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The FODcast
In the FODcast (The Future of #DigitalCommerce) we explore the real career stories of the people who have made it to the very top of the sector and those who are working at the cutting edge of innovation and change right now. Listeners to the podcast gain insight into the journeys industry leaders have taken to be where they are today, the challenges they are facing now and their aims for the future.
The FODcast
RE-RUN: The Future of MACH and Digital Commerce
As we continue our look back at some of our most popular episodes, we’re revisiting another must-listen discussion - this time with two industry heavyweights: Sonja Keerl, co-founder of the MACH Alliance, and Jim Herbert, CEO of Patchworks.
Recorded in November last year, this episode explored a pivotal moment for MACH technology as businesses demanded more flexibility, speed, and scalability from their digital commerce solutions. Fast forward to today, and those conversations are more relevant than ever - especially as AI reshapes commerce, and enterprise buyers push vendors to adapt faster.
🔍 Discussion Highlights:
- MACH at a Crossroads – Are vendors keeping pace with evolving buyer expectations?
- AI’s Expanding Role – How AI is simplifying commerce and integrating into MACH frameworks.
- Tech-Savvy Buyers – Digital-native enterprises are reshaping how tech is adopted and implemented.
- Platform Evolution – Can Shopify and other platforms meet enterprise needs while staying MACH-compliant?
- New Frontiers for MACH – How industries like healthcare and financial services are embracing composable tech.
- The Vendor Challenge – Why adaptability is key in a fast-changing landscape.
If you missed this episode the first time around - or want a refresher - now’s the perfect time to tune in.
Simply Commerce is the leading supplier of talent into digital commerce across technology, digital marketing, product, sales, and leadership.
Find our more about our approach and our services within digital commerce recruitment here: https://simply-commerce.co.uk/
Welcome to the latest series of the Fodcast, where we bring you the latest insights into the future of digital commerce. In season six, we continue to interview some of the most respected professionals in the industry as we broaden the topics to cover what it takes to build a business within e-commerce, navigating through business change, as well as the future of technology within digital commerce.
Speaker 2:As we continue our journey to have one of the best podcasts within commerce, we ask you to like and share within your network if you enjoy our content so welcome to another edition of the podcast where we talk about the future of digital commerce, and today we have a head-to-head a very much a first for the podcast. We have two big hitters within the Mac Composable headless space joining me today. First up we have Sonia. Sonia is a leader in the digital experience tech and co-founder of the Mac Alliance, now 100 plus members strong, With over two decades of experience driving growth in strategic roles for vendors like Bloomreach and ContentStack. She now works as an independent strategic advisor and Sonia brings her expertise in strategic storytelling to positioning, messaging and analyst relations for tech companies within and beyond the Mac ecosystem. So welcome, Sonia.
Speaker 3:Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:A wonderful bio, jim. Jim is joining us again as a leader in e-commerce and integration technology, specializing in composable and Mac architecture to drive agile transformation, and as CEO of Patchworks, he empowers businesses to streamline complex integrations and maximize operational efficiency, working with renowned brands like Gymshark, castor, bellsoft and Mint Velvet. Welcome, jim.
Speaker 4:Thank you, Tim. That was a brilliant introduction. It's almost like it was scripted. Nice one.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much. That was literally nothing to do with ChatGPT in any way, shape or form. Seriously welcome, guys, and this is a really good one for us. We've never done a head-to-head um. I think we had some conversation before we decided to do the podcast and there was a kind of agreement across the board that this is a kind of an inflection point for for mac, from proposal for headless and, and we've also seen how Mac has reacted to that in recent times with some of the articles and the outgoing messaging from them. There's a lot to cover and we're going to try and cover it in one hour. Let's see if we can manage that. For me, I'd like to start with predictions for next year, which would be very interesting to get your views on and how the Mac alliance is going to play into those predictions. So for me first question would be what, in your view, are the major shifts you expect next year in the digital commerce space and how is that directly relational to Mac? Sonia, I'll let you go first.
Speaker 3:Can I start? Yeah, you know, I had the pleasure of looking through all those big Forrester-Gartner predictions over the last few weeks and it's fascinating because if you look at them, the one commonality is that the predictions are contradicting themselves left, right and center, which is always an interesting point in time when nobody is quite sure what's happening. So, if you ask me, I think 25 is going to be a big change again. 2020 was a crazy change in commerce. I think 25 will be again for two reasons. The first one is I see brands that buy commerce technology get a lot smarter at how to buy them and more emancipated from the fads and the trends and the heights and really asking what is right for me, for my situation, for my technology, for my goals. And I think vendors will need to adjust to that.
Speaker 3:I think a lot of them are scandalously underprepared for the granularity in that buying demand that they will then also meet. So they will need to focus and they'll need to do and sell service differently. And the last thing and this is, I think, where Jim and I could geek out for hours, if not days is all the complexity in commerce that we've been working with and dealing with, especially on the composable side will be simplified insanely in the next year. I have seen the craziest MVPs of AI, ml, gen AI and Able technology that is there today but the world doesn't yet know. And next year the world will know and life will be so much easier. So I look forward to 25. Actually, and 24 was crap. Can we be on? Can we just say that yeah, it was, but 25 is going to be amazing again?
Speaker 4:No disagreement. 23 wasn't great either, sonia, to be fair.
Speaker 3:Yeah 23 was meh, and then 24 was like let's just forget about this year for so many reasons, and then 25 is going to be fun for everybody again, right?
Speaker 2:Things can only get better, as D Reem said in the night.
Speaker 4:Jim. Yeah, no, I agree with a lot of things that Sonia said there and I'd like to sort of build on one thing which I think is interesting, especially when the analysts you look at the analyst reports, they're naturally geared to big retailers and big infrastructure, big technology partners. Ultimately, it's very hard to get into those magic quadrants as a company the size of, say, a Patchworks. So I think it's sometimes worth looking at things like G2, which are more kind of mid-market. And the reason I think that's interesting for enterprise is the disruptive impact of what I've been calling for years because I nicked it from somebody else the democratization of SaaS or buyer SaaS. So what's really interesting is, while the enterprise vendors where a lot of the Mac Alliance principles came from as you know, I've been working in e-commerce for 20 plus years did a lot of work with ATG, where Kelly from the Mac Alliance obviously worked back in the day as well put Hybris in over 50 customers around the world with my agency back in the day and it kind of works, that monolithic approach works really well because e-commerce was in a kind of second probably e-commerce 2.0, maybe, if you want to call it that but they immediately started saying I need to deconstruct this monolith because I need to have better content management system, right? So, because I've got content management people all around the world and they're doing different languages and they've got different marketing to do in different you know, classic example of that would be a company like Wiggle back in the day, who have a UK brand and an Australian brand and, funnily enough, because of the southern northern hemisphere splits, the summer cycling rush happens at different times a year, right? So they need that separate control of their different areas, and so a lot of that, you know, drove into the principles of the best of breeze composable of the mac alliance. Ultimately, let's see if we can deconstruct those monoliths. Uh, put in an e-commerce engine that can deal with that and then have separate, you know, teams working on, like enterprise and content management system as an example.
