The Buyer’s View, Scaling Enterprise in Open Source Software

Karim:
Well, hello, welcome to Scaling Enterprise WordPress and Open Source Software. This is the Buyer’s View. As you might remember from our last episode, we are going to be doing two podcasts a month: one that is closer to the buyer’s view and helps the enterprise see how to engage and work with WordPress and open source software, and the other side will be more of a community-focused WordPress project podcast around how the project and WordPress can focus on the enterprise in certain areas. My name is Karim from the Scale Consortium. I’m also CEO of Crowd Favorite. With me is Tom Willmot. Tom?

Tom:
Hello. Great to be here. Excited to be kicking this off, what I hope becomes a regular thing for us. I’m also a founding member of the Scale Consortium and the CEO and co-founder of Human Made. Yeah, excited to get into this.

Karim:
Me too. Me too. So let’s jump right in. We at the Scale Consortium figured that it was time to have a group that unified and had a singular voice around helping the enterprise navigate open source software and WordPress specifically and its options. Tom, how do you see how we do that?

Tom:
Yeah, I mean, good to probably just step back and talk about that a little bit. The challenge we have in the enterprise WordPress space, and I think the challenge buyers face is compared to the single vendor options that are out there where they can talk to the buyer with a unified message and simplified positioning. The strength of the WordPress ecosystem is it’s really broad and deep and that brings lots of benefits. There’s lots of choice and flexibility, but it does mean that as a buyer you can look at all of that and it can be a bit overwhelming. It can be a bit confusing. Where do you go? At Scale Consortium, we come together and we work together across vendors within the space to give that clear view.

Karim:
Well, one of the things I hear most is if an enterprise wants to approach WordPress, where do they go? Do they go to a host?

Tom:
Right? Who’s the vendor? Maybe they turn up to a host, maybe they find an agency. But yeah, it’s not so simple.

Karim:
And then on the community side, folks argue that if you go to one vendor or one host, you’re going to get their flavor of WordPress. One of the things that I’m hoping that we’re going to dive into is that really you can customize WordPress to do almost anything, but the point here is that there are no flavors of WordPress. There are flavors of Linux that are forks. This is all the same WordPress, right? It’s just the special sauce that any one team might bring to it or the special sauce that any one host or any other one product might bring to it. But WordPress is not the same type of complex ecosystem that operating systems were for the last 40 years. So let’s dive right into the introduction to why WordPress. Its current market share is 43% of the internet. So it has very strong strengths, right?

Tom:
Yes. Even amongst the kind of enterprise tier, it’s pretty dominant depending on how you’re talking about measuring it. It’s certainly true that the vast majority of enterprises, the vast majority of businesses, have got WordPress somewhere, even if they’re not using it as their primary CMS, they’re using WordPress somewhere in their organization. And actually there’s plenty that are using it as their primary, but I think that’s secondary. The CMS kind of narrative is the WordPress history is quite relevant, I suppose, to how WordPress started to break into business and how that’s evolved over time.

Karim:
But if it’s a generalist platform and it’s being used as that secondary system, is it just vanilla is the problem we run into all the time? We have a hard time explaining to folks that what ends up happening is this isn’t just a generalist system that can’t help you with your specific need because the WordPress project is so general, you can actually bring it and customize it for your specific needs without having to use the technical term fork, without having to fork the code, without having to move away from it. You can adapt it to your needs. It’s so adaptable, which is what I think some of the successes out there are, right?

Tom:
Sure, yeah, a hundred percent. That means that the barrier to entry actually is quite low. It’s quite easy to get going with WordPress and then you can customize it and it’ll flex with you and scale with you. There’s WordPress out of the box. Of course, if you’re an enterprise user of WordPress, you do need some stuff on top of that, right? You have specific common needs across enterprise or workflows or governance or digital asset management or whatnot. And so there’s this layer of stuff that exists in the ecosystem that does make WordPress meet the needs of enterprise. And then of course you get the vertical-specific needs too, whether that’s higher education, financial institutions, or publishing.

