The Evergreen Platform

Adam Weeks:
This is Adam Weeks from Open Channels FM and I am in a carousel of sorts here at CloudFest. And one of the great things about CloudFest is that you run into some incredible people doing some incredible things. And I found out recently that the gentleman sitting in front of me, I’m gonna let them introduce themselves in just a second. They have a partnership that they would like to announce and this is pretty unique because we have an incredible hosting company with some great technological solutions and an agency that has worked with some of the biggest brands in the world. So yeah, we’re gonna kick it off. Lasse, Lassie, would you mind sharing a little about who you are? And yeah, just give us a quick introduction.

Lasse Hall:
Yeah, sure. I’m Lasse Hall. I’m the CEO of ServeBolt and I’ve been in the company for about a year, but my background is from, you know, management consulting, banking, finance and so on. So yeah, short introduction right there and I’ll pass it to Karim.

Karim Marucchi:
Hey, Adam. It’s good to see you.

Adam Weeks:
You too.

Karim Marucchi:
My name is Karim Marucchi. I am CEO of Crowd Favorite and for the last 30 some odd years I’ve been helping large organizations with content management systems and helping those individual business units figure out the complexity.

Adam Weeks:
All right, perfect.

Karim Marucchi:
And at CRUD Favorite, we were one of the original agencies that was founded on WordPress and bringing WordPress to the enterprise. All right, so we really focus on trying to do some really cool, incredible things that you wouldn’t normally think that a CMS can do on its own.

Adam Weeks:
Awesome.

Lasse Hall:
Love it.

Adam Weeks:
And then Andrew.

Andrew Killen:
Hi, Adam. Andrew Killen. I’ve been with the web for forever, since 94 and I’m the CTO for surfboards and here to talk about technology and what we are going to be doing together with Crowd Favorite. Yeah, that’s my beautiful.

Adam Weeks:
That’s perfect. And Andrew, I’m glad you’re here because this isn’t just an ordinary partnership. This is a partnership that really has to do with the technology. We’re not looking to do easy things. We’re looking to do complicated, large things at scale. And so I’m gonna start with that real quick. Since you’re holding the microphone, tell me about some of the interesting technological solutions that you are looking to provide for Crowd Favorite and what’s an interesting challenge that you have?

Andrew Killen:
Well, Crowd Favorite are doing remarkably different stuff to most WordPress people. They’re mixing in with Laravel in the backend, different databases, bit of node JS here and there and where you can support all of those things along with go. And yeah, so we’ve got MongoDB, we’ve got Postgres, we’ve got the standard MySQL. So this gives them a playground that they can work in to create whatever they want to make. And we bring the technology with the capability with like high tolerance, always online failover, all of that kind of good stuff, so they don’t have to worry about it. And as we’re working together at the same time, it just becomes much more simple. It becomes that we’re just like smoothing the road for them to be as creative as they can be.

Adam Weeks:
Beautiful. Pass the mic to Kareem Karim. What are some of the things in the industry? What are the changes in the industry that are happening that. That created like, hey, we need to do something different. We’re looking for something.

Karim Marucchi:
So what’s really interesting is I met Lasse last year and I started talking to him specifically about the problems we’ve been having. Because at Crowd Favorite, we walked away from just the traditional, hey, WordPress is for publishers. And starting in 2014, we started doing, as we were just talking about, we started doing these sort of crazy installs that had other technologies, but everybody’s gone so verticalized that it’s hard to find a platform partner that has a wide expertise at enterprise scale that can understand performance and do that. So we started looking at Servebolt as a partner specifically for all. Right, can we bring some of our clients here? And while we were talking about that, we realized that we have a problem around bringing those things together with other partners. We’ve had to manage either multiple hosts or multiple stacks in multiple departments.

Adam Weeks:
Okay.

Karim Marucchi:
And really with a team at Servebolt, we can talk about all the technologies at once. We don’t have a separate WordPress team than a Node JS team or Laravel team.

Adam Weeks:
It’s awesome, right?

Karim Marucchi:
So that allowed us to say, you know what? How do we fix another problem? And the problem that we were coming across is our customers are saying, in a typical environment, we have a platform hosting company.

Adam Weeks:
Okay.