Speaker 4:Now what's interesting is, while all that's happening in the corner, the rise of the shopper buys and the big commerces and the other sass platforms you know, press shop in france and oxford and germany, all that kind of what you have to say the smaller customers ultimately has happened, um, and that has now meant that enterprises are thinking about it and that's what that's a classic disruptive play. You know I'm 50 plus now, sadly, um, and I've been through a number of disruptive uh moments in in life in general, um. So ai is definitely a disruptive point, um, but so is the kind of rise of these platforms that now enterprises saying you know what? That's good enough for my front end, um, and I won't get sacked for buying shopify, for instance, because you know they're a two billion dollar plus quarter business, um, and I'll live with the fact that I want to have sort of a different store in australia, in the uk, and I'll use a, a platform to keep those in sync to our, to our strategic back end or something. So I think that's going to be an interesting one and say that's slightly further than 25, because I'm really optimistic about 25.
Speaker 4:There are big projects kicking off now and there are people out to irfp, which is fantastic. It's really big. I mean, the interesting thing about 24 being crap at 23 and then 2021 and 2020 with covid was, um, there's a rush. During covid, people put some technology in, maybe, or if you had a pretty good technology stack, you just double down on on that, right, you just double down on what you had in place. You're getting to an inflection point with this coming 25, I think, where people are going.
Speaker 4:Okay, my platform is either really old I've got to do something about it now because it's starting to cost me more, it's on fire, right, so I need to do something.
Speaker 4:We're seeing some major um customers here in the uk, or major prospects here in the uk, or retailers who are, you know, at that point they're running on 20 year old digital tech and they've got to do something now. Um, but you've also got the, the kind of the new customers coming up and I think you look past 25, it gets super interesting because with the rise of marketplaces, the rise of tiktok, um, instagram shop, facebook shop for those guys, will they even bother putting in an e-commerce platform? Because they can get their orders different ways, right? So what's fascinating, what I love about this, is the data still needs to be composed, it still needs to be sent around. You still need that kind of best of breed approach to get what you need. It's just we were saying in the preamble to the recording I don't mind mentioning it now everything's moving quicker all the time, so that disruption is getting bigger and bigger and that's why my prediction will be wrong.
Speaker 2:I'm rubbish prediction so I'll say that right now. But one thing I'll predict is I'm wrong about my prediction fully caveated, I'm going to be completely wrong, but okay, so kind of leads nicely to my next question, which is the demands of the buyers. And so we've talked a bit about tiktok and marketplaces and that's dictated by the demands of the buyers. So how do you see those demands evolving and other vendors, in your view, ready to meet those evolving expectations of the buyers?
Speaker 3:I think I'll just jump in here now because I have some. I like wrote all down these notes while you were speaking, jim. I think the expectations of the buyers like beautifully tie in with a few things that Jim said. Let's double down on this G2 aspect here for a second. So why has G2 become so important? Because it gives us a relatively, relatively unbiased view on how good is technology that I have used as a buyer, like as a brand, and I do see that going far beyond the mid-market. Enterprise buyers look at G2 just as much. Enterprise buyers look at G2 just as much. And what we're also, in 25, seeing for the first time is that the majority of the market, the majority of the companies, has already adopted SaaS software, has already adopted cloud native software. So I too am well above the 40s.
Speaker 3:When I grew up in tech, we had a very reliable three to five year replatforming cadence across the categories and digital experiences some faster, some less, and those were driven by. I couldn't be bothered to upgrade because it was so resource intensive. Last year, the year before, the year before, oh no, now I'm on old software. I need to get something new. Might as well get something new that I actually like, and that has kind of stopped for the majority of the market because we're on SaaS and because that upgrade process and the technical debt now sits with the vendors to manage. So, unless my vendor is really scandalously wrong about where the market is heading or is appalling in the way that I do business with them, changing isn't as urgent and as business critical anymore as it was 10 years ago, 15 years ago, right, and that means how am I being treated as a customer? How am I being serviced? How good is the vendor with their product vision and their product strategy? How good have they been in the past? How much do I buy into their roadmap? And their vision now becomes much more important than making text bold buttons that I have right now, important than making text bold buttons that I have right now.
Speaker 3:So the selling actually happens on the customer success side, not so much in the sales team anymore, and buyers know that. And buyers ask different questions now, even on their RFPs, than they used to do before. And the buyers Jim, they're younger than you and I Holy crap, that also happened. That also now pivoted that the majority of enterprise buyers too are below the age of 40 and they want to even buy big ticket deals self-service online if they know from G2 and others that the software is something that will probably work for them. So even you know tim talking about do they need to be on tiktok? Do they need to do this? Do them the other? The way that software is now being bought and consumed. Now we're at the end of that five-year period from the transition to sass and we're feeling it, we're seeing it. Yeah, I agree with that. I agree with that.
Speaker 1:I was on my little soapbox, yeah I mean I'm down now we're gonna have a conversation again I've been that younger tech buyer in the past, if you know what I mean.
Speaker 4:I I think, um, it's, uh, it's an interesting one because quite often during a tech buying process, you concentrate on the features and functions of getting it built and getting it in, if you know what I mean, especially in our space. Right, you know, in ipads that's that's what people really care about and that's where the the no code, low code and all the things we've been concentrating on there. But I joke when I'm introducing patchworks that we're technical plumbing and like plumbing, once you've done the work, you never want to hear about it again. Right, you want the taps to work and you want the you know the toilet to flush and everything else to work. That's all you need. Uh, if you know what I mean, it has to be secure and safe. So, um, it's been an interesting one recently because you know, we get rfps in.
Speaker 4:There's loads of stuff about how easy it is to get live, because that's the hard part often with integrations. Um, but once it is live, you've got to be secure. You, you need the ISO 27001. You need the true auto scaling, because it's amazing how many people say they're SaaS and then you discover that, well, yeah, we're SaaS, except for those big customers, we give them their own hosting. You're like well, that's not true. We have this, the Mac Alliance, right, it's only when we're doing the missions piece. Well, that's not true. Important part is that can that can run through, and I think that's what's what's really become apparent with that younger cohort of tech buyers, um is that they're a lot more savvy when it comes to that um, because they've grown up with it. Right, you've grown up. You are those digital natives, uh, that have grown up with a phone in your hand and working with social media. The other problem, though on the other side of it, I would argue, as a vendor, is that you're also used to the Apple and Android app stores, where things are $50 a month, and so the pressure on pricing becomes really real.