Karim:
But I want to jump into this question of the first choice versus second choice, because I remember the way I approached WordPress when we first came into the space was automatically assuming it was going to be a first choice. One of our larger projects that we started now 14 years ago, it was the first choice. So I came to the WordPress larger enterprise community thinking, oh, let’s do that. And then I was shocked to find out that more than one of the managed hosts, their marketing was all targeted towards WordPress as a secondary enterprise. They had one of those monolithic enterprise systems as their .com, and then the host was saying, we’re never going to get that .com, so we’re actually going to market as put your .com out there with this monolithic system and then after that, or proprietary system. And then after that, all these smaller sites that you don’t want to invest so much time in those ones can actually be on WordPress. And that shocked me. I mean, how did you find that back then?

Tom:
Yeah, I mean, I think to some degree that reflects how WordPress usually comes to be used by an organization, which is usually bottom up. It’s usually people in the organization who are on the front lines using these tools and they want to use WordPress. Maybe they’re familiar with it, maybe they’ve used it somewhere else, and then they’ll fight internally to get WordPress. And so maybe it comes into one specific team or one department rather than those large rollouts, which are usually top down run by IT or something. I think what we’ve seen over the last decade, it started out like that actually.

Now there are plenty of organizations where that the WordPress gets its foot in the door and then it works its way through the organization and unseats the primary CMS. And so I think that’s great. WordPress is definitely validated as a great primary option. And if anything, I think that’s the biggest gap now to close because we are, how do we make the jump from people inside organizations fighting the fight to get WordPress? How do we make that jump to the top down the IT rollouts or digital strategy rollouts?

Karim:
And that’s interesting because I’ve always tried to address it specifically as how do we head to head compare ourselves to these monolithic proprietary systems and how do we show that we can feature for feature or more importantly business need by business need actually come up to that level? Because people still think of WordPress as this, oh, it’s just a CMS. Oh, it’s just to push pages and articles not necessarily can help me integrate data from many different sources or so forth or so on. So it’s interesting to see that there’s part of the market that is still thinking of it this way as second choice.

And then there’s the other part of the market that’s saying, how do we actually show that we can do this? And more and more case studies are coming up that way. You’ve worked on a giant major European bank as WordPress being the first open source. We’ve worked on one of the largest media companies with WordPress being the first choice, the .com, so to speak, of all their major sites. So it works that way. But how do we get that message out? And I guess that falls down to the enterprise needs. What do you think about that? What are the enterprise needs?

Tom:
I think that’s the opportunity here, right? Because actually the enterprise needs, I think particularly these days, the trends that we’re seeing in the industry actually I think pair very well with WordPress around total cost of ownership, the need for a lot of flexibility that just increases and increases. We’ve seen this kind of trend of all-in-one DXP, which feels like it’s peaked and now, and actually we want to own more of our stack and be able to swap pieces out, and we need it to integrate with the long tail of things that we are using across the enterprise. And so actually that really starts to, WordPress actually been a particularly good fit for a lot of those needs. And again, it’s like we’ve got to form clear messaging around that so that enterprises are aware and they’re being told that they can discover that for themselves. It doesn’t need to come up through this backdoor, secondary route.

Karim:
So the general WordPress project as an open source project needs to stay communicating that we can be all things to all people. And because most of the internet are smaller sites in the enterprise space, we’re a very small subset of clients by volume. What ends up happening is it’s a very small voice. So then it becomes up to the Scale Consortium podcasts like this one, the agencies, and products that want to work with the enterprise to try and communicate that. What we need to do is try to bring together some

sort of unified messaging because those needs aren’t being met. If a particular host or product or an agency is saying, oh, well let me show you how I do it in this one exact example, they get pigeonholed right away. Most people are very surprised to find out that WordPress can be used as the central hub of an ERP system. There are large medium enterprises, not necessarily the Fortune 100, but right below that, that are using WordPress to manage content on what could be classified as an ERP system, not just a CMS or a marketing solution. You’d say, why would you do that? Why wouldn’t you use one of those other applications? And I feel that the bottom line of the need of the enterprise is not what is the name of the package, what is the technology? What programming language am I going to use? What’s going to solve the business need? And in this particular case, going back to quoting Matt Mullenweg from WordCamp San Francisco, 2010 or 2012, it takes five minutes to learn how to publish a page. Bottom line.

Tom:
That time to publish and the flexibility of that, again, it is something actually we can often take for granted. I think within the community, we often have this experience when we are demoing to clients and actually it’s the stuff that we forget is actually quite groundbreaking already. The fact that you can log in and edit a page and publish it, have it live within five, 10 minutes, and those things are not actually true across the rest of the competitors.

