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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
ROI or Bust: Commerce in a Cost-Conscious World with Tal Ofer
Is Replatforming Dead? Why Retailers Are Taking a More Targeted Approach to Tech Investment
In the latest episode of The FODcast, we’re joined by Tal Ofer, Senior Partnerships Director at Cloudinary and Co-Founder of the MACH Alliance Community Council, to unpack the reality of tech decision-making in retail right now.
With over 15 years shaping global eCommerce strategies, Tal brings a straight-talking perspective on where retailers are really investing - and where the hype doesn’t match the reality.
We get into:
- Why large-scale replatforming is on pause for many brands
- The shift towards targeted, ROI-driven tech projects
- How personalisation and loyalty are driving customer lifetime value
- The rise of composable architecture, and why it’s not for everyone
- Why speaking to those who’ve actually implemented MACH principles is a must
As Tal explains: unless your system is completely broken, you’re not going to rush to change it. Retailers want technology that delivers value- fast.
If you’re navigating margin pressure, evolving customer expectations, or considering how composable commerce fits into your business, this episode offers clear, practical advice.
Sit back, tune in, and enjoy!
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/
Hello and welcome to Season 7 of the podcast, the podcast focused on the future of digital commerce hosted by Simply Commerce. Season 7 promises to continue to bring you some of the industry's brightest minds across the globe as we unpick the sector and where it's heading From war stories to strategy and technology, deep dives to future trends we cover it all as we continue our journey to have one of the most popular podcasts in commerce. Before we start, if you enjoy our content, please do hit the subscribe button on whatever platform you're listening on, like and share on socials. Hello and welcome back to the podcast the future of all things digital commerce. Today, I'm pleased to welcome one of the industry's most travelled professionals and a name many will be familiar with Tao Offa, currently Senior Partnerships Director at Cloudinary and co-founder of the Community Council at. Director at Cloudinary and co-founder of the Community Council at the Mac Alliance so co-founder of the Community Council. I believe that's a new announcement, tal. Do you want to tell us a bit more about that please?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure. So I started getting involved in the Mac Alliance around three years ago when I joined Cloudinary. I was very, very passionate about it and originally I was involved as a member of the Growth Council, which later became a chair of the Growth Council after elections. Then the Growth Council has been abolished by the Mac Alliance, as the focus of the organization was about helping existing members growing get more value from the Alliance. So, together with a couple of colleagues, we co-founded this community council, which now also have a member of staff looking after the community, and the point is we already have over 100 members.
Speaker 2:We're helping them each other to connect with each other. We're helping them with member initiatives, events, using stuff like the power of mac and helping new members you know to find their way because when you join it doesn't matter how established you are as a business. You're joining a new organization. You don't know who to speak to if you need to troubleshoot, if you have any issue or you want to be connected to some potential partners inside the Alliance. So we are the point of contact both in Europe and the US to help those members and, of course, we're working with the board and the permanent members of staff of the Mac Alliance.
Speaker 1:I don't know where you find all the spare time in the day to do these jobs. Like I said, you always seem to be at a different event every week, and you've got your responsibilities for Cloudinary and the Mac Alliance and you've got your family as well. Where do you find the time?
Speaker 2:I think it's something that I'm very passionate about and you know it's like when you have a hobby or a subject that you're really passionate and like to do. Some people you know they play golf and some people you know they do other stuff. So I'm very, very passionate about it. It also benefits personally, myself and my company, both in the medium and in the long term. So I enjoy doing it and it also gives me a lot of satisfaction. You know helping other people, you know getting well in their jobs and in their companies, because I remember when I started I didn't get a lot of help and I had to find my way. So you know if I can help, you know people to do well, it gives me a lot of pleasure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I love it. You're certainly a great person to be offering assistance and to be mentoring and what have you and I really appreciate you joining me on the show today, tal, obviously, we bumped into each other at a couple of events in the past, so it's cool that we've been able to extend that relationship and have you on the show.
Speaker 2:Thank you, it's great to be here.
Speaker 1:So look. So today we will be focusing on the current state of the digital commerce market and, with yourself having just attended Shop Talk last week, I guess it's probably a good time to be having this conversation. So I think we should probably jump straight in and just give a quick, a quick summary of where we're at as an industry right now. Obviously, there is a lot going on and a lot's happened over the last five years, and we just play it through and see where we're at as an industry right now. Obviously, there is a lot going on and a lot has happened over the last five years, and we just play it through and see where we're at right now. So, yeah, how have you seen the industry sort of play out over the last five years? Tal?