Speaker 4:And what I'd say to other vendors out there is that's where you have to be, you know, honest and transparent. You don't want to declare your margins Although if you are a limited company, you probably couldn't go and see them anyway if you don't mean but you know, make it obvious why this bit is expensive. So you know, it might be that um again in our world. We're going to put images for your platform. Well, that's huge amounts of data, um, you know, and our pricing is normally based around orders, inventory price. You know that kind of stuff, right, right.
Speaker 4:So if you want to use this for what's probably not the best use for patchworks, then you know, maybe you should go and look up another Mac Alliance partner of ours that can do that piece of work. Obviously, I'm talking about a meeting I had literally 45 minutes ago, but, you know, if you're honest about it and you have that conversation, they're savvy enough to go. Oh yeah, oh yeah, you're right, I didn't see that phase policy. Oh, okay, fair enough, yeah, let's have a conversation. So, um, that's quite nice. That's quite a difference. If you're not, I mean, you're dealing with procurement people who've got a certain level of tech that probably wasn't there 15 years ago, even yeah, and it does.
Speaker 3:It does demand that value conversation. Isn't that a wonderful thing, that, as vendors, uh, we I say we, I'm not really a vendor anymore but one gets forced to articulate value by those savvy buyers too. Wonderful, thank God.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and actually to double down on your customer success points, you're absolutely right there as well. I mean, there is a certain amount of yeah, you know. Again, looking at my cohort, my competitor space, I spoke to a prospect yesterday and I said, yeah, this is what everyone else said no code, low code, you know, uh, multi-scale, auto scaling, multi-tenant. Why are you different? Um, and, and it is about listening to your customers and partners and making sure that you play that back in. So, g2, captera, these kind of review sites, they're really good for that, without a doubt. But actually also it's really important as a vendor. We track our partner happiness through a partner nps score. We track our customer happiness through a nps score. We track all our you know ticket turnaround times because, again, once you're live, if you're getting loads of tickets, you're not answering them, even if they're really easy. Um, then you know you're gonna, you're gonna lose customers ultimately, and then you know you'll get a bad reputation in the market, which is certainly I've seen with a number of vendors over the years.
Speaker 4:And actually, what's really interesting come back to your point from the earlier answer that's where AI can start to play a really really good role actually, because there's really simple stuff there that we can do to expose our APIs to our own chatbots, if you know what I mean. So a classic example would be we were introducing this soon. On our side, we have an API that exposes. Now, if you track your data where your orders are, you can say what system it's got into, and we can do that via interface. But we're working with, we use Ndesk right, and they just bought Ultimate AI.
Speaker 4:I met Sarah, one of the the founders a thing a couple years ago amazing, amazing bit of software, right, and and why would you not track, put that in? Because actually that's quite often people raise a ticket for that, have to wait for ticket resolution time and everything else, whereas ai can get that data really easy so it can consume our own apis as well, as you know, uh, as well as the kind of large learning model around all the documentation, um, that kind of thing can really help and that's a really good use case for improving customer journeys right now, without um being too scared of all the the big stuff that's coming down the pipe next year, which is coming which is coming.
Speaker 3:Yeah, love that doom and gloom thing at the end.
Speaker 4:I put on my Austrian accent.
Speaker 2:So, with the view of what's happening in 2025 and the future and Mac at the inflection point that we believe it's at, where do you guys see the most adoption coming from?
Speaker 3:The most adoption, the adoption of Mac.
Speaker 4:Sorry, Sonia Do you want me to start quickly, sonia, just because I am, the adoption of Mac from our perspective at the minute is very much around the front-end technology still from what we're seeing and the supportive technologies of front-end. So I'd argue, content generation, product content, the actual content itself that goes onto the website and the commerce engine. There's a lot of adoption of Mac coming in there and what's interesting and I think we'll probably talk about it later on in this is actually the rise of companies like Shopifyify, where you then integrate in um, the mac technologies in front of that content stack, content for story block, etc, name on, if you know what I mean um, and then your you know discovery software, your blue reaches, etc. From that side of it, algolia obviously you've got your product data coming in from your pimbly's and the kinos and soft supplies and all in the Mac Alliance. I'm trying to remember them all by heart here so I don't want to get them wrong, if you know what I mean.
Speaker 4:What's interesting is then you've got the OMSs, you've got OneStock and Fluent and you've got us at Patchworks and Pipe17 and Zyotech as integration platforms. In the middle of that. There's not a lot. Down the other end, if you know what I mean, there's not really, um, a mac erp yet, um there's. There's a couple looking to get in, I know, and we've had the conversation and we'd love to get some more of that in same on the warehouse management side as well, and that's somewhere where you end up dealing with, quite often, a more legacy piece of software which has got apis and and runs in the cloud and you know it's headless to a certain extent, um, but that is, that's quite an interesting kind of area where we don't see it. Frankly, I don't know what you think, sonia, from your side.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I have seen the first ERPs that say they're mock, curious or compatible or I don't know. I don't think they're certified yet. I think in commerce use cases there's been a lot of ambition to go mock with brands and now that road needs to meet reality as well. Adoption start most then in the majority segment, in the mainstream buyer for for commerce, and the job of the mock alliance and its members will be to actually simplify um, adopting mock approaches and the hybrid ones. Jim, to your point 100, because that whole idea, whole idea of this isn't a polarized conversation. Right, there's no either, or it needs to be something that fits together, certainly when you're going further down the back end with warehouses and ERPs. Some of the principles that the market lines advocates right now were geared for the digital experience and are potentially not even realistic. In the. I wanted to call it plumbing, but then you said you're plumbing. So whatever we call that, that's a bottom Foundations. Thank you very much for helping a non-native speak out.
Speaker 3:I think also the adoption of Mark Ben and I see that happening is going into adjacent industries and use cases. So financial services, for one has been talking about composable banking for a really long time. We see a lot more actually happening there as well. Healthcare too, a lot of that driven from new way of taking care of patients and how to manage patient processes, and I think that that will ripple through more other industries and not digital transactional processes. Really talk about composable business and the tech to enable that. Curiously enough, I've heard an analyst say government they see the biggest uptake for composable, which I would not have thought happened so quickly. So if anybody wants to send me a LinkedIn message and explain that in more detail, please do. But yeah.
Speaker 4:Okay, interestingly sorry, tim, just one of my old generic guys. He's now at Elastic Path. He worked in the government for a bit, um, and that's when cloud was becoming a thing and, uh, I went and met him in the house of parliament, refectory and bar which is fantastic, you know, it's a nice thing to do for someone who's never worked in government and he said he was amazed that went to a cloud conference and it was mainly government and banking in there and it was banking and stock market trading because they could use that burst capacity of cloud, you know, for you know big arbitrage trades or whatever else they needed to do where it wasn't necessarily time sensitive, and then what it does to themselves, but they needed that compute power and government Similar thing. Ultimately, quite often they get very large data sets. You know tax returns in the UK always happen on April, the 5th, etc. So why, would you know, you've suddenly got millions of people doing the taxes, um, or certainly many people doing late as well, to be fair. But you know there's a, there's a glut of stuff coming through, so, um, so yeah, it is surprising, but actually, you know, the governments can be quite, quite good at that kind of thing and it needs to happen.