Karim Marucchi:
We have possibly an internal IT team, and then we have an agency or an innovation team internally that’s looking forward to getting complex. And if things get complex and those, those touch points get confusing as they try to move forward quickly and maintain where they want to go business wise.

Adam Weeks:
Okay.

Karim Marucchi:
Staying out of the Technology. Because that’s. And just talking about from what the client needs are. How would we create a system where we can say to the customer, look, we want to help you focus on running your business and solving your business problems. To do that, let’s not look at maintenance of a platform as just one thing that you have to spread around.

Adam Weeks:
Sure.

Karim Marucchi:
How can we take that off your plate so that we’re looking at the platform that Servebolt provides and maintaining and advancing how your base delivery is handled so that your teams can focus on what’s next. And that’s the conversation that started that was so important.

Adam Weeks:
I love that. And it feels like things are getting ever more complex. We are demanding more of our websites. When these companies are saying, hey, I went on my competitor’s website and they have this thing, I want that too. And so they’re coming to you to say, hey, we need you to solve this problem. And then you are looking for a partner to help solve some of those things.

Karim Marucchi:
Because our customers are re platforming way too often and they’re doing it for the wrong reasons because they’re hitting these natural endpoints that end up being specifically because, hey, let’s rebuild only because a ball was dropped somewhere along the lines of how do we keep a fresh platform? Not just what they provide, but somewhere between IT Agency, innovation team. Something’s happening where nobody’s looking ahead, at what performances, what new libraries are available to give an idea of what the innovation team could use, what new technologies are faster than others. And this really lets us be a force multiplier for those customers.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah. And that deplatforming that gets expensive every time you switch, that’s huge dollars. Lastly, I’d love for you to talk a little bit about. You guys have been doing some really interesting things in your technology stack. How you operate. You’re known kind of as one of the fastest hosts out there. Just really like blowing away metrics. Talk to me a little bit. Let’s get philosophical. Like, how do you think about hosting from that performative as well as custom solutions? Because it’s nice to productize things like, hey, there’s the prices. This is what we offer. Go to the website and buy it. Like, sure. But we’re looking for. I kind of think of this relationship being you’ve got a race car and you’re ready to like, you want to like, get it out on the track. You want to like, hey, let’s really test this. Let’s see how fast we can go.

Lasse Hall:
Yeah.

Adam Weeks:
And at scale.

Lasse Hall:
Yeah. Well, we kind of internally like to, you know, talk about ourselves as, you know, the formula one of hosting and you know, all our technology is proprietary. We built everything from scratch. We don’t have anything that’s off the shelf. You know, we own everything. So, you know, the secret sauce is within the team, the tech, you know, all that good stuff. And hence coming back to Karim’s points about, you know, the complexity of, you know, enterprise customers. And so it’s getting more and more complex and there’s, you know, in the market, there’s no one out there that does it as we do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So go and you know, you can test us, benchmark us towards anyone and we’re definitely the fastest and you know, we have the uptime is close to 100%. And I would say for us having this product, I think when we’re talking about the complexity of things getting more and more complex, our market share and this platform together will just benefit everyone that’s in the enterprise market.

Adam Weeks:
Got it.

Lasse Hall:
That’s, you know, it’s just, it’s a no brainer.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah, yeah. It’s fun to see and really rewarding to see the work that you’ve put into this technology, into what you’re doing and then to be able to say, hey, crowd favorite, test us, see what we can really do. Like that’s what we’re looking at.

Adam Weeks:
WooCommerce.com without getting into, you know, details that we all can’t know because, you know, between crowd favorite and Servebolt, you know, there’s, there’s this relationship is an ongoing. What are some of the details that you can share with us? How is this relationship growing?

Karim Marucchi:
What’s interesting is we found common Customers on both sides.

Adam Weeks:
Okay.

Karim Marucchi:
That are running in the problem of they can’t focus on their own business if they’re trying to manage their agency, internal and platform separately. So they said, how do we have this conversation where you can help us maintain the base need that we have on keeping that going forward? Because once you, once you install something and get it out there and launch it, it’s awesome. Yeah, right. But then a lot that happens where either a platform or an agency or an IT department, internal technology department is blamed is because they have to take their eye off the ball of how to move forward to try and think about how are things changing as I add new features, business needs and other things. So in a non competitive way, crowd favorite is coming in and helping their customers say, hey, you guys focus on moving forward. We’re going to help maintain where you’re going.