Speaker 2:So I think one of the major things that's obviously happened in the five years ago is that we had, you know, the lockdowns and the whole industry has gone through a really seismic change and for many companies on the vendor side, those years between 2020 and 2022, 2023 was huge growth in terms of new business. More and more businesses, whether they had online presence or wanted to expand their online operations, they're in the markets to to buy technology, to try new things. Budget-wise, it was great time because companies had increased revenues, sometimes increased margins, and we're looking to, you know, to experiment and to try new technologies and stuff to meet their customers' expectations. So for companies like ourselves you know Cloudinary we saw huge growth in those years with what you do. I know that a lot of our friends in the industries have experienced the same. And also I think there was also a lot of big projects.
Speaker 2:When you look at the solution partner side and the agencies and the system integrators, there used to be a lot of big projects. When you look at the solution partner side and the agencies and the system integrators, there used to be a lot of big transformation projects, big, big bank deals that were going through with replatforming and CMS and the DAM, oms and such and all of the things that the customer want to change, and this has changed. So I think a year or two ago the market dynamics have really changed. Um, you're seeing smaller projects. Um, you're seeing very, very specific uh projects that the customer try to solve, um, a certain problem that they have with their tech stack or with with their operations, and then they go to the best of breed solution. You know, uh, if you want to call it in that space and benchmark, who would be the best to fit their needs, the costs, project, product roadmap, etc. Helping them to solve the problem. So there's been a lot, of, a lot of changes.
Speaker 2:Some are good and obviously some are not so good, but I think for any company in that space that operates, you really need to evolve as a business. So it means it's how you sell your solutions, how you go to market, how you work with your partners, how your product roadmap looks like and also how you sometimes price your solution. You need to be very, very creative and also look at your ideal customer profile, because for many companies they were, for example, dealing a lot of years in retail customers. You, they're very comfortable in that space and now they need to think a little bit outside the box, to be more creative, because it could be other businesses that could benefit from um, from what they do.
Speaker 2:And we at cloudinary, you know we we're working very, very closely with lots of fashion brands, lots of luxury brands, inend, and we figure out that we need to, you know, think outside of the box and we're doing now more stuff, for example, in the automotive industry, with financial services, with legal firms. So you need to try and explore how your product can fit, you know, outside your ideal customer profile. You know to try and, and you know, reach where your company wants to be in in terms of growth yeah, you made a good point there about the icp.
Speaker 1:I guess you're quite lucky in the fact you have a product that can be used across multiple sectors and I mean, not everyone has that luxury right so they they might find themselves aligned to a sector that is either doing really really well or not so well in this case, maybe, like retail, where there isn't as much money right now as there has been in the past. But if we look at retail as an example because that's where the majority of the listeners would sit, either within retail or services and products that are delivered into retail why do we feel there's been this shift around sort of going to smaller projects? Is it because there's just no money to spend? Or is it because actually a lot of the work has been done previously and there's no need to keep re-platforming, because they've already done a re-platforming the last five years and it's still fit for purpose?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So first of all, I think unless your system is completely broken and it gives you a really hard time and you know that you miss revenue, it impacts your operations, it impacts lots of other parts of the business you're not going to look to change it. I've been working in the payment industry before and there's a lot of competition in working with retailers and it's mainly come down to who's going to offer the cheapest cost of transaction at the end of the day, because a lot of the companies can do more or less the same now when it, when you look at payment, for example, unless you have very high decline rates of declines, you know money that you can actually recover by maybe using a little bit more advanced technology when it comes to payments, you're not going to change your payment provider unless you have, you know, major, uh, major issues, and that applies to other areas. You know, unless your platform really holds you back, you want to go international. You can't do multi-store or multi-catalog or other things which are important for your business. You're probably going to stick around. But the point about cost is a quite a major one because for many retailers the margins has been squeezed year on year, especially, you know in, especially in the fast fashion space. You have the increased costs of shipping. You have the increased costs of returns Some of the fashion retailers you know that everyone knows they have returns anything between 20% and 40% of the orders so that eats a lot into your margins and into your operational revenue and that means that you can't spend as much as maybe you could have spent before.
