Interview
The Gist
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Evolution from CMS to DXP. The transition from traditional CMS to DXPs caused initial confusion in the market then moved toward integration platforms as a more accurate categorization. This shift reflects the industry's move toward more comprehensive, integrated digital experience solutions.
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Challenges with DXPs. Users experience practical challenges with DXP implementations, such as high costs and the complexity of achieving quick, efficient digital campaigns. We explore the industry's maturation and the narrowing differences among platforms, suggesting a more cautious approach to re-platforming.
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Future focus and AI integration. Looking forward, there's a need for more relevant and high-quality marketing content. There will be mainstream adoption of AI in content generation within DXPs, with rapid progress in how digital experiences are created and managed.
In this inaugural edition of CMSWire's The Digital Experience, Managing Editor Dom Nicastro engages with Rasmus Leth Skjoldan, the CMO of Hello Retail and former CMO at a digital customer experience software provider.
This conversation navigates through the evolution of Content Management Systems (CMS) to Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs), the role of AI in shaping future digital experiences and Rasmus' perspectives from his varied roles in the DXP space, including insights into the challenges and the future direction of digital experience software.
Table of Contents
- Introduction to the Digital Evolution (0:01)
- The Shift from CMS to DXP (1:00)
- Navigating the Challenges of DXPs (1:56)
- Deciphering DXP Integration Versus Platform: Navigating Choices (5:40)
- The Realities of DXP Implementation: Costs, Integration, Market Confusion (9:10)
- Looking Toward the Future: Content That Matters (15:00)
- Conclusion: A Vision for Quality and Innovation (17:22)
Introduction to the Digital Evolution
Dom Nicastro: Hey everybody, Dom Nicastro, managing editor of CMSWire with another edition of The Digital Experience with CMSWire. And today we're going to catch up with a former member of the DX software community, and that's why we grabbed him because we can, he can talk openly now. He was with a vendor called Magnolia previously, and his name is Rasmus Leth Skjoldan. How are you doing Rasmus?
Rasmus Leth Skjoldan: Doing really well. Thanks, Dom. How are you?
Dom: Good, good. It's great to connect with you. We've connected before many times, many articles and You know, we met, I believe we met at the Gartner CMO conference, possibly, right?
Rasmus: Yeah, I think we met in San Diego pre-pandemic there. That's right.
The Shift from CMS to DXP
Dom: Yeah, so we're going to talk about the DXP (Digital Experience Platform), the evolution from the old CMS world and into DXPs and kind of where it's going now. That's what our practitioners want to know, and they want to know where AI is going to come into play. That's super early with generative AI stuff, but we know vendors are trying. Catch us up real quick on, on your roles that you've had in that prior vendor company, Magnolia. I know CMO obviously was one of the chief roles you had there.
Rasmus: Yeah, that's right. Um, so I basically had three roles at Magnolia over eight years. I headed product management for three years and then I was the CMO for four years and then I had one year as chief evangelist before we felt it was time to move on.
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Navigating the Challenges of DXPs
Dom: How did we get to this moment of the DXP?
Rasmus: That's a big question. Prior to my experience at Magnolia, I was also in the open source communities. When I look back at some of the stuff we would be doing with clients back in 2008, that totally was the DXP idea.
That we were sort of developing their, or clients were developing their own platforms based on the type of CMS. So I didn't really feel it was that new again. The CMS being more than just content management is pretty old actually.
What was new of course, was this idea that we could sort of bundle all of those many different pieces that you need to put together for good digital experiences either in one product coming from one vendor or as some sort of bundle. But honestly, if I think back to the timeline that you mentioned, and if I were at Forrester or Gartner back in 2017, I really would have framed it as a DX integration platform instead of eventually asking thousands of customers to sort of ask themselves and their agencies and their tech vendors what on earth was inside or outside the boundaries of the DXP.
It definitely did come with a heavy amount of confusion in the market. And, I really do feel that sort of, if I look forward to the whole scaffolding for integrating the different pieces, whatever you need to work with, that's what actually should have been the categories’ core from the beginning.
I get very passionate when I hear the usual argument that DXP is purely this umbrella category for multiple quote unquote, real types of software. I think the whole idea of the composable DXP when done right is more important than native management of content or experience assembly. At its heart, it's that integration platform for piecing together the DXP. That's what should be the actual category and its definition in my opinion.
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Deciphering DXP Integration Versus Platform: Navigating Choices
Dom: Yeah, so integration more than platform because when you hear platform and when I heard platform back then, I was like, Oh, what's this?
Is this a new piece of software? You know, what is all about? What is it different from web content management? People would tell me. No, it is web content management. Oh. Wait, how is it different from your data management tools? No, no, that's part of it too. Wait, what? And like you said, confusion.
Look, it's software. We're always going to be somewhat confused. I mean, I'm a journalist. I'm still trying to understand software still after 10 years of covering the space, Rasmus.
So, the message now, now that we have, I think we have sort of, you outlined it nicely. You know, what's the message to the people that are using these tools today?
You know, um, in terms of, hey, geez, where do I go? Do I need headless? What's ultimately when the marketers, customer experience people for us getting together at the table and say, hey, we want to create great digital experiences. Where do we start with a tool audit like a martech tool audit. Where do we even begin?
Rasmus: I definitely see signs of a highly matured category now for the DXP as well and what happens to all categories as they mature, and this happened to CRM as well is that differences between the different platforms start to get real soul and you know, you need someone as smart as a Mark Demeny to sort of tease out the subtle differences between, the different vendors and their approaches and what you fundamentally cannot do on one platform that you can on another.