Speaker 4:Let's be fair, um, on that side of it, the one thing just to build on the on the mac adoption piece again, um, and that front end piece is, you know, there's no denying, I think it's probably worth mentioning there has been a bit of a mac lash in this year, uh, where some of the projects just haven't gone live or they've been three years, um, and you never, you should never devalue the value of experts. So you know, you look at the successful projects. You know some that won awards at Mac 3 this year. So ProTire, mitchell Deba, tires, mitchell Deba, rick, not Mitchell Deba who basically just got the road. For me, that was a brilliant project that went live on time. They've got a really nice, you know, true Mac story built out of various Mac components.
Speaker 4:Clark's, done by Grid Dynamics Again really good implementation. I think it's Commerce Tools, I can't remember what the other technologies are. And then Brompton, done by the guys at E2X, applied Digital right Again, that's a really fast Mac project that made significant changes to the business and the conversion rate went through the roof there. So they launched as quick as they could, if you know what I mean. Same with White Stuff. They launched as quick as they could, if you know what I mean. Same with white stuff as well. So, um, so there are success stories out there, but it's all down, a lot. Not all down, but a lot of it's down to the agencies and having a customer that understands. You know the value of, of building a true agile project. You know that's. Is it good enough? That's my. Was my mvp good enough? Uh, or someone says it is the uh, the um, what's it? It's the enemy of perfect. It is, but good enough, probably better than what you've got. It's better than what you've got. Get it live. Move on, iterate it no-transcript.
Speaker 2:Yep Agreed.
Speaker 3:I think that mock lash is an interesting thing and it's something that also in 25, we'll have much more open and honest conversations about and need to have them about what went wrong there. And in the prep for this, I watched a few episodes and I heard one of the mock vendors say well, the things that go wrong. I don't want to talk bad about our customers, but really our customers kind of screwed that up, you guys. That's a little too convenient now, isn't it? And I think that it's on the vendors to ensure success, not selling that license, that is, you know, 1990s software sales.
Speaker 3:As a vendor, you need to ensure success and that means you need to have a clear conversation with your buyers, with your prospects, about is this the right fit for you or not, and you cannot, in a SaaS world, go in and say, oh, is there fault?
Speaker 3:You need to simplify to the extent that the mistakes that happened in the last years don't happen. You need to build alliances with other vendors to fill the gaps. You need to educate your SIs and agencies but it's 100% on the mark vendors to ensure these projects are successful, and I've heard shame attached to the failure of those projects and I think we all know a few names where they didn't dare to talk about the fact that they failed, because it might mean they're not mature enough and their team isn't good enough. And I just want to to say no, no, no, no, no. We need to hear about the failures, we need to hear about what went wrong so we can make sure we help others and we put the right processes and the right technology in place so brands do succeed, and not talking about something making a taboo. It's never been a good thing in this world. So I think that's also a 25 thing for us to sort out.
Speaker 2:So it's never been a good thing in this world. So I think that's also a 25 thing for us to sort out. So has the the backlash and I've heard that phrase mentioned a number of times this year has that been the driver for their recent change in their vision and their mission, and how does that change address the challenges that we're talking about?
Speaker 3:the challenges that we're talking about. It has not been the driver for it, but I do think that it comes together very nicely to solve two challenges at the same time. The driver, tim, is really that the original intention of the Mac Alliance, that original vision, was to advance and promote the adoption of open, best of breed and composable technologies. And now we're at the end of 24 and we often forget this was a vision and mission we had. In 2019, like before covid, 83 of executives woke up and thought digital was a nice to have in 2019, said forested research in 2019, and then the happened. And then everything got a little different. But you already feel that, I hope that vision was about the technology and propelling the technology. And when you'd ask the founding partners at the time what is the alliance going to be in five years?
Speaker 3:Most of us actually believe the alliance would probably not be needed anymore back in 2019, because our goal was let's shake up the vendor space, let's make sure established technology doesn't get away with selling hosted services as cloud native and those sort of things, and we've achieved that. I think we've rattled a lot of cages. We were the rebels back then. We were, you know, a little spunkier than others. Roadmaps at big technology companies have been changed Adoption of SaaS, adoption of cloud, adoption of headless API first, or at least API all has gotten a lot faster. So, yay, you know we've done that.
Speaker 3:But then the question is okay, can now everybody use it? Maybe not yet, and that's where the new vision talks about. We want to create a future so that every business is empowered to use this new tech ecosystem that is there, and the focus is now on the businesses that use it, not anymore on the technology only. And so what was the driver? The driver was we've accomplished sort of goal. One mark and composable are an understood, established way of doing commerce, in this case, digital experience in general. Now the next question is how can we make sure everybody succeeds fast and gets to their goals? And then it's about the business more than about M and A and C and c and h.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I can't really add anything to that, sonia, funny enough um, other than sitting on the c-suite board and going to the mac events. I'm not really part of the reasons for it, but therefore, as somebody um a little bit more external, a member of but you know, not on the not, not not on the kind of rule of it at all um, it's refreshing to see and you know what I would say again is, any organization or company that succeeds is one that listens to the market, listens to its customers, listens to its partners and members, um, and then evolves accordingly. So, um, you know, this new, newer vision is an evolution. It's not revolution, isn't it? If you know what I mean? And it makes absolute sense because, like you said, you know, 2019 was, uh, was the very beginning of this as a thing.
Speaker 4:It's like come on, guys, this is the right way to do stuff. Everyone kind of gets it. Now, you know, you we've got customers, um, like navida bell star on stage saying I built my project around mac principles. So the message is there, and now it's about how that gets. Like you say, gets involved in more things ultimately, to make sure that, ultimately, we are making the technical world a better place, I think, which is a bold vision, but definitely part of it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and just to make that clear, I am also just on the advisory board nowadays. The kudos here's. It's beena brave step, let's face it to change something. So, um, yeah, it's, it's an evolution, but it's also fundamental shift. Um, that kudos to that 100 goes to casper, uh, rasmussen and holly hall as the two leading and the the the executive board now Jasmine Goodman and Kristen Aragon they've been fundamental in making this happen was gutsy Respect to doing that.
Speaker 2:Okay, so the change has happened and our vision and mission has been adapted to meet the, the changing demand, the changing landscape. How important do you guys think is for the mac alliance now to set the standards, uh, in the industry, and what do you think the impact will be on the vendors and the buyers?