Speaker 2:Now, from my personal point of view, one of the benefits of the marketing lines and I'm plugging it in is that you don't have to go and do a wholesale change of your system. If something is not right you want to try it. You can take enough for your search solution and you can replace it with something else. You can take your promotions or loyalty or anything around that and it can be quite cost effective. You don't have to change the whole thing. The trouble is if you are working with an Adobe or Oracle, then to change from it usually it's not easy to go just with one piece and then you need to look at CMS or a DOM or something else, and that's why the retailers and the merchants which rely on the old monolithic solutions they are more reluctant or nervous when it comes about changing. It needs more time. Usually there needs to be more than one ISV involved in that and usually there needs to be as well a partner involved.
Speaker 2:You know, to make a whole business case, I can give you an example very known high-end UK brand for quite some time to about consolidating the tech stack taking three old legacy solution and consolidating them into one and they're still not a customer of ours because they got a new CEO which came last year and he decided to prioritize other areas in the business, even though the product team wants. So you have this kind of constraint in the business that they may not have a budget. Or maybe there is a new CEO, cto, cio that came in and changed the priorities of the business and a lot of the vendors in the market. They all go around the same customers, you know around the same ICP, more or less you know same size business. Everyone wants those flashy logos. You know everyone wants the same customers and these customers as well. They can't just sit all day and buy technology. They have a business to run. You know they have to look what to prioritize and I think it comes down to what areas have the highest pain points of the business where you can drive both the best return on investment and also best operational efficiency with the technology.
Speaker 2:And and this is how I see that brands and retailers are buying. Nowadays, they're looking at two kinds of ROI. They're looking at the commercial ROI, so increase in conversion, reduce in returns, page load performance, but they also look, for example, at removing manual tasks and save money where they can by using technology, by using AI, and this is, I think, the future, which we're going to see more and more is we see more point-selling solutions about buying specific solutions for an existing problem, and we don't see that many big bank digital transformation projects. They're going to be here and there, but not that many. And the main companies that struggle because of that are the commerce platforms, because a lot of them used to in the good years in the economy, they used to hit their revenue, crush their revenue, do really really well. Now a lot of them are just trying to hang on to their existing customers because there are some challenger platforms which coming with very low costs and eating into their market share yeah, it was funny.
Speaker 1:I mean this. For a while, people have said commerce is just a commodity, right, and it's like, if you've got your, your website and it's, what changes can you make to your commerce platform that are really going to give you that kind of uh, usp and your competitors? A lot of the changes are going to be around maybe the front end, or around how your, your search works or your. There's a very good chance that you might be using a specific vendor for that and not the commerce platform itself. So I can see exactly why those conversations are being had and the impact that it would have.
Speaker 1:I think something you mentioned on there is around the best investments and the commercial ROI, and I guess something that we're also seeing is the companies that are spending. Approximately half of those are spending money with the aim of spend now to reduce costs over time, and a lot of that is focused around AI and how AI can reduce efficiencies within the business in certain areas, whether it be operationally or whatever. So it's quite interesting that there is money to be spent, but actually it's not on big, fancy digital transformation work or a re-platform. It's around sort of business efficiencies and optimization.
Speaker 2:Correct. That's exactly what we're seeing at CloudNear in the market. That's what our friends in the industry are seeing as well, and every decision now takes longer than it used to take before. Everything is more scrutinized, spent on, and you need to come with a very solid business case that proves this, this ROI because again everything is is scrutinized quite more closely than it used to be before yeah, so here we go.
Speaker 1:There's a crystal ball in front of you. At what point will will cost stop being so heavily scrutinized and when will only be more free-flowing?
Speaker 2:I don't think it's going to to change dramatically in the next couple of years because, as you you know, there are certain geopolitical things that are happening around us which is not always in our control and they also impact how businesses are buying and how they plan and how they invest.
Speaker 2:I can give you an example without mentioning the customer's name. Last year we were involved in an RFP for a business from the UK and they decided not to go ahead with that project this year because the tariffs that the US president decided to put on increased the cost of their products by a couple of hundred millions a year. That means now that they can't go and spend that money on technology that they wanted to do on certain areas of the business and they wanted to go with the project. They were very serious about it. But, you know, sometimes things like that happen and it has impact and people don't even realize. They were like, yeah, but increase the tariff, what does it have to do with that? Actually, it has an impact on the business and it means the business actually now got to seriously hit the margins and now they operate the business and now they have to deprioritize this project and probably push it back by quite some time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we had two clients that immediately paused their recruitment drive because they were impacted quite severely with the tariffs as well. So we've kind of seen that from a recruit impact, the recruitment sector as well, as I'm sure many have as well. So the, like I said, it's not always you think about the impact as in the wider industry, outside of the tariffs itself, but as we're talking about sort of money where it's spent and investing, I mean companies are investing in areas. I mean the last couple of years we've seen investments in search and PIMs and CMSs and they seem to be some of the more sort of busy areas. So would you agree, is there like one or two specific areas where you feel companies are investing the most money? Tal?