So I'm pretty positive toward many of the well-known players in the space in terms of their ability to serve a client if it's implemented right, of course. So I don't come with super strong opinions around exactly what you should do as a client. My take on this is that you can actually get many, many types of projects done on at least 10 of the most notable players in the space.
So there's a lot of arguments for, you know, don't get into yet another complete re-implementation or re-platforming project. Stay on what you have and figure out if you've implemented that right or how that can be improved before you take the big decision to completely switch.
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The Realities of DXP Implementation: Costs, Integration, Market Confusion
Dom: Yeah, well, I know Irina Guseva and her work for Gartner said a lot of the cost and stress and resources will come in the maintenance of the service for the DXP. So a lot of the cost comes later. Well, what are some of those challenges when you were CMO that you can recall customers telling you about? Do you remember some of those challenges that would commonly come up with users of this type of software?
Rasmus: A big one that is not about, um, technology differences or the subtleties of the different approaches of the different platforms or anything like that, but it’s just that price itself for even some of the really big clients that we onboarded in my time, they chose to abandon some of the big suite players. Yes, because they wanted to go composable in a more modern way and all that stuff, but also simply just about prices getting to a point where it would be insane, even for a large enterprise, with loads of funds, right. So sometimes that I saw that happening the financial burden of running on a particular suite platform would just be crazy.
And then the whole topic of frustration within marketing teams around getting faster to market with new campaigns and projects and initiatives without having to be deeply involved with IT … we've been talking about that for a very long time, of course, but it still was the case with many new customers that we onboarded in my time that they wanted to significantly improve time to market, and they felt they just could not get there on their existing platforms.
Dom: Do you think it's ever going to be easy to implement or roll out tools like this? That this had, like, people talk about low code, no code, and it's a cool thing to say, and it seems like, wow, I can do that. I'm not a developer. We don't need developers anymore. We got low code, no code. Now we got composable. That's so easy. It's better than all these monoliths, but what's the reality there? The reality is, isn't every single toolset going to have some challenges and implementation and time to market?
Rasmus: Yeah, absolutely. It is going to remain or sort of keep that way. It's not going to get super easy anytime soon to do a big new enterprise-grade platform that needs to run many different sites and digital experiences in a coordinated manner.
So for sure not. But what I did see as sort of one point of real difference that I often saw in my time at Magnolia is the ease of integration and swapping things in and out of a composable platform; there were real differences there. And you know, there's a lot of composability washing going on in, in the category or in the market right now.
And there really are differences to how easy or difficult or time consuming and costly it is to swap a, you know, an ecommerce platform in and out of a DXP. So sort of behind all of the vendor marketing, there are real substantial differences on that particular sort of aspect of the DXP.
Dom: Most customers in this space are going to face the reality that they're going to work with some kind of third party implementer or provider or that kind of thing? Do you think it's realistic or happens a lot where someone buys that tool and they only work with that company in implementing it? Or is the reality is you're going to have some kind of agency cost or service provider?
Rasmus: It'll never happen. Not at least not on the real enterprise scale. You'd always have multiple implementation agencies and partners, involved at the same time, you'd have loads of different tech. That's just the reality. And you obviously need to prepare your platform to be able to do that well.
Related Article: Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs): What to Know
Looking Toward the Future: Content That Matters
Dom: What are some of the things in the area of digital experience that you're going to be focusing on in 2024 as a CMO? I know you're just getting started again, you're changing careers and stuff. So it's quite early, but, you know, as a CMO in creating digital experiences, what's top of mind for you?
Rasmus: I think the relevance of marketing content needs to go up dramatically. There are a bunch of companies out there that are realizing too slowly that the days of content marketing and the ways that it was being invented 10 years ago or so that they're completely over and you just cannot continue to push out bland trend-based content anymore.
So I'm going to look for much higher quality content, and I'm going to look for content that can guide customers around sort of immediate practicality as well. I don't want to see a bunch of new blog posts about trend topics that could just as well have been written by 100 different vendors.
So, that's definitely going to be top of mind for me, the quality of the content, it needs to be completely, totally epic. And I'm not gonna go after huge volumes, if that means mediocre content.
Conclusion: A Vision for Quality and Innovation
Dom: I like that approach. I mean because as a journalist, we always get those pitches. It's always the same tone.
You want to make your company unique and stand out in that digital experience of, hey, here's a problem we're hearing in the industry. This is what needs to happen.
Rasmus: The complexity of DXP as a category has sort of unfortunately sometimes led all of us vendors into a very, very abstract world where we would be trying to sort of explain this difficult piece of tech to customers.
And eventually, because you know, the DXP covers so much ground, it would sort of eventually push the abstraction level to even higher places, right? So I want to go in the opposite direction and come with something that has that immediate practicality. And we can talk about a customer who was not able to do something before, but now they can. It's gotta be on that level, actually problem-solving, getting rid of all of that trend content that isn't really going anywhere for customers.
Dom: And finally Rasmus, where do you see the AI development going creating digital experiences?
Rasmus: I'm big on that topic. I feel that in many ways it has already happened that there is a huge amount of change that has already taken place that's influencing content creation processes in many different ways. What I'm expecting for this year is that content generation within the realm of the DXP is going to mainstream and really get into production on a much bigger scale. I think it's going to go extremely fast.
Dom: So Rasmus, best of luck in your new role. And, and we appreciate you coming on CMSWire for this digital experience chat.
Rasmus: You got it, thanks.