Speaker 4:you saw me smile there, sonia, yeah, yeah you go I. Yeah, I'm smiling actually because before um, when, when we sold soneric, uh, back in the day, I took a few years into the kind of advisory land. Um, I did literally nothing for two years that you know, did a lot of cycling, hence these um and ended up sort of stage tour de france and whatnot. But, um, in that advisory capacity, I had my own little consultancy and I put a blog up one day calling for a, you know, almost like a w3 standard for e-commerce, apis, um and it, and it generated quite a lot of um just just before the map lines. Actually it was like early 2019, um, and I remember putting out on linkedin and I had a number of people, a number of mac vendors. Or now, back when, they go, we don't want to do that.
Speaker 4:It'll be be a race to the bottom, you know, etc. But other people go. Actually, that'd be a really nice thing. Now I don't think the Mac Alliance should be like a W3C personally Based on the kind of feedback from that you can't impose on vendors. I don't think this is how products should be modeled or this is how you know data should be passed across. That is too much control and I don't think that'll ever happen. But you know, asking that question, imposing standards that's not it.
Speaker 4:How to not just do the technical side of the business but to get kind of microservice-based thinking into your organization. So, using Patchworks as an example again, because I'm in control of this business, I'll talk about it. What was interesting for me is when we launched what's still being called our new platform, but it came out last April into a beta. What was interesting was watching the testing come in, because we are true microservices-based what's still being called our new platform, but it came out last April into a beta. To be fair, what was interesting was watching the testing come in, because we are true microservices-based, different product teams could work on different bits of the platform and so the integration testing was that much easier because it all kind of just worked right. You know you're based on contract-based development and by having these sort of separate teams working in collaboration. You know daily stand-ups across the teams. Everyone understood what was going on, but they were working on their microservice, they were working on this piece that then kind of fitted into the dashboard was just brilliant to see. And that's not just something I don't think for for the technical side of the business, but for the business in general. So you know, ultimately you don't want to create silos, but you want to create teams that work well on the piece of work that they're doing. For that piece, you know quickly. You know agile development, two weeks sprint, et cetera, but as part of a greater whole. So they understand what the vision is, they understand what that part of their vision is. They deliver that part of the vision and then you know as a business you can say, okay, great, well, now I need you to work on this, and I think actually that's quite a nice way to structure a business in general, not just a software development project or product, if you know what I mean. It's very much more. You know, actually, if there are parts of the business where.
Speaker 4:Think about a retailer right now. They're gearing up for Black Friday, right. So you're going to have the photography team doing their bit, You're going to have the marketing team doing their bit, you're going to have the warehouse team getting ready for that bit. You can, you can build those as almost products, if you know what I mean. Uh, and as there's almost you know, have the separate sort of micro service teams or service teams working that together. Um, and if you don't include somebody like the customer success on their side, you know the people who are going to be manning the phones.
Speaker 4:If, if the warehousing team do have a problem, or if there is a problem with delivery like everyone remembers the royal mail strike in the uk a couple of years ago over black friday, it was absolutely nightmare for anybody delivering stuff how do you deal with it? So you can take some of those kind of um, uh tenants of the mac alliance and actually apply them to your organization as well, uh, and become a better and more agile organization? It's not just about, uh, the technical side of it. It's something I would add there, a little bit complex and strategic thinking, but, um, I've seen it working.
Speaker 4:You know, again, these kind of newer vendors that are coming up in the Castors this world who have grown from 10 to 200 plus million very, very quickly. They are structured very differently from a high street brand that's been around for 100 years in the UK with those silos in place and therefore they're that much more agile. You know they can go out and and do a team kit deal or they can go out and do a uh a deal with a with a smaller school, uh you know to to have branded uh school wear for, for their, for their sports teams, stuff that would take a long time and probably would take six months of a committee to think about if you're not made. And you see it not just in retail places like octopus energy as well. They've got that kind of founder mentality that gets talked about on linkedin and and you know, business journals.
Speaker 3:That all comes from that kind of mac way of thinking yeah, my opinion has changed so much over the last few years. On that question of standardization, I, when I was the president of the mac alliance, actually one of my goals was this year we're gonna get the standards. Like I had the clipboard, I had the pen, you know, I was ready to hum and then we tried, and to your point, I just had to learn the hard way what you intuitively knew, jim. There was no inherent interest of the vendors to really come together and do that. So when you look at now who is driving the interoperability task force and the actual results that are happening and the patterns and the best practices, it comes from the system integrator side of the house predominantly, and a few very forward-thinking vendor individuals, but 100% and I think I'd even go a step further since then the AI-driven integration interoperability. Driven integration, interoperability. That the the way that gen ai can now read self-descriptive apis.
Speaker 4:Is that the?
Speaker 3:right term, jim. So yeah, pretty much apis. Like I've seen this mvp just just last week where a a tool went in, read the apis from one vendor, read the apis from a different vendor, self-interpreted the mapping and built a connection in front of my eyes in a matter of well, I want to say minutes, but the minutes was the talking, it was milliseconds if we look at.
Speaker 3:What does that mean for the mark alliance? I think it's not so much those clipboard standards we need to do, it's the clarity. Clarity is more important than uniformity. So do the mock member, and I'm just making this up. This is not mock alliance driven. But do all APIs describe themselves sufficiently? Is there enough documentation that a machine can understand how to work with it? I think those aspects will be more important than do we call color, color with an O or an OU or you know, those nitty-gritty things Don't matter anymore, it doesn't matter either, because AI will sort that out too, but you know what I mean.
Speaker 3:I think the whole paradigm and the whole task has changed in the last 12, 18 months, from rigorous defining something to enabling the machines to figure it out.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I agree. I do agree. I don't remember you at our internal product demo. I'd love to know where else you saw that oh, we can talk about that afterwards well it's all about?
Speaker 4:I mean, there's a lot. It's a classic hype cycle, isn't it with ai? Everyone shouted about how they had it last year. What did it mean really? Um, and I spoke to a vendor a conference it wasn't a mad conference and I said, oh, you know. So what is your ai? He said well, to be honest with you, it's a huge team offshore. I'm like okay, so it's not AI. You know what I mean.
Speaker 3:It's mechanical, is it?
Speaker 4:It's mechanical, it's people. Basically, yeah, it's AI, not AI, but it is there without a doubt. And so you know, like you say that, being able to ingest API documentation for two vendors, which is easier if those vendors are already in Patchwork for us, because we've already got our connection to it, it's all the same format on our side, throwing out a larger learning model and doing the auto mapping and building out the flows and stuff. I mean that's got to be the way it goes right. The interesting thing is then configuring that to work in production.
Speaker 4:The interesting thing is then configuring that to work in production and so using AI to work that out as well, if you know what I mean. So it's all very well building it, coming back to the point I made at the beginning but you've got to host it and it's got to be scalable. But you'll find that some flows impact other flows and maybe every Thursday your ERP does something. So therefore, if you've got some sort of AI monitoring in there that can adjust how things are being flowed through, that's the other thing. I think it's going to get really interesting, and certainly you know where we're putting some of our research in development ultimately is around that in particular because, like I said once, the plumbing's in, you just want it to work. But if you make it work really well and minimise your costs and maximise your return on investment, then that's what you need.