Speaker 2:Yes, so I think it didn't change in the case of the CMS and PIM quite popular investments because you need to get your products right. Because you need to get your products right, you need to get your content right. You know it impacts the conversion rate and how your brand is perceived, in addition to what we do with Cloudinary. But I would say that there are two areas which goes really really well together. Where I think is really the future and the vendors in those spaces are going to and already making a lot of money, where I think is really the future and the vendors in those spaces are going to and already making a lot of money, is around personalization and loyalty, because a lot of those brands and I spoke previously about retail a lot of those brands they want to differentiate themselves from the competition. They're spending a lot of money on marketing and advertising, driving traffic through different channels, through affiliate marketing, display, etc. And then the customer comes on the website and they abandon the basket. You know, because of different reasons, maybe they're selling their stuff cheaper through a wholesaler or through Amazon or something like that. Maybe the experience is not optimized, maybe they're missing attributes and the ones which are doing well and the ones which are going to do well are the ones that are investing in those areas. Because when you are investing in a personalized one-to-one or micro personalization as some call it, you're more likely to retain your customers, and that's again connect to loyalty, where you can really increase the lifetime value of these customers. Because what you don't want to do as a business is you want to invest all of this money driving them to your website and then, for a reason that you're missing something on your website, they're going to drop off, they're going to go to a competitor and they're not going to shop with you at that frequency. Or they're not going to shop with you at that frequency or they're not going to shop with you at all. It depends how bad the experience is.
Speaker 2:So I think that the vendors and the players in that space are doing really, really well. I probably will mention one which I'm really really impressed by the Growth Braze, which is also part of Market Alliance. They've been doing really well with the CDP platform, and a lot of the big companies you know want to use a solution like theirs or competitors, because they want to take the existing data that they have, learn about the customers and then serve them with relevant you know banners or offers or anything which would be relevant for them, for their shopping experience, to make them come to spend more money, to tailor offers to them, promotions and all of that stuff. So this is the area which I think you're going to see a lot of investment in. The big supermarkets are investing heavily into that space. You know they have big customer bases. You know the club cards and the other ones, and I think that if you're in that space, you're going to have a really good future ahead of you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the whole kind of personalization piece has really interested me for a long time because there has been so much improvement. But I mean, there was next to no personalization for a long time when it was awful, but it's still amazing. I look at some brands, like Zara, for example, and they're widely known as one of the leaders from a digital customer experience point of view. But I can guarantee you if I was to go on Zara now, it would bring up the women's homepage and my wife never uses my laptop, so I'm not quite sure where like that has come from. But then it still can't seem to personalize it to me browsing for me, um, which I find quite amazing. But um, but I mean that's a a separate conversation, right but um, I feel like there's definitely a lot that can be done there still.
Speaker 1:And if I look at loyalty, we've had a lot of really cool conversations around loyalty on on the podcast recently we had um, sam from talent one on the show last year and fiona from loyalty line. Both talk about some of the cool things that their platform does and that their customers are doing to improve customer loyalty. Because we're in a we're. We live in a world where, with a couple of clicks on your, on your laptop or your phone, you can be buying your product from somewhere else. Um, and as you said, you spend so much money now on getting the customers to your site. You need to keep them and a really good way of doing that is by having loyalty programs and like gamification and that kind of stuff. Do you? Do you see that industry sort of developing further? Now with the ai is becoming more prominent?
Speaker 2:absolutely it's. It's inevitable that it will be developed, and AI is a major part to do with that, because what a lot of those solutions will do. They collect all of these data points from customer journeys and obviously they compare it and then they try and test it by doing A-B testing. They, for example, do a special landing page for this customer and another one for that customer and they can change the layout of the page and they can send how the search looks like. I find this honestly a fascinating space because it can bring a lot of value, and I'm always looking at it also from my point of view as a customer, because I want to know how I will enjoy shopping, you know, coming to a website having the best customer experience, which will make me to want to come again to this website, and I will probably single out one which I really really like, which I plan to be also a customer of ours, even though this is not really to do anything with redo.
