 Morning. How is everybody? Good? Awesome. So, so, huh, no? All right. Well, thank you everybody for coming. I'm really, really, really humbled and honored to be here at WordCamp Asia. The first one, it's amazing to see the WordPress community come out for you. Everything that's going on here, and I'm just really grateful that you guys chose me to come up here and share some of our stories with you. So, let's talk about bringing together open source and the MarTech stack, and where the future is going with that. So, why am I up here? I have the privilege of working at Crowdfavorite. I am the CEO and Chief Strategist. Crowdfavorite, for those of you who don't know, was started by Alex King. Alex King was one of the original contributors to the first release of WordPress. His team in Denver did some amazing things in the very early years when everybody thought that WordPress was just a blog. I love open source. I love everything that is open source, and I believe it is the future of the enterprise. I started my career in closed source enterprise systems. I started my career in the dawn of the CMS and try and understand what the enterprise needed. So, even though I've been doing this here for almost 30 years and have been in the WordPress community since 2012, I'm still learning, and every year there's something new and exciting. So, let's talk about why some of these big major brands choose WordPress. We've had 16 years experience at Crowdfavorite, scaling these brands and using open source software, mostly WordPress, to actually bring these brands to life and help them get their information, their marketing, and publishing out there. A note about Buzzwords and Lexicon. There's a lot of talk about CMS, Agile CMS, DXP, Multi-Channel, Omni-Channel. Everybody uses something different, but the bottom line is, if you look back in history, we had everybody thinking about the web, everybody thinking about what we're going to publish on the web, we're going to move the brochures, we're going to move publishing to the web. Then we started talking about interacting with the web. It doesn't matter what you call it. The idea is, where are we going with transmitting information and communicating with each other? So, as these terms come in and out of fashion, just don't worry about it. Now, one of the things I love about coming to these WordCamps is sitting down and just going poof. Yesterday, I had the luxury of sitting in Alberto's talk, and he said something when he was addressing the consumer market and what social closed platforms are doing, that just I went, that's exactly the point also for the enterprise, for the big brands. Everybody when they approach the enterprise, they're like, tell me what features you need. Tell me how to add personalization. Try to tell me how to add progressive profiling. And it's not about that. It's about creating these use cases, creating these stories. So, again, hats off. Thank you, Alberto, you helped me actually expand my way of thinking on this. But I do want to talk to you from the enterprise perspective, from the client's perspective, because we come to these WordCamps and we think of things in the WordPress way, as we always have said. So, the most asked questions that we get asked when we do strategy engagements with our clients is, how do we get past the idea of pushing assets out there and talking about getting out there with OmniChannel and bi-directional and all these other buzzwords about really communicating with their clients? How do we get out there and really use the web, open web applications, social media, all these things? How do we do that? Well, they think about it in the term, for those of you who already work in the enterprise, I'm boring you, as the 360 experience for the customer. So, what ends up happening is they're all talking about personalization, they're all talking about reaching out to those different data channels you see out there, and it's a very pretty picture you see. You see the customer at the center, you see, oh, look, there's like two or three things that you have to hook up. It's all going to be very simple, right? Well, in the WordPress space, we've had the rise of the API, and that's allowed us to bring data in from different sources. And as we brought data in from different sources, we're like, okay, we can also maybe think about pushing some data out. We can start thinking about communicating better. This is really exciting. And in 2015, there was just this excitement about, what could we do with the REST API? What could we do with the Internet? Well, that's when it went from taking literally an isolated moment of a WordPress installation in the box. It was a very low level of effort for our marketing teams. Marketing teams said, I'm going to just log in, and I'm just going to try and get this published. And everybody fell in love with WordPress on the marketing side. The Walt Disney Company in 2011 made a 10-year commitment to WordPress and open source. They moved off a closed source system called GoPublish. It was written in Visual Basic, for those of you who remember who that is, to WordPress. They've renewed that commitment. They're going at least another 10 years with WordPress. Why? Because they could sit down and they could teach somebody how to use WordPress in five minutes, posts, pages, the concepts of adjusting your theme. So all of a sudden, with the REST API, we started seeing, wow, we can do more with WordPress. Let's do that. Let's plug all these things in. It's amazing. All right? So what ended up happening? We started making the websites more complex. We started adding all these little features, right? So we're looking at it like this, right? We're looking at it like the opportunities are endless, but what ends up happening is we have a limitation in what we can do when it comes to creating that admin experience. Marketing teams started having to do more and more work to get the information out there. So while we, in the WordPress