That was a really interesting um, exploration. Richard. I think it's still. Most brands still haven't made the leap to it.

Speaker B: M my experience Omnichannel is way harder than you think it is. And we're talking about omnichannel marketing much less like I've dealt with Omnichannel, like from the inventory perspective, where store inventory and online inventory are totally separate creatures because they were built by different VPs. And there the two shall cross. Until, you know, during the pandemic where stores were full of inventory and the online shops were empty because the stores were all closed and they had no way to get to that inventory. Like they didn't even know what they had. But I could see it. You know, you think about how fragmented the social media market is right now. Where the heck do you post your marketing like that? Omnichannel has never been more important than it is right now.

Speaker A: That's a great point. So there's two parts to this. I want to come back to this whole discovery piece, uh, because I think product discovery, more of that is happening in those channels.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker A: And it's that it's the answer Engines and perhaps maybe an order management system behind everything. That's kind of fulfilling that. So the question becomes where does the CMS fit? What is the value of the cms? But before I get to that I want to go back to your inventory point. Because I came out of that auto ID industry M. I spent years working with companies like Wearnet, Zebra, um, and Datamax. And um, they were just squarely focused on how do we deal with the stuff we can't see. The consumer has uh, this data in front of them on screen. How do we bridge the gap between uh, all the inventory data that's being entered somewhere in a warehouse. Um, and the only story I'll share about this was I was doing a project with Microsoft's ERP team. Um, quite a while ago we did an on site, site visit to a place called Arthur Schumann Cheese, which is the largest importer of Italian cheese in North America. They're based in New Jersey. Uh, they have wheels of cheese that are, no lie, six to eight feet wide. I mean this is not something you take out during a party as part of your um, you know, your cheese and wine pairings.

Speaker B: This is, that's an interesting party. If you did,

Speaker A: it would be a very interesting party. You get a little, you, it would, we'll leave it at that. It would have consequences for sure. But the, the um, the whole idea was this, you know, this was sort of an inventory point for all this cheese entering the country. And it uh, was processed into all these different endpoints. Um, but they'd have to shut the factory down for three days once a month to do an inventory because they had so many of these big wheels hanging out.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And believe it or not, I don't know, it's New Jersey wheels would go missing, right? So they would kind of like lock things down and, and get, get a, get a, you know, like baseline inventory. So we brought in um, Microsoft, uh, Dynamics at the time I think was still business solutions. And I was part of that transition team and uh, and had a really successful outcome and sort of figuring out how to again bridge that gap. How do we keep the data as fresh as possible? How do we put the collection points in the hands of users? We've moved way beyond that now. But you know, we could always see that this is where the gap was in getting data to be as uniform, as unified and as trustworthy as possible. And when we talk about these, you know, how products are evolving, I think at the end of the day these are all systems that manage data or content Right. So sort of the reverse of CMS Content management system is a system that manages content. Um, it's a system that manages data. And there is a distinction I think you brought up earlier between how we view this as marketing versus maybe that, that data layer. Um, and when I, when I think about how all this stuff is connected, um, I think a lot about all these new emerging channels and how we have um, this very close alignment around how the data is being expressed or surfaced in a place like social media. It's a great example you brought.

Speaker B: Sure.

Speaker A: Right. Because m. So much buying is happening on TikTok and the, the delivery of that, you know, the sort of final step for a, uh, consumer to complete that delivery. More of that is happening there than it is happening on the website.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And that is raising really big important questions about that own brand channel for a website. It's certainly an important place, but what is its real purpose now? And I think that's a blend of certainly being able to maintain that narrative for humans that visit. But the more important story is how is the CMS becoming um, sort of an orchestrator of the, the brand content.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: So that when AI agents visit a website, um, they're able to collect the right information so that we can improve the ability for that visibility to happen in those channels. And make no mistake, it's not just going to chat to ask it a question about a product or for a comparison. It's going to TikTok. You know, it's going to all these places where AI and algorithms are sort of becoming the control mechanism for brands.