Karim:
Exactly, exactly.

Tom:
Yeah. This kind of central hub piece, I wonder if that’s something we certainly see a lot. I imagine it’s similar in the work you are doing where actually customers are building DXPs, they do end up with a DXP, but they’ve put it together themselves with WordPress at the center and all of these other pieces. And so it’s true that the world has the needs of enterprise that have evolved beyond just CMS. Absolutely. There’s a bunch of other pieces now, but WordPress doesn’t need to be all those things. What WordPress needs to do is integrate really well with them.

Karim:
That’s the key. That’s the key, right? Because both of us have done presentations on how you’ve built a DXP centered on WordPress and it’s an amazing product, and we’ve done this composable direction, which we’re going to talk about a little bit later, but this composable direction. But the key is integrating. The key is for all these folks, all the folks who might be listening who have been around the block a few times, old school, 1990s, system integration of middleware. If you think of it in those terms, WordPress is a great connector.

Tom:
Yeah. That’s usually where we find clients end up in actually. They’ve got WordPress as that central hub.

Karim:
So how do you address when you end up going to an enterprise client and you have the technical team of the enterprise, the client goes, but it’s WordPress, it’s a blog. How do you address that?

Tom:
Yeah, I think that is something that’s improved quite a lot, certainly over the last five years. I think the number one thing is just that the WordPress, there are so many examples now of WordPress being used really for the very biggest stuff on the internet across almost all verticals. And so you can usually rely on just a lot of direct evidence. Actually, that’s not the case. So usually it’s a mix of lots of case studies, lots of references, and lots of demos that you can show and demonstrate. And perhaps five or 10 years ago, you perhaps were on the cutting edge if you were trying to use work with the scale. Actually that’s just completely normal now. And the concern is just out of date. And so you can just show all of the evidence. And actually there are many more examples. There are many more high scale WordPress sites than most of these other platforms actually.

Karim:
No, exactly. Exactly. So I think we’ve reached the part where it’s time for a small break and when we come back, Tom, I think you’re going to head us off with talking about the evolution of content management and how we got here. See everybody in a minute. Thank you.

Tom:
Okay, welcome back. So Karim, we touched a little bit in that previous section on the evolution of the enterprise CMS and the evolution of content management and how WordPress fits into them. And so I think that’d be good to just dive in on a bit and expand on. One of the things I often reflect on is that the narratives out in the industry, the buzzwords, the framing, the structure of how we think about enterprise CMS has actually historically mostly been set by the competitors to WordPress. So I think this is an opportunity, right, for WordPress to start actually putting its vision for enterprise CMS forward and more that maybe you can do as a bit of an explainer on that.

Karim:
Well, yeah, because if you look at the history, content management systems started out what we used to call OnPrem, right, on premises. And then with the evolution of SaaS and the evolution of not just software as a service, but just thinking of things being not within your own system but putting together lots of other systems. You ended up with just this expectation that it was out there in somebody else’s system. But there’s a lot of Fortune customers and there’s a lot of mid-market enterprise companies that say, we need our data internally.

And one thing that’s vastly overlooked is that if you’re using open source and specifically WordPress as this hub that we were talking about, that lets you literally own your data and actually keep solid control over what’s being shared outside. It’s not about points of failure necessarily, although it can be. It’s not about having things across 12 or 15 different SaaS’s out there and different companies having access to your data. You solve all of those things if you are centralizing saying that your source of truth is your content management system. And that is an evolutionary piece that’s been lost in the last 10 years of the MarTech stack explosion of SaaS products, I feel.

Tom:
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. A common occurrence for us, which I’m sure you’ll run into too, it will be working with a new client who are wanting to move to WordPress and a driver of that move is that they have bought into a legacy CMS or a CMS that is now legacy in which the company behind it actually are no longer around or they’re no longer supporting it. Maybe they’ve built a new product and the cost to move to that new product is the same as the cost to move to WordPress. Actually, that’s a pretty dominant frame for the industry. A lot of enterprises make the decisions over a five to 10-year cycle because actually that’s the cycle. That’s the lifetime of a lot of these platforms that in five to 10 years they’re going to be legacy and you’re going to want to move to something new. A lot of the education we are doing as part of a WordPress installation is that’s actually not true in open source. We’ve got a much longer time horizon ahead and you’re not going to need to move off in five years because WordPress is still going to be around and innovating.