space, in the open source space, are looking at it like this, what's happened? I'm gonna skip to the end to just show you a preview. Clients are looking at it like this. This is one of the largest telecom communication companies in the US, right? They don't think about it as, I'm just gonna hook up a couple of things. They actually are thinking about it as a complete 360 experience and the smallest icons on the screen are actually the technology that they're using. They're actually thinking about how do we connect these things? So getting back to our story, we were very excited. The promise of multi-channel. We're gonna actually be able to do this. Then we started adding all these channels. We started adding the way that we're gonna, we're going to administer the website and the amount of content we're gonna bring in and out of there. What ended up happening is those channels grew. Those channels grew exponentially. Marketing teams started going, this is insane. It's a lot of work. So as we moved over here to duplex data, going back and forth, the level of work, the level of configuration, the level of bringing things together got more and more difficult. So the rush to create this multi-channel, this omni-channel ended up with marketing teams just pulling their hair out saying we have too many interfaces, our workflows are unperceivable. So, what do we do? What other choices are available as a marketing team? Well, when we look at WordPress, what ended up happening, the feedback that's starting coming back was, if you already work in enterprise WordPress, this is like a bingo game. These are all the reasons why your clients say we don't want to base things on WordPress. This is way too complicated, right? All of us who already have been there know how to answer each one of these questions, but this is the perception when the marketing team brings in their own IT stack, their own IT team and says, hey, we're thinking about using WordPress for something more complex. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, as we say, this is how they were selling Adobe Experience Manager and SiteCore. Now, those of us who are experiencing WordPress in any form know that that last column is not true. We can absolutely do those things in WordPress, but this is the sales proposition out there, and what that's created is that's created the perceived choices around you can either have what they call an all-in-one DXP, or you can go to the Mar-Tex stack, and they've said, look, we have all these features. On the DXP side, we can give you all these things, and again, if we had time on stage, I could literally break down each one of these and explain to you we can deliver those things, but we'll get there in a second. Meanwhile, the Mar-Tex stack from 2011 to 2020 went from 150 SaaS platforms to over 10,000. It's amazing the things you can do out there with SaaS platforms today, but do you wanna make choices like this for your marketing team? Each one of those tiny little dots is a company, is a platform, is an idea, and they're saying, we wanna sell you our features, just like Alberto said, we wanna sell you our features, not our use cases. So how are we gonna sell against that, right? Well, let's talk about what's wrong with them. If anybody says I can't do it with WordPress because I wanna use one of these all-in-one systems or one of these closed-source systems or SaaS, here's a list of things that you can deal with. Here's the things that you can talk to your clients about and talk to people in the community about. Not only is there black box and software lockout, but when you talk about the SaaS lock-in with the data, which we're gonna get to a little bit later, when you talk about the way things are disguised in the selling process, it's a completely different experience of using data than if you've ever used open-source before. So what are the major points we use to be able to say, let's look at the open-source in the enterprise? We actually talk about the fact that there is no vendor lock-in. If you don't like the vendor you're using for open-source, you can move from one to the next. We're always joking about it in the enterprise space. There's a few firms that sometimes we just keep rotating clients depending on who they bring on board or have leave. You can innovate faster. Why? Because we're using these open-source libraries because we can play with sandboxes. You can customize without these massive regression tests because at the very beginning we're using these automated and human systems to make sure that things are going well. You have the massive install base. That's the second most important thing that we hear. We have this massive install base. So if you install Adobe Experience Manager in the enterprise, you have a few thousand developers out there who are really experienced in Adobe Experience Manager. How many tens of thousands of WordPress developers are in this community? It's amazing. And every day all of you are getting to the next level of what you can do in the WordPress space. So but what really ends up being the winner in the enterprise conversation is TCO, Total Cost of Ownership. I can't tell you the amount of times we have been able to actually get into a bidding process that was only for closed-source because we said not only are you gonna save on licensing costs, but if done right, your running Total Cost of Ownership will lower and lower and lower. There's a lot of case studies around what IBM did with Red Hat starting in the 90s that really proved that for the enterprise. And we're just using those same models today. This is not new business theory. So let's quickly discuss the technology range that's available in the perception. This is the way the IT department with the technology mark on folks thinks of things. They think of things from all the way from let's do something completely bespoke and I left it with open-source PHP right now to let's do a complete turnkey product. And you can see