Adam Weeks:
Got it.

Karim Marucchi:
On the other side, for our customers, we have a way that we were able to say, hey, there’s a platform that we can actually bring your entire stack to at enterprise grade and you can focus on quite literally talking to us about strategy.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah.

Karim Marucchi:
And they can help with bringing it forward at that really, truly blazing speed that they do.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah. From a technical.

Karim Marucchi:
Exactly.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah. Perfect. Well, technical. Andrew, we’ve got you for a little bit. Let’s nerd out a little bit. There are a lot of hosts out there doing a lot of cool stuff. But you are at Servebolt, you’ve been there for a while now, and I’m curious, what is it about the work that you’re doing at Servebolt that gets you excited about waking up in the morning and solving some of these big problems?

Andrew Killen:
Surprisingly, it’s not actually all the problems. It’s the boss I get to work with. I have a great boss and we have a, a partnership.

Adam Weeks:
Good answer, by the way.

Andrew Killen:
Yeah, yeah, I’m looking for a race later. No, but seriously, it’s rare that you get to work with somebody where you’re on the level and you have that level of trust and you’re on honesty. And that goes a long way for me. And so for me, that’s why I’m staying at CloudFest right now. The technology. Yes, there’s. There’s so much challenge there that’s really enjoyable to do.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah.

Andrew Killen:
We have a good team that are able to engineer things that.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah.

Andrew Killen:
Many, many, many years ago, I used to be at intel and we used to be their best tech department of the world at the time. Where I’m at right now, we’ve Got people that are at the same sort of grade. They’re still learning to be wonderful project managers with it, but the technology and the engineering is at that level again. And it’s wonderful to be around that, to do whiteboard sessions for people that truly know what they’re talking about. And it’s rare, quite simply, it’s rare to be in a room full of people that know what they’re talking about and can spot solutions and can work through the problems. And so that’s what keeps me there. Yeah.

Adam Weeks:
Fantastic. Karim, I’ve got a couple of questions for you. You are on the front lines with these enterprise clients. What are they. How are those conversations going? We’re all a little bit nervous about what AI is going to do. This is a fundamental, a monumental shift in our industry. What are some of the things that you’re hearing that like, okay, we got to figure this out

Karim Marucchi:
more than ever. It’s. Don’t worry about the code.

Adam Weeks:
Okay.

Karim Marucchi:
Or picking a direction. And that’s why Servebolt is such a great partner, because I can now have my team call up Andrew and go, hey, we don’t just need WordPress or Typo 3 or Drupal. We also need Node. We also need a data lake.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah.

Karim Marucchi:
Because our customers just giving an example without talking about which customer it is.

Adam Weeks:
I mean, you’re welcome to.

Karim Marucchi:
But we have a large customer that has a massive salesforce in. The amount of data that they have available is impressive.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah.

Karim Marucchi:
Let’s leave it there.

Adam Weeks:
Could you give us a size? I mean, without. So we don’t know who this is. Like, what. What scope? Just, like.

Karim Marucchi:
Because our client base is bespoke.

Lasse Hall:
Okay.

Karim Marucchi:
I’m gonna just so very, very. Let me put it this way. Fortune 50.

Adam Weeks:
Okay.

Karim Marucchi:
Okay.

Adam Weeks:
All right.

Karim Marucchi:
And they need to get a certain amount of that data and act on it based on information from other parts of their stack. Servebolt is the only platform where we could ask and his team to create a data lake, bring some of that data in, securely mix it with other sources, have privatized. I’m just going to say generalized artificial intelligence. So I’m not saying anything. And be able to have that all in one place with the content. I can’t find that in a lot of places. Right.

Adam Weeks:
So you have these massive companies who have massive amounts of data that have to be moved really quickly, accessed instantly, because nobody has any patience. Right. When I click the button, I want access to everything right now.

Karim Marucchi:
Yeah. And Andrew didn’t talk about his background, but he’s sort of og in this space, him and his team come at it like the same way Lasse came from management consulting. They come at it from a true enterprise background.

Lasse Hall:
Love it.

Karim Marucchi:
Not from a. I’m a hosting company trying to manage servers, which is a very different thing for the audience that knows what I’m talking about.