Karim:
I’m actually going to challenge that, Tom. I’m going to say I don’t see clients that are spending in a total of five years on a platform before saying they want to move.

Tom:
Like you’re seeing it come down.

Karim:
I’m seeing it come down because of their marketing so hard against each other. Sure. If you look at the market leaders in the DXP area, they’re marketing so hard against each other that they’re innovative and the others aren’t.

Tom:
It’s true.

Karim:
They’re marketing so hard against each other about how they’re better that CMOs and CIOs are saying, well, maybe it’s worth the cost of migration and they’re bouncing. Or if it is a longer-term thing, it’s because they created a bespoke dead end of their own that the cost of owning it is so high that they’re like, okay, now what do we do? And coming back to your point, doing something with a platform like WordPress that doesn’t have major migrations,

Tom:
No, sure.

Karim:
It’s not free. You actually need to maintain it, right? Which is another misconception.

Tom:
I mean it’s actually a big difference even between WordPress and Drupal, which are the two open source platforms, but Drupal actually does have this cadence of major backwards compatibility breaking releases, which we see from the WordPress side whereas a user of Drupal seven, you’ve got to make the decision, okay, I’m going to spend a bunch of money moving to Drupal 10, or actually maybe I’ll move to something else.

Karim:
And another nod to Matt and the way he’s thought of the WordPress project, Matt Mullenweg, in the sense that he has been really steadfast about not breaking backwards compatibility sometimes even to the point where you and I are frustrated in thinking how can we move the platform forward? But it’s really helped us in that long-term future. So as I’ve seen the SaaS companies market harder and clients have more and more choices and flip even more, the more I’ve seen the total cost of ownership come down for staying on something like WordPress, the more I’ve seen the cost of migration be not just money, but also the time aspect and the retraining of your employee base. So it’s been very hard to understand exactly how to relate this back to customers because they’ve only seen the last 10 years of marketing that again, these marketing budgets on these major platforms are huge and all these individual companies that are trying to help enterprises with WordPress are going, we can’t match that marketing of that major platform. That brings me to the one word that I

think has started to take over from just digital experience or digital transformation. There’s a lot around the word composable these days, and I know a lot of people assume that means, oh, I’m just going to compose three or four SaaS platforms, I’m going to compose my own system. We’ve come to realize that when they do that, they end up with a mess of the poor marketing staff that has 18 tabs open in a browser and to get one workflow done for marketing tasks, they’ve got quite literally six to seven different interfaces with six to seven different products that are trying to swap information back into each other, sometimes in real-time, sometimes not. Is there a way that this general tool of WordPress helps? We feel it does. How does your team deal with that with the vertical of the enterprise? How does your team try to address how can we not have customers do this?

Tom:
Yeah, I think we went through this phase with the kind of all-in-ones, whereas kind of this bundling phase and the dream there that was being sold was if everything’s all in one place, you’re not going to have to worry about it. You’ll get everything you ever need here. And usually that doesn’t work out right, because actually they’re too limiting and the stuff you need to do, they can’t innovate fast enough to keep up with the pace of change in the ecosystem. As then we’ve kind of swung the other way, okay, now it’s completely composable all of your tools just talk to each other. You can swap any of them out at any time. But again, that brings a bunch of challenges, right? Actually it ends up with a pretty brittle system. How do you do governance across 20, 30 different SaaS tools that you lose track of what you are being billed for? The person who set that SaaS tool up is left now and you can no longer log in. A bunch of challenges there.

I feel like you go through those cycles and you come back to meet a little bit in the middle where actually this hybrid CMS that sits at the center that absolutely can plug in to the stuff you want to use externally but is still providing a significant portion of your functionality and acts as that hub. The compromise between composability and all-in-one, I think the fully composable platforms inevitably will need to trend in that direction where actually there ends up being some hub or the management platform that ends up needing to be developed to just manage all those different SaaS tools becomes that hub over time probably. And same thing, we’re seeing the all-in-one DXPs trying to become as composable as possible as quickly as possible because realizing the limitations of all-in-one, and again, I think it’s that trend just plays really nicely for WordPress.