Speaker B: Sure. Well, and short format video. So it's not just TikTok, it's Instagram Re, it's YouTube Shorts, it's Snapchat, it's even X, whatever is left of X. Like that. Again, for a poor marketer, because these markets have fragmented so much, those short clip videos are not that cheap to make and you want to repurpose them as many times as you can. And for us as administrators to sort of say, okay, you've made this thing, how do you get it to all those different places? Right.

Speaker A: Are you not connected on Snapchat? We should do that after this call. Right. Make sure we're.

Speaker B: I'm not a big Snapchatter admittedly, but I get, you know, you get the point. Right. It's just like, yeah, we're in service to these folks that are trying to communicate with potential customers and things. And uh, the market is nuts. There's not one place to do it, you know, Once upon a time CMS systems were about making web pages and that's just not the case anymore.

Speaker A: Well you know, in reflection to that point, that observation, Salesforce recently bought a, what was a headless CMS turn with a deem a content platform called Contentful. Um, and this was kind of a big shock because I think for years the worst kept secret was that Salesforce uh, was shopping for cms. They eventually built their own a couple years back. Um, but it's very elemental, it's very simple and sort of designed around just solving problems within the sale sort of custom Salesforce, uh, deployment. Um, this, this I think is a sea change because they you know view Contentful as a layer that does enable them to manage that brand content. You know, so Salesforce is really good at um, you know and the argument can be made that Salesforce has bought a lot of stuff. You know, between Slack and um, Tableau and other uh, other tools that we're still waiting to understand the full impact of everything. But I think it does complete at least some part of the picture when we think about the AI roadmap um, and how they view themselves more as an agentic, an enterprise focused agentic front ah, end for all of their backend services. And that includes a layer of CMS that allows uh, a brand to maintain the brand standards, you know, control the assets that they're using and publishing at the point of publishing, um, and enable it to more, I don't want to say seamlessly but harmonize with what, what else is happening from a data perspective, uh, inside the Salesforce ecosystem Now that just happened. So you know I have hope that it's going to turn into something that's, that's positive for both Salesforce and Contentful and the way that those, those tools again harmonize. But uh, you know I think Salesforce also has you know, an interesting history when it comes to making acquisitions. Does, you know, do we see the full picture?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: What's the long game? And um, you know where they're at today is uh, you know I think a lot of people have said as well about cms, well can't I just build my own CRM? Can't I just vibe code my own?

Speaker B: Yeah you can. But you know, every time and again I'm this straight administrator's argument, it's who's going to maintain it, you know, uh, are we really going to get the complete feature set? Because the feature step is always deeper than you think. And then you know that's years of, you know, who's going to deal with the security patches around that. Like I always push back on build versus buy. Just from a perspective of have you really think about total cost of ownership here? Because often buying code is not the expensive part of the equation. It's all of the stuff that goes around it for the admins that are going to take care of it, the developers that are going to maintain the new features and the security patches and things like that. Like those are long commitments that often a company's ignoring at the moment when some dev says oh we could just build that.

Speaker A: Right. You know, I think there's someone in the back room often who's saying oh, I can't wait to minimize my costs or reduce my headcount because we're going to now replicate this or, or cut this cost from our bottom line because we're going to build our own CRM or cms. You make excellent points. I think that is when the rubber meets the road.

Speaker B: I wonder how many times is just a fear of the procurement process like they're literally making a bad choice that's more expensive because asking for money is harder.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I think that there's an end of cycle for a lot of um, big enterprise licenses that are coming up for renewal. Um, the last couple of years I have objectively and talking to enterprises, agencies and vendors, um, there's definitely churn, there's definitely this um, renewed interest in researching how can I break out of this three to five year contract that I'm going to engage in with this big monolithic tool. Uh, maybe I can compose or use. I mentioned the mock alliance earlier. We have an ecosystem of over 100 different tools that uh, meet the architectural standards that we've defined. Um, that make them better. Um, I don't want to say hot swappable, but much easier to kind of move in and out if you build a composable architecture.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Uh, so there, there's been an effort to try to better democratize, create more choice in the marketplace for uh, enterprises. But um, at the end of the day, I mean Adobe and the big leaders in the CMS space have grown, they've added more big brands over the last couple of years. I can't say the same further down.