Speaker 2:Paul Smith has been really doing an amazing job there with a new website that they launched last year the search of the product and now the layout is very quirky. It's like the brand, and I think if companies want to learn from someone. They need to look at what they've done and making it like a really enjoyable finding the products really connect with the brand, with the personality of the brand. You know you actually can really feel it when you go on the website and it's not generic. Like you know, you go sometimes on the website. They all look the same, they all feel the same. There's nothing really exciting about that and, as you say, gamification and other things part of the customer journey can make it really interesting for the customer to want to check out, maybe to add additional product that they were not planning to buy and then to overall increase the lifetime value and stay on with this brand. Uh, moving forward okay.
Speaker 1:So a couple of things. And if we're looking at sort of loyalty and personalization and where do you feel like we are on the journey to that being at its like peak, like goodness, like, if we feel like the the end goal is like hyper personalized one-to-one, where are we on that?
Speaker 2:journey now and I would say we're not in the beginning. Uh, we're also not at the end. We're probably. We're probably in the middle, because this is an area of trial and testing. You know it's an area that you have to again to keep evolving.
Speaker 2:I think what a lot of brands were trying to do around loyalty for many years is to try to discount heavily, and they found out that you know it doesn't really work. They get the customer come to them only on Black Friday and then you never see them and you have high returns because of that. I think, in a way, it's good that you see less heavy discounting, as used to be. I think now a lot of brands try to understand the customers, what really motivates them, their shopping habits. I think there is still more work that needs to be done.
Speaker 2:I think also, any brand that sells internationally on their website, personalizing it, making it, you know really nice experience. You know you can recognize where your customer is from. So you know your customer um is from from new york and you know the weather in new york is this, so you can maybe target them to buy summer clothing or you can, vice versa, someone from a cold place. They need to buy coats, you know, so you can merely focus their customer journey on the products that they are more likely to buy.
Speaker 2:These are the kind of things that some brands are doing it, but you don't really. You don't really see enough of it, and I think the ones that are going to push it as part of their strategy, they're going to stand to win more in the long term Because, again, the customer experience journey is not going to be generic. It's going to be tailored to you as a customer. They know about you, they know about what you searched before. That's why they're also displaying these kind of products and where you're from and all of those things, and it can really move the needle for a lot of those businesses of those things and it can really move the needle for a lot of those businesses.
Speaker 1:Yeah, as I mean as a customer, I'm really torn because, going back to what you mentioned about the discounting strategies, there were a lot, of, a lot of retail brands that would just send discount codes out every month and, as a customer, that was great because I knew at some point in the month I was going to get between 10 and 20 off, so I would just wait for that discount code before I bought an item. And that happens less now. So as a customer, I'm probably going to be paying more now for an item than I would have maybe last year, but then at the same time, I look at the experience has generally got better and actually their targeting has also got better. So now I might end up buying things that I wouldn't have bought beforehand because I wouldn't have seen them beforehand, whereas now they're pushing the right products to me. So I find it really torn.
Speaker 1:It's like the. It's like cost versus value, isn't it? And you don't mind paying a bit more if you get a better service or whatever it might be. Um, but there is a part of me that's a bit gutted. I don't get 20 discount guys every couple of weeks anymore.
Speaker 2:But maybe you buy only stuff that you need, right. So sometimes before that you would be impulse buying because you knew you were going to get the discount and you waited for the time. And you buy stuff that you maybe not going to wear, you're not going to need it sometimes. So maybe for sustainability it's actually better because there's less returns, there's less deliveries and you buy stuff that you actually need and you want to buy, compared to just buying because there was a 20% discount or something like that.
Speaker 2:I think there's also some benefit from it and, of course, margin wise for the businesses. You know a lot of businesses. When I mentioned earlier the margin issue, a lot of them were, for example, selling on marketplaces in different places and sometimes you go and you could buy a Ralph Lauren polo here for much cheaper and you went to their website and the website never had discounts and like, ok, if I can find it cheaper, I'm going to go here. And companies, for example, like Under Armour, really, really struggle because they became over reliant on Amazon for their sales. People will not come for the website because it will be cheaper to get it through Amazon you know, and it's not a great strategy.