Karim:
But can an all-in-one solution be the best tool for every job?

Tom:
No, I think that’s the fundamental failure. Ultimately, they’re attractive to begin with and I think we’ve just seen that play out in the market where the pitch is very attractive and very compelling, and then the reality doesn’t deliver on that for a variety of reasons. And I think we just, we’ve seen that play out in the market. We’re past the peak of that. There are now plenty of organizations who’ve bought into that and either they’ve been paying for a bunch of tools they haven’t really got the value from, or they need to do stuff more quickly than the platform that they’re bought into is innovating and they’re starting to look around and want to use other stuff. And the bunch of those end up moving to something like WordPress. That’s part of the inflow we see into the WordPress market.

Karim:
Absolutely. Exactly. Well, so I feel like episode zero, our first episode with Brad gave us the concept of what the entire show’s about, and today we’ve laid out what the differences are between the two different shows and introduced the concepts of what we’re going to talk about. And with that, we agree completely as you were saying in talking to our friend Remkus from this community. I’m sure that the upcoming episodes where we’re going to talk about procurement, we’re going to have to talk about how to approach customers, we’re going to talk about how to service those customers. We’re going to talk about what the solutions are for the enterprise.

It’s going to be a little bit more of showing how we have a little bit of a different take on these things. But just from this conversation, I can see conversations around, like I said, speaking with a procurement specialist, speaking quite literally with somebody from some of these other monolithic platforms about what they feel they do best and having these conversations, talking about how to integrate well with SaaS and what that looks like, customized workflows. These are some of the topics that I feel like are coming down the pipeline in our next episodes that are really going to start asking and answering questions on how can we do better as a WordPress community in communicating this and give some information out to enterprise buyers on how they can approach any of the vendors who work with WordPress.

Tom:
It’s a nerdy thing to say, but I think it’s a pretty exciting time in the enterprise CMS space, right? There is actually a lot happening. There are some trends peaking. There are some new trends coming. There’s a lot of players in the space scrambling to figure out what that is. The analysts have all got their takes. Are we agile CMS? Are we composable? Is it composable content? There’s so many of these things. As a buyer, it’s pretty confusing. And a lot of these platforms at the moment you’re kind of like, okay, I’m going math, I’m all in on this, or I’m going with an all-in-one. And you’re kind of all in on that. So they’re pretty consequential decisions as well, I think, as a buyer. And so I think there’s a ton of scope for us to get into all of that debate, all of that. What’s the WordPress answer to a lot of these things? Again, that’s not really discussed much.

Karim:
I’d like to invite literally an analyst from one of the companies to come on and ask them why, besides the fact that it’s pay for play, why can’t we get any attention?

Tom:
Yeah, I think that would be great.

Karim:
As an open source.

Tom:
Yeah, I would love to do an episode on analysts and their place. I think there’s tons to say there. Yeah, well exciting stuff. Okay, good first episode and more to come.

Karim:
Absolutely. So Tom, tell us about Scaling Enterprise WordPress and Open Source.

Tom:
We are the buyer’s view, but we’ll be in the same feed as the sister cast that we’re going to be doing with Brad Williams, which is, as Karim said, the Enterprise WordPress community-focused version. And so we’ll be in the same feed. So you can listen to both of those. I think both are going to be interesting to everyone inside enterprise WordPress. If you’re a buyer, maybe you’re more interested in this buyer’s view one, add us to your favorite podcast subscription. Come along on this journey. And I think most of all, we are just starting out and so we really want to hear from people. What are you seeing out in the space? What are the questions people have got? What would they hope to get from a show like this? I think we’ll lead a lot on that as well as we go. Do people have questions that we can answer? Are there topics people would like us to cover? Are there people that it would be great to get on? Let us know and we’ll endeavor to do so.

Karim:
So go over to Do the Woo and check on our feeds and whichever podcast platform you’re using, and also feel free to go to scalecms.org and get in touch with us and ask us to do a particular topic or dive into something. We’d be happy to talk to you. We are really looking forward to bringing back some informative and useful information to help enterprises really understand how to better engage with WordPress and open source.

Tom:
Alright, a good place to finish. Thanks very much, Karim.

Karim:
Thank you Tom, it’s been awesome. Talk to you soon.