Speaker B: You've hinted at this a couple of times, but tell me if it's really true, uh, is it possible to migrate between CMSs? Because in my experience that was virtually like just not a thing. But have the, has competition gotten to the point where they've got an importer for your other CMS to move data across into their environment.

Speaker A: Almost every major platform out there has some kind of a wizard that claims to automate that. But um, in talking to agencies and again this comes back to how easily CMS can be bent to our will. In the past we've, you know, modules have been customized around XYZ FE capability. We've encouraged users to hey, go make your most complex whatever you dream or imagine. Make your most complex um, ah, coded feature inside our ecosystem. Yes, migrating out of that has often been a very, it's been a quagmire. Right, so to your point. Yeah, it's, I think it's, it seemed untenable without having some layer of professional services and I think it's been a real cost center for businesses which has prevented them from wanting to um, migrate or wanting to modernize. But also it's been a profit center for agencies like agencies have viewed that work as a big part of their revenue model.

Speaker B: And yeah, we love a migration because we're going to have to redo a bunch of work and we're going to bill you by the hour for it.

Speaker A: You got it man. That's exactly it.

Speaker B: But if you want to talk about the power of an LLM, the power of the LLM to meticulously go through a content set and recreate it in a different environment, that's actually something that tool can be pretty good at because it doesn't have to do anything original per se. It just has to repetitively do the work. And those tools are compelling in that environment.

Speaker A: Yeah, uh, it has gotten much easier. I think the Lyft has been positioned to agencies that this will allow you to work on other high value um, projects or you know, support your customer in different ways. Don't look at or view the migration as the, you know, as the sort of center of the universe from a, from a revenue perspective. But you raise an interesting point. I think that migration has historically been um, you know, viewed through these different lenses and we're now at a point where the LLMs are able to you know, do a lot of the heavy

Speaker B: lifting to offset that doesn't mean you pick a product because it'd be easy to leave it.

Speaker A: Although, although I would say that I would argue that the mock alliance has, that's one of the tenets is not so much that you would leave it, but if you ever decide to replace the CMS or replace the search like Algolia for something else, um, can I more or less say hot swap? Can I rip and replace without doing a whole lot of damage. Um, and the answer, if you follow the mock tennis, should be yes. It's frequently not. It does require some reducing, some glue glucose to make things work. But overall, the idea has been, can we democratize it so that you're not stuck with something for the next five to 10 years? If you want to shift out to something more modern, you don't have to replace everything.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's. But either way, I've never seen a migration that was actually fun. It's always worked.

Speaker A: It's always work, man.

Speaker B: Hey, Matt, we, uh, should leave it there. That's such a fun conversation. And it is just a sense that the landscape is still complicated. There's no one right answer for anybody out there. But AI hasn't changed at all completely

Speaker A: either, it seems 100% agree. Uh, and we could, uh, just talk about this one angle, uh, for another two hours, but, uh, sure, we'll save that for a future. But you got to come on my

Speaker B: show now, so I think that's only fair. And go to CMS critic, take a look at what they're talking about there. If you need to make decisions around these products, there's a lot of information that'll help you.

Speaker A: Yeah, agreed. And thanks for that plug. And, uh, we do try to focus not on just reporting the news, but getting the story from, uh, the leaders, the people who are shaping the vision for companies so that you have that kind of sense of. Like you talked about, where's the accountability? What's the roadmap? Um, we go straight to the top to get those kinds of answers.

Speaker B: That's awesome. Matt Garvey, thanks for coming on Run Ads Radio.

Speaker A: Thanks, man. It's great to see you.

Speaker B: And we'll talk to you next week

Speaker A: on Run Ads Radio.