Adam Weeks:
Yes.

Karim Marucchi:
So it’s very good to be able to have our strategists and our technology architects be able to say, right, here’s the issues with connecting these things up. Right. Another quick example. If we have.

Adam Weeks:
Please.

Karim Marucchi:
Yeah, we have a customer that’s mixed mode that I think was mentioned earlier. It’s a WordPress front end. The interface is WordPress. But a lot of the heavy lifting is done in a Laravel environment. And that needs to be all manage together.

Adam Weeks:
It’s complex.

Karim Marucchi:
Right.

Adam Weeks:
That’s difficult.

Karim Marucchi:
It’s becoming harder and harder to find hosts out there that can do that.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah, that want to do it.

Karim Marucchi:
That want to do it. Exactly right. And that’s the difference between top grade enterprise. And I have fast servers, which a lot of people say, right, you can

Adam Weeks:
go and buy fast servers.

Andrew Killen:
But see, the problem is when you go to a lot of these hosts, they have a straight jacket they expect you to wear to work with them because they just really, really force you down a route. Absolutely. Force you down a route and you’ve got to take it. And they look at all your code and go, nope, you can’t have that. No, that’s not allowed. We don’t. That’s allowed. That Servebolt on the opposite hand goes, how can we make it work? How can we get this together? And we then go forward and make it work.

Karim Marucchi:
And honestly, that’s where my team comes in, in trying to help them see the options. Because even if there’s a third party agency, even if there’s an internal team, sometimes you need somebody who can look at the code from the outside and say, hey, we’ve understood your business needs and let’s make a suggestion together. And Andrew’s team and my team work very well together in helping those customers do that. And then we’re not implementing that. That’s the agency’s prerogative. Or it’s the internal team that’s doing it. Right. So we were able to do that under sort of one contract under Servebolt, to be able to say to the end customer, look, we are taking care of the base platform the same way that you would get from a SaaS. You get to. You get the best of all worlds. Yeah, we’re going to take care of the entire platform for you. But you’re going to get to choose and they’re going to give you the best ideas forward of how to expand your business, not pick your next technology.

Adam Weeks:
Right. Good experts make strong recommendations and I think that’s important if you hire people who are good at what they do because you want they’re better at it than you are and you’re looking for their expertise. I think it’s one of the fun things about this partnership, this relationship and I imagine we’re going to see more of this in the industry. And I think that looking for those partners that can help you take your business to the next level and serve your customers at ways you never thought possible or your customers never thought possible. Possible. We’re going to start wrapping up this conversation because I have learned a lot. But before we do, could you kind of just summarize what we’ve said here and then so yeah, summarize quickly what we’ve said here, what this actually is. And then where would someone find you if they wanted to find you? Online.

Lasse Hall:
Online. Yeah. Well, you can find us on obviously cerbolt.com and then you know, we have crack crowdfavorite.com as well. So it’s quite simple and get in touch with us. But this, this platform is, you know, it’s a one stop shop for enterprise. That’s it. You know, you can come to us and this one platform solution is just there’s nothing else out there.

Adam Weeks:
Fantastic.

Lasse Hall:
No one else has it.

Andrew Killen:
Yeah.

Lasse Hall:
And we do.

Andrew Killen:
There you go. Yeah, that’s good.

Karim Marucchi:
What he said.

Adam Weeks:
There you go. Love it.

Karim Marucchi:
Honestly, the one thing I’ll add is this. There’s a lot of customers out there in the enterprise space who are tired of being sold. Oh, you need to do this next thing. The way Crowd favorite is partnering with Servebolt. We’re not interested in selling the next big redeploy, the next big. Let’s rebuild something. We’re interested in helping them give you the best longevity on the platform that you choose. Whatever that is with your internal team or your agency, we are there to support the internal team and the agency.

Adam Weeks:
Wonderful. Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for taking time out of your roller coaster riding day. I want to let you get back out there to riding roller coasters or whatever crazy kids do at Cloud Fest right over there. If you want to go get a tattoo, you’re welcome to do that. A lasting memento. This place is nuts. But what is true and consistent about Cloud Fest and these events are the incredible people that we all get to meet and the partnerships that are made at events like this. And I can’t wait to see what comes next. All right, so this is Adam Weeks for OpenChannels FM. We’ll see you guys again very soon.