WordPress and Drupal and now a little bit more advanced Acquia with some of the things they're doing and hosting that aren't part of the Drupal project are being perceived as the next step. But there's this giant gap, the enterprise gap. What can we do to fill that? Well, we can use open-source as a hub to not completely compete with the SaaS market, to not completely compete with the Martek stack, but to actually use it as a hub to connect to the market to the SaaS stack. If you think of WordPress and open-source as an actual hub with the spokes coming out functionally, you start getting this idea that actually you don't have to write everything within your application, within WordPress. If you do it in a performant way, you can bring data back and forth. So looking back at these massive features that these DXP platforms say they have, right? They're saying, oh, well, we have all these things. If we break that down, what we end up with is three basic parts. We end up with trying to push content or manage a channel. We end up trying to do integrations, and we end up with a lot of legacy stuff that the enterprise still deals with. If you break it down into those three sections, let's talk about it from the WordPress way for a second. I'm gonna switch streams and come back to the way we think about things here in this community. We think about things with a core, like WordPress, and then we put plugins around it, and then we put more extensive open-source libraries around it if it's really complex, and then on top of that, we're starting to connect to things. Well, by doing that already today, we can start creating the same feature stack that they're selling within Martek in closed-source. We can actually do that, but instead of trying to really figure out how to sell against the feature set, we do need to keep in mind the user story, the customer story. So let's take a look at it again back from the perspective of the client because this is sort of the crux of this talk, and then we'll get to how it gets taken away. If you start from an open-source core, it's important to have embedded around it the right platform. At Crug Favor, we call it sort of the platform as a service. This is gonna be your managed hosting. This is gonna be your extension into the physical world serverless as it's coming up, all those wonderful things. Then around that, you have these core services that can be expressed as plugins, they can be expressed as different ways of getting the story accomplished for the enterprise. And then finally, you're actually looking at outside your main stack, how are you connecting to these things, right? So as we do that, I'll quickly, instead of giving you all theory, I'll give you some actual live examples on the internet today. And some of this is interesting if you've never seen it before. For the Walt Disney Company, in 2014, we started building a site that started getting away from the core concept of just the content because they came to us and they said, we need to build a website that on day one is gonna have 14 million assets. We're gonna need a website that instead of going through the typical process of workflow that you do in WordPress, we're gonna have to turn pages and posts into shows and episodes, and we're gonna have to figure out how to completely change the workflow because we have eight people to manage 25,000 shows and over a quarter of a million episodes, eight people. Oh, and by the way, this has to do it with sunset and sunrise of different content in different countries because of licensing rights. It was amazing. That system is still live today. It's still being developed. They're having changes. In fact, they're now bringing Hulu and the Disney Plus into the system. Academic partnerships. Academic partnerships is a great example of how an agency and a managed hosting company like WP Engine were able to look at an RFP that went out for an enterprise client and that RFP didn't say we're looking for a website. That RFP said, we're looking for AEM, Adobe Experience Manager or Sitecore or a competitor. So it's written with questions as a product. We went to WP Engine. We said, we want to answer this as a product. We're not gonna hide WordPress. We're not gonna hide WP Engine, but we wanna answer the questions without making the distinction. Not only did we win the project, but the real life example saved them a ton of money and it's now a case study that's winning over closed source into the open source space. The US Olympic and Paralympic Museum in Colorado Springs, Colorado, they came to us and said, we have an in real life museum that is digitally set up. You are walking through physical spaces. You are interacting with the space and we need to have you have an interesting experience before when you get your tickets and you're getting ready to come in the museum and then we wanna keep that relationship going after you leave. The only way we could do that because they looked at closed source systems was by extending the APIs and it turned out that a lot of the physical hardware in the museum, those vendors were using open source to run the hardware. So it was actually easier to hook up our APIs than it would have been if they had to use closed source systems. For Janice Henderson, I'll go quickly on this one. We were able to quite literally hook up big data into WordPress and also run everything through federal filters for investments, all sorts of legal fun stuff and compliance stuff in a way that, again, only the closed source systems have been able to do now. For those of you who've never heard of LKQ Corporation, LKQ Corporation is a 95% monopoly on used car parts in the world, including here in Asia. They have hundreds of brands throughout the world that they need to manage and they manage it all through WordPress. Even though the sub-sites and the sub-countries are every single other platform you can think of. Finally, before we get back to our story, Insperity, a large HR firm in the