Speaker 2:Can we touch on some of the pieces around non-Mac solutions, because you mentioned something, jim, around an interesting trend with non-Mac engines being composed of Mac solutions. What does that mean in your view? How does that play into the future of composable in digital commerce?
Speaker 4:I'll sort of like Shopify, to be honest.
Speaker 3:Yeah, let's name it.
Speaker 4:Let's name it. Let's just get this right out there, which is quite hard for somebody who worked at BigCommerce right, trying to take them on In kind of direct-to-consumer everybody's having a conversation with them. I would argue, if they're looking at replatforming their e-commerce engine, because they're everywhere, right and proven to work, more large enterprises now. You know we've got a 500 million euro plus German brand that haven't announced themselves yet, so I can't say any more than that because they're slowly migrating off of Magento onto Shopify. But they looked at everybody else. They're like do you know what? For what we do?
Speaker 4:There are enough examples of 10, 20, 30 million pound or euro brands or dollar brands on Shopify that do the same thing that we know it will work, it scales, and if you look at the kind of Mac tenants, you know is it microservice? I don't know, is your honest answer, so I'm not going to go into that. But is it API first? Well, yes, actually, their APIs are really strong. They're really good at launching new APIs. They're just deprecating their old REST APIs. Over the next couple of years we're replacing them with a really nice GraphQL API, which is a lot easier to use. If you've got developers who know how to use that. So are they cloud? Yeah, they are. Are they headless? Yeah, they are. Now absolutely. People have been building headless Shopify sites for for ages as well, so so they've got the uh, definitely got the act of the mac, if you know what I mean. Um, and that, combined with their brand, means that you know they're going to be part of your conversation if you're doing a direct consumer brand, particularly in fashion, because there are so many examples out there running on shopify that do that.
Speaker 4:So increasingly, therefore, you know we get involved in a shopify project with a lot of other vendors, like I said. So you know we'll have a PIM that's come from Mac Alliance. We'll have a search and merge tool where we might be used for the ingestion piece, but you know the actual kind of direct app will be used for the actual search piece within Shopify. There'll be content management coming in, because you know, if they are a more sophisticated vendor, they probably want to create content in one place coming in because if they are a more sophisticated vendor, they probably want to create content in one place, get it translated via another system and then pushed into the right language Shopify store for that country. It's a really, really interesting development, and it isn't just B2C, b2b as well. I mean, the thing about Shopify is the amount of money they spend on R&D, and so that's what's, I guess, quite scary for other vendors ultimately, once you get a certain critical mass. That's the case Now.
Speaker 4:At the same time, there are also reasons why people still go out and choose Centra or BigCommerce or Commerce Tools or Commerce Layer, because those platforms also bring things to the table that you might need in terms of control of your experience, control of what you want to do with the backend complex products maybe. Maybe there are B2B offerings that are still slightly more mature, and some of those products as well, and so but it's, it's, it's definitely there, and and therefore we, you know we have to talk about it and and so it's an interesting one. I don't really engage with analysts, even do this on you, so, but you know, gardener, put them in the, in the magic quadrant anyway, if you know what I mean with a sort of a gray. We didn't talk to them, but here they are kind of blog, and I think that's because of that. You know, I was at Forrester sorry, yeah, that's because of the head of steam they've got ultimately in that market. So, and then, you know, in the older space, there's still people working on Salesforce as well.
Speaker 4:And again, you can't argue that Salesforce isn't cloud native. Well, you can argue that maybe the commerce cloud wasn't originally cloud native, but it certainly is now. It's certainly headless and it's certainly APIs all over the place. So again, we still see larger organizations choosing and working with that, or maybe thinking, do thinking. You know, my commerce engine is fine. It's the other bits of my tech stack that I need to drive towards mac instead. So, you know, I'm fine with the checkout, I'm fine with the way that people could find stuff, but my product creation process is dreadful.
Speaker 4:So, um, let's go and look down. Uh, a way of doing kind of like, the true product attribute entry, then the products, um, content management, using one of the pins out there and then pushing that through. Then Mac three there was a brilliant presentation done by Mattel and it was all about that content creation process and ultimately, at the end, it's back into a Shopify store that they would throw up for a brand. But they were talking about and I think I've talked about this publicly because it was, you know, it was in the the post mac three. Uh, um, uh, documentation that came out. Um, you know, barbie, when the barbie film came out it was massive. They were able to basically, almost you know, generate at industrial scale all this different content for all these little stores that all appeared in different countries on shopify around the world. And then, when the barbie movies got through its kind of final end of its whatever hype cycle curve that the content providers use Mattel, were able to turn that off and move on to the next one.
Speaker 3:Um, that's really fascinating yeah, yeah, and it's a wonderful example for um, where a mock enabled content management system which was in place at the time um actually enabled this process. So I think I'll know that having multi-country and multi-brand stores with shopify isn't as easy as we'd all love it to be um. But to your point, supplementing it then with a cms that can go into that stack will do the function that I as a brand in this case as Mattel want to have. And I think that's where we're going to have much more conversations. Is Shopify enterprise ready? I don't know. Kind of depends on the enterprise. I. I know from evaluations I've been privy to that there are certain functions that Shopify isn't all that great at. Maybe that's okay, maybe it's not. But the M, the A, the C, the H, they are by and large not differentiating anymore. We can have a religious conversation about should the M look like this or should the M look like that? I don't know who we're helping with that at the end of the day, honestly, but absolutely, and also that kind of again demanded a new approach to the Mark Alliance and to go away from the definitions to what is it we're trying to achieve here.
Speaker 3:So the conversation goes towards the function and I think Shopify has come in beautifully leveraging that buyers are looking more for. What's your vision? What's your roadmap? They have proven how quickly they can shift their tech in the last few years when demand went there. They have sufficient resources to adjust to whatever the future is bringing. They're doing a pretty good job articulating their vision as well, and they're not beating that cloud native kind of drum that the majority of folks don't care that much about because it's a tick book somewhere. And if you're, then a vendor in the core mock environment and you're still talking only about headless commerce or API first commerce and you forget to talk about the value and your vision and your customer success, you're going to lose right, because your conversation, your story, is not relevant to the buyer in 24, 25 and kudos to Shopify. I'm not a fan of their tech. I'll say that, right, but I don't have to be, I think. Think their go-to-market is excellent.
Speaker 2:So, in your view, then, we're talking about blended solutions, hyper-solutions. What do these mean for the composability standards and the role of the Mac lines?