Speaker 2:So also, when you look at promotional activity, loyalty activity, email marketing, etc. One of the most annoying things is that you can get like those blast emails. It's all the customer base is getting the exact same email with stuff which is not relevant for them, you know, and happening on too frequent. You know you want those marketing, promotional materials to come to you less often. You want them to be relevant for you because you don't want just to click delete or unsubscribe or all of that. This is again some, some things that brands need to take into account how not to create this customer fatigue, this discount fatigue around the brand. Don't market to us too often. Give us the right stuff, otherwise you are at risk of losing us as a customer because we're going to go to brands who get it right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, so it's certainly been an interesting space and, given what you said, it sounds like that's going to be a good kind of maybe year or two ahead of us as well, with some some cool innovation and and what have you.
Speaker 1:And just quickly going back to what you're saying about paul smith and I mean that's to me that's a really good example of um having a composable tech stack. Obviously, paul smith recently he went live on central, didn't they? And uh, I hear really good things about the platform, but a lot of people that I speak to they would say to me, if your brand hasn't got a differentiator, then something like a Shopify or a Monolith could be quite good for you, because you're selling your products and you want to sell your product probably as cheaply as possible. But if you've got a genuine differentiator in this case it's the quirkiness behind Paul Smith and bringing their, their brand, to life then maybe that's not possible with a, with an out-of-the-box platform, and actually you need to put your own tech stack together. To bring it to life is maybe where you need to go, and I've not actually looked at the website, but it sounds as though they've hit.
Speaker 2:They've hit it spot on yeah, they hit it spot on, um, they, uh, they're working with different, uh, different a couple of different other solutions from Lomak Alliance, which I don't remember all from the top of my head, but this is exactly what helped them to really compose if you can say it compose the whole experience, the best search experience, the best media experience, the best content experience, when you put it all together, and it did take them quite some time until it all came into play, but then the, the final, you know, the final product is like, you know, like a, like a stew that you leave overnight, you know, to cook for, really, really on low fire, and then when you open it, it's flavorsome, you know, you can just want to eat from it and enjoy from it. This is exactly like the website it's. It's brilliant. It wants you to to spend more money, you know, and their products are not cheap, you know. They're quite high end, um, but they're doing really, really well without having to do heavy discounting.
Speaker 1:So I think that they got it right so one of my favorite things on here is the analogies that people share. And there we go. It's like a stew, love it. I'm gonna keep that one. Um, so, just before we move on, obviously you have just been at shop talk and there would have been loads spoken about, but would you say, a lot of the conversations that you were part of and the talks that you heard were focused around topics that we've just been discussing, around loyalty, personalization, or obviously AI is going to be involved as well, but was there anything else that was being discussed?
Speaker 2:I think definitely loyalty, personalization and AI dominated. A lot of the conversations that I heard and a lot of the conversations that my friends and my network heard, it was quite evident that the big monolithic platforms were not there at all. So SAP, Salesforce, Adobe they didn't have a booth, they didn't have a presence. They left the space primarily to commerce tools and to Shopify. Shopify, really, I think, really going to benefit long term from this event. They brought together a couple of SIs and a couple of ISV vendors with them onto their big boot that they got. They get also a couple of successful side events around a boat ride in Barcelona and a few other events. So they stand to benefit from it really well. They're already eating into the market share of the big platforms and it's quite impressive because a couple of years ago, if you spoke to some of the biggest eyes in the industry, they would you know they would really equally if you ever said, yes, we're going to work with Shopify.
Speaker 2:Now, a lot of them, because the business dried up with a big platform. They're not a lot of project, but the customers are moving from those platforms to Shopify. They need to start building their own Shopify practices and some agencies that I've been working with for many years. They've been very strong Salesforce Commerce Cloud, for example. They're now having very, very successful Shopify agencies because they realize this is where the business is going, this is the direction of the market and they don't want to miss out. So I think Shopify has clearly dominated a lot of the conversations in ShopTalk. I think overall it was a successful event for us as a company overall Some really good meetings. For the pre-booked meetings. It did feel a little bit smaller last year um less exhibitors and, I think, a bit less attendees, but the quality uh overall hasn't dropped and I think this is what make uh the event I think one of the one of the best in the industry is globally, both in the us and in new york yeah, I mean, it's what you know.
Speaker 1:It's spoken about as being one of the best. Um, I'd love to get out there at some point, but I definitely echo what you're saying.
Speaker 1:With Shopify, it is in every conversation, and I just look at the clients that we work with and speak to, and almost all of them have spoken to us about building out a Shopify practice. If they're a consultant to an agency many of whom we're currently helping with all have helped this year as well. So it's where it's going, and as Shopify just pushes more and more into enterprise, we're not, we're just going to see that continue, I think. So it's an interesting space to be in. Um, yeah, I see at least two, three, four more years of Shopify dominance. Um, but that's it. You never know what's around the corner. So, uh, technology's evolving fast at the minute, so so let's see.
Speaker 1:But we can't go through the conversation without talking a bit about the Mac Alliance. It's obviously been for a bit of a turbulent time in the last couple of years. It hit the industry hard when it first came around a few years ago and it's safe to say it's left its mark. So I guess what would be interesting to hear from you, tal, is there still a place for the McLaren in the industry and how is it now versus its original positioning?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's a very good question. I think there is a still place, because if there was no place I don't think that I would be personally involved in spending my time and my effort. I still see a lot, you know, giving them more value. That's why, you know, we have the community council. We launch a new forum that all the members can interact with each other. You know there is a way to have some conversations there. There are chats, there are forums. People can really help each other, which before that it was a little bit more difficult to do it, you know, over Slack. So we have like a central platform where every member can log in and they can find what they need. They can find training, they can find stuff you know, related to Mac Alliance, I think as well.
Speaker 2:Everyone saw, you know, the news lately about a certain platform that decided to leave the Mac Alliance. I think, you know, when you join this organization you really need to be all in. You really need to be convinced that you want to go in that direction and you're not just doing it for marketing and PR purposes, like certain companies have been done. The more effort that you put in, the more resources that you put into your journey when you're a member, the more you're going to get out of it, and that's why you see, the companies which benefited the most from the organization, the commerce sources of this world Cloudinary, contentful and others are the ones which really invested a lot into it. So you know, when you join, you have to go through evaluation process, you need to be certified. You know, when you join, you have to go through evaluation process, you need to be certified. You know it's not an easy process and, of course, you need to pay the membership fee. So you need to be fully, to fully bought into the idea.
Speaker 2:Now, I think the Mac Alliance did a great job in the fact that everyone now speaking about you know Mac as an acronym. Everyone speak about API first, about composability, etc. Now the question is where do we go from here? And I think in certain markets there is already a very good presence for Mark in terms of principles, in terms of adoption, but it's not the case in every market. I mean the US market and in Europe, and some markets like the UK are doing really well, but a certain market in Europe where there is a really, really good potential. So I think, as far as I'm concerned, the future of the Mark Alliance will depend a lot about the collaboration between the members, how they help each other to grow as a company, and that's why I'm basically involved, because I believe it has a role to play and you know, we can all be winners at the end of the day by being part of it. So you know, let's try and make the most of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean you're right in what you say. I mean you go back a couple of years and MAC wasn't a widely known acronym I don't think I ever heard the word composable until two years ago and obviously now they're both discussed daily. Um, I think what would be interesting to get your take on here, tau is, when the mac alliance first came around, there was lots of images of lego flying around and how you can literally put it on and take it off, and it's really simple. And I think what's been clear, uh, is that it's maybe not quite as straightforward to do that as it was suggested at the start. We're kind of seeing that reflected in the tone of voice from the Mac Alliance as well. And now it's not necessarily about best of breed, it's about best of suite, which has still got the same principles at heart. It's just picking, maybe, what's right for you in terms of the right two, three, four vendors and not necessarily needing to have 10 to 15 different vendors or so. What would you say about that kind of change?
Speaker 2:I think one of the things that I see in terms of changes that you know the big platforms talking about composable, talking about Mac, you know it's a few years ago you wouldn't think that the Salesforce and SAP would actually have like composable storefronts. So I think in that sense you can really we can really say that some of it was due to the work that the alliance has done and the members have done, I think, in how you, how you do the go-to-market here. In many, many cases now not every business have the right expertise. So you know you may see that the competitor of yours gone in a composable architecture, but you maybe don't even know how or you don't know how to go about it. So you need to, you know to work with the right partners who have done it, who did this kind of built, a composable architecture. If you're interested, speak to someone who've done it. Maybe it's not for you. First of all, don't go and buy a luxury car because your friend or neighbor got it. You know. Just see first of all if it benefits you as a business, because, again, it's a complete change in how you work, how you operate. And you need also to get internal buying, whether you're the CTO or CIO, you need to get a lot of other teams on board. You need to get the marketing, operations, logistics and, if the case