US, they were on Sitecore for years and one of the major reasons they were on Sitecore is because they used a feature called Progressive Profiling and it was a core of their sales team and a core of their business. Just to give you an example, they were able to save between 35 and 40% year over year for four years in a row by switching from Sitecore to open source. You can't do that. You can't see those savings if you're stuck on a roadmap of a closed source system. I'm gonna mention EMEs real quick because it's an ongoing project that is based on WordPress and it's starting to push the limits of what we can do in WordPress. It's starting to push the limits of really how do we extend the features without having to say we're gonna have to use WordPress only for a piece of it. There's a lot of the pieces here that technically, if somebody wants to talk about it later, that we have to do with Laravel in other ways. We're still keeping it open source but we're trying to figure out how to do that and what does that look like? That looks like this. As we've gotten to this point now of what we call these digital experience platforms, the level of effort is so high for the marketing teams that they're saying we can't deal with one more interface. We can't deal with what we're going to do. As we've started to say, how do we deal with these things? What's come up is this. We think about things as, okay, we're just gonna connect all these applications in. We're gonna use smart data connectors and it's just gonna be easy. You're just gonna throw it into database. The reality is it starts looking like this. You start having these data links and data warehouses. Again, this is conceptual. All the engineers can come ask me about it later. And that allows us to start doing things like this, which is really exciting to the enterprise. Theis was on stage saying that when you're starting out, data isn't important. It's absolutely true. Run your business, get to that next stage. A lot of the enterprise clients, they make their decisions only based on the data they can do because they've reached that spot in the experience. And being able to do that is absolutely incredible. So what ends up happening though is we get back to this. Instead of having just a few things to integrate, by the time you're done with the conversation, who wants to manage that? None of us do. It's up to us to convince the SaaS world that they have to be compatible with open source. That for them to expand to their market, this is important, for them to expand to their market, they have to come to us in the open source world because we will have the rest of the customer experience besides the very vertical slice that they have. So this is leading to a new opportunity. Some of the things that we're actively right now talking with our clients about is this, data lakes. How do you take, symbolized by the colors, separate SaaS sources, bring it into a data lake where you own all your data, all your information? You can imagine some of these clients who they are from my slides earlier, and then parse it back out for use outside of that system. They want to own their own data just like the consumer does. They have the luxury of being able to spend the money to start having these conversations, and it's amazing. So, back to this. We are looking at these moments and these times where we're saying we've covered that middle area in the hub there. How do we make that intelligent data warehouse? How do we bring that there? And then pass that. How do we start sharing that data within the enterprise? Open source can do that better than anything else. Again, done right, all sorts of caveats. We are the only community of technology that we can actually bring this stuff together. That will allow us to be sort of the center of the conversation when it comes to bringing these applications together if we do this right. But we have to band together as an open source community like we have in the past to say, we can be the future of technology in the enterprise. We can be the answer for big brands. Why? Because then we can truly create this omnichannel experience. We can truly manage the data for our clients. We can truly bring these things together. And what does that end up doing? Well, that brings us to the point where we're gonna hit the other end of the bell curve. It's getting easier and easier as we unify these experiences. As we say, we want APIs to other systems so that we can bring a unified workflow to the experience of the marketing team. It starts to go down. Today, we are solidly right here in the digital experience platform and we are solidly moving towards a fully modular DXP, the truly composable solution, because we are bringing down the level of difficulty for marketing teams to manage more. But to do that as a community, we're gonna have to work together to actually bring down the overhead of making unified workflows. Everybody here who is in design knows about atomic design in graphical design. We have to apply that to UI and UX at a technical level so that imagine if we had a standard of a technical standard around atomic UX design so that we had a common set of, I'm gonna use a word, hooks, filters, what have you, that did this. Well, that gets us solidly on the road of the possibilities of the future. Now, I grew up with the term brick and mortar. I'm just finding out the newest thing is digital. I think it's awesome, but some people are laughing at me. I think it's funny as hell. So, where do we get to the future? How do we do this? The answer, my friends, is this community. The answer is pushing open source into the enterprise because it benefits everybody, including medium business, small business, and the individual contributors to the individual projects even down to the blog level. So, I hope this has been something of an eye-opener. I hope you've seen something new and interesting. Thank you so much for your time and anything I can do to answer some questions.