Speaker 3:Okay. So first, I think this whole idea of is it mark pure or is it non-mac comes from a north american actually correction, a us approach to mark. When you've spoken to european members and european co-found, we never had this harsh divide. It was always clear there will always be a blended view. And then our American friends we all love them dearly but they have an us versus them mentality. I think we've seen that over the last few weeks beautifully again. So it's always been this way, tim. So it's always been this way, tim. We're just having a bit more open conversation about the fact that naturally, mark and non-Mark always have to play together, especially in enterprise settings. Yeah, I polarise saying that now with US versus Europe. I'm sorry for that, but it's kind of true, right?
Speaker 4:I did like to say something. I mean, yeah, no, it's um, it's just true, though I mean, there are cultural differences, without doubt, right? Um and uh, I think the important thing is to come back to something you said earlier, sonia. Uh, it's about the value to the end customer. That's all that really matters. So, how quickly, you know people want to change tech for a reason. What is that reason? Let's find and work out what it is. Is it to save money? Is it to open new markets? Is it to, you know, as part of maybe growing your top line? Is it all of those things? Let's concentrate on something you know we can bite off now and go down that route. Then it's what's the best solution to it? Right? You've heard me.
Speaker 4:I'm going to say again, up to then, numerous podcasts and all the time about the hammer, anti-pattern. Right, if you've only got a hammer, everything looks like a male, a nail. So what you need is a toolbox, right? So you go and say what's the best tool for now, for me, for that, um, and it could be that the best tool, uh, at the front end, for an e-commerce platform is shopify. Uh, you know, because it's, I can get a site stood up in. You know, one of one of the partners for these fabrics stood up a site for I think it's flying tiger copenhagen. I saw on the on linkedin in eight days, right, so I can get something up really quickly. That's good enough. Um, they're happy with shop pay. We can go with that and that's that's going to work there. Um, what's the real business problem? The real business problem is they need to be like I talked about with with mattel, we need to be live in 27 countries really quickly, or they need to be able to create content at industrial scale, like some of the big sneaker vendors do, if you know what I mean, for all the different markets. That's the interesting point. Okay, so we do that bit really easily with that, and then maybe we'll revisit it in the future if we need to.
Speaker 4:But this other piece is where we can go out to the Mac vendors and say oh, okay, you can answer this question for me, right? And while we've been talking, I've been thinking about this. You know, it's the A in Mac. That's the really important bit the APIs, because if you can get machines, if you can get human-understandable machine interaction right and this is why APIs became such a big thing. That's one of the real reasons that you can make composability easier.
Speaker 4:But with ai coming up as well, that's that's that's the kind of real bit, because the machines can understand that content. It's not just about talking to each other and connecting those apis up, um, and that's where you can truly industrialize some of that stuff. And so that's coming back to the sort of top of the conversation. That's, you know, that's the real kind of prediction. There is that the, the machine readable, understandable, uh data coming out of these ap, these APIs, is frankly going to make that kind of integration piece and make the businesses that embrace it more successful than the ones that won't. I think that's probably the simplest way to look at it from that side.
Speaker 3:Yes, 100%, and I think an important question for a buyer, for a brand to ask is also why is that technology non-NAC? Is it because they don't meet the criteria? And we've had a few recent rejections where a piece of software was not SaaS, was not multi-tenant. Saas to Jim's earlier point was still essentially infrastructure in the cloud. Not cool, you do not want to buy that stuff right now, right? Is it non-MAC? Because the vendor, for whatever reason, decided not to be part of the MAC alliance but still essentially fulfills that criteria. Great, you know, we've said that before. There was MAC Lash. There's lots of reasons why. Maybe you don't, you're not philosophically aligned Wonderful, right. What the mock certification does help with, though, is it saves you as a buyer to do the due diligence, because it's pretty rigid, it's pretty hard to get in. So if there is a mock certification stamp on there, you don't have to ask so many rough, tough questions yourself, and that's handy, but it doesn't mean, if a vendor doesn't have a mark stamp, that it's bad tech by default.
Speaker 2:If we could just go back a little bit to the rise of the solutions like Shopify. Just go back a little bit to the rise of the solutions like Shopify. Do you think that, due to that sharp rise, the traditional vendors are feeling pressured? And if they are, how would you expect?
Speaker 3:them or like them to respond. Make it simpler, just please make it simple. Make it simple, make it fast. Take a lesson from that book of Shopify, oh, a Gartner analyst said to me a few weeks ago when we had a discussion about usability in enterprise. He said also, by the way, 50 plus right, just to ageism here a little. Well, you know, sonia, let's be real here. Enterprise users, they're used to work with crap interfaces. Right, and yes, I work with SAP R3, right, I know what bad user interfaces look like. But I think it is really dangerous to assume that the now users and the now buyers in enterprise organizations still cope, are willing to cope with that stuff and shop if that isn't fantastic. It's simple, it's easy. You're up fast, days matter of days, insane. So, dear other vendors, there's your bar, right yeah, it's that cohort piece again.
Speaker 4:I think that's really interesting because and just a little aside I can remember having that exact conversation 20 years ago putting ATG in at Friends Providence and they had mainframe backends and we were replacing a bit of the mainframe backend with some internal stuff. I was like, well, we'll get you to experience people in, and their architect said no, we won't, they're used to it, we'll just train them. Who cares? It's like no, think of it differently. And now you know if you've got, if you've got somebody who is a, you know, a millennial, a gen z or zed uh, I've said gen z because my kids who are gen z say z, which is really annoying um and uh who maybe they start their own business. They've installed zero because it's really cheap. And they've used Xero and it's really good. It's got a lovely user interface and it works right At backend. I've used Xero myself in the past.
Speaker 4:And then you try and get them to use a traditional ERP vendor or accounting software. They're not going to part with it. They're going to go and find a kind of a challenger brand which is enterprise ready, that fills and works like zero, or try and work around. You know, I want to put zero in. I want to put other things around the outside of it so as, as the, as the users get, um, uh, get more tech savvy and more used to good user interfaces, it will impact. You know what you're selling there, uh, and how you build that product, without doubt, um tim, quick question for you what do you mean by traditional vendors? Just out of interest as well, to sort of help define that question what do I mean by traditional vendors?
Speaker 2:yeah, I would say that we're looking at for me the traditional sap hybris. Yes, yeah, commerce cloud, the vendors that, over the past 10 years, have dominated the demand that we've seen for project teams when delivering those, those monolith implementations.
Speaker 3:That's, that's my take yeah, yeah no fair play.
Speaker 3:So and then interesting, if you think about, if you think about the buying site, I think one thing we didn't yet really talk about in a straight way is for the other vendors, it's also really important to get their agency and, as I relationships, that partner satisfaction that Jim just spoke about, to the next level, because they do have much more influence in purchase and retention decisions than vendors like to believe. And I think, for the buyers at the same end, it's important to critically look at their agency partners and wonder are they making sure their banks are empty or are they giving me genuine advice? What's best for me? Their banks are empty or are they giving me genuine advice? What's best for me? Um, and also there, shopify has done a really good job in the last few quarters, even not even years, to attract interesting agencies, um, and help them up level from possibly smb work to more enterprise savvy as well so the reason I asked him sorry just quickly is because another prediction those large companies, they are rich, they have cash.
Speaker 4:I would not be surprised to see them buying some of the mac alliance vendors, which would be interesting for the Mac Alliance membership, of course, sonia, although we have changed the rules on that slightly, I believe. But you know, I was, as you know, working with Hybris. When they got bought by SAP. They released SAP WebCommerce 3.0. I seem to remember on the Monday it looked quite good and they built that product themselves and they bought Hybris on the thursday and and basically, end of life, sap web commerce at the time. You could see, you know there are some very cheap mac alliance member commerce companies out there at the moment, I'll argue, and I wouldn't be surprised to see, um, an sap, an oracle or somebody like that who've got deep pockets thinking actually we want to be in here at some point and look, you know, oracle, they're gonna have to buy almost anybody you know as RSAP. To a certain extent, there could be some really interesting moves coming forward in the next 18 months or so If people think that e-commerce is still worth doubling down on in that regard.
Speaker 2:That's another 2025 prediction. There, Jim Could be 26.
Speaker 4:Let's call it 28.
Speaker 2:Do we want the vendors to keep it simple? My drama teacher said to me keep it simple, stupid, and do it quickly. Um, so there's lots of challenges and lots of opportunities for the vendors. How, in your view, um as the last question from me are they failing to adjust to the challenging needs of the market?
Speaker 2:oh the traditional or everybody yeah I think I think both um from. It's interesting from my point of view to understand both, particularly of what you just said there, jim, which is actually, you think some of um, uh, the traditional vendors are going to start to look at acquisitions to get themselves back in the game. Is that fair to say?
Speaker 4:certainly, in the case of Oracle, don't currently have a web offering, right, but they've got still 80 plus customers running on ATG from what I understand. But the end of life did publicly, I seem to remember, about 18 months ago, and there is literally nothing you can buy from them to do that work. But, um, yeah, how do we? Where do we start? Sonia said let's look at traditional vendors first. I mean, I've lived through that hybrid. So sap acquisition, um, and big companies deal with partners as a partner and they deal with partners in a different way, right, so, um, come back to sonia's point putting partners first, keeping them first, like, interestingly, sap then bought another company, uh, that we have as a partner at patchwork demarcates and they actually let them run pretty much separately still, um, there is some sap-ness in the background, but that experience is much better than the experience we went through about, I'd say, 18 months into the highbris time, once the founders left and you know the partner people left and you know the whole structure became much more about what can you do for me? What leads can you bring for me? What more of sap can you sell? Nothing wrong with that, and that's how traditional sa partners work as a part of work. But is that really answering the you know, the commerce partners, uh, requirement? Not really. And similar thing happened with oracle and atg. I know some of their partners literally got told you have to be able to sell every single part of the oracle tech stack, or that's it. You won't be able to sell ATG or work with us on ATG anymore. So it leads to interesting and different behaviors. I big companies thinking that everybody's a big company. Um, so I would say you know, actually transform your organization via the companies you buy rather than you know. If that happens, rather than trying to impose all that's a winning success from a from a numbers perspective, you're having to buy that company for a reason, even if you don't. I mean, if you go, if you're going on that route, if you're looking at the mac vendors that you know they're listening or not listening.
Speaker 4:Again, come back to what I said before make sure that you've got, you know, great partner management, and sonja said the same thing. Um, again, come back to your point. I mean we put in an implementation success team to work with our partners who are building on patchworks to make sure that we don't have any churn on our side. Before it launches right, make sure things are done the right way, that certain patterns are being uh followed for uh, you know, for back-end systems, down as a sweeper to pick up the orders that go through that kind of good stuff. Um, that's important. So make sure that you've got that success team in place on that side of it and then listen to what the market wants, like, really listen. So so we we have a monthly partner uh and customer get together where we get all the ideas and you know anyone who can attend and, you know, raise them as tickets. They get. They get grimged into the backlog and come into the product from that side of it. But also it might be like, oh, your commercials are changing because there's a new person out here that's doing this in a different way.
Speaker 4:Um, it could be, you know, in the commerce vendor space I'm you know, we're seeing shopper by a lot more, or, you know, or one of their kind of competitors who've got. You know, years ago, when I was at big commerce, I was presenting to one of the big five consultancies and they went yeah, this is like a great accelerator, but how? Yeah, how long does it take to get that working? You know, because they're thinking of accelerators in the traditional way, the old, um high risk, uh, you know, commerce store type thing. I don't know.
Speaker 4:This isn't except. This is what we tend to sass. You can sign up to a trial account now and you get this. You get a shop. You know, you can put a shop live in an hour if you really want to, um, as long as you've got the payment provider set up. If you know what I mean. All right, that's what people kind of used to now. So if it takes a year to get you live, for whatever reason, because you don't have that accelerator in place, you know, listen to the market, come up with something that allows you to deal with that, because that's probably why you're starting to lose against the the rise of the SaaS platform. As always, I've spoken too much. Sorry to you, sonia, sorry, yeah.
Speaker 3:I'm with you, totally with you. I'd say also, I'll stick with with the mark vendors. There's certain things you will not be able to compete on to your point investment that an SAP or an Adobe or Shopify can make into the product, into the roadmap. You know you can beat that. So there's other ways to speak to that new buying audience and the, I want to say easiest, but that's because I think in vision and strategy and future, uh, the.
Speaker 3:The fastest way, I guess, to open up other ways of differentiation is to articulate your vision for the future, for the market and for your product better. And I see vendors by and large, do a terrible job at that right now. If you go, go and ask here's a challenge go and ask someone that should be able to answer the question what's your vision for category in the next five years, 2030, 2030, most will start with insert name will be a market leader in blah, blah, blah. That's not a vision, right? That's a goal that you have to be a market leader. Everybody does that. What's your vision? What's the world going to be like? What's your role in it? What pain will you solve? And it's scandalous, scandalous, how few can answer that. But then, if you can't compete anymore on the MBA, the CVH, if you can't compete on your development budget, you better have a better vision for the future so you can convince your buyers. So that's something to invest in.
Speaker 2:Perfect. Thank you very much, guys, for your time. That has been incredibly insightful. I have other questions, but there is someone that you can't see. You're literally kicking me out of the room because we have another podcast coming straight after this, but I really appreciate your time Incredibly insightful, and I think the audience that we have built up over the past five years will take a huge amount from that, and I've also learned a substantial amount too, so thank you very much.
Speaker 3:Thank you for having us. I know you said we're going to go head to head. Did we agree too much?
Speaker 2:uh, I think probably a little bit more. Uh, passive, aggressive would have gone down okay, but no, we're fine thank you.
Speaker 4:Thanks for having us on Tim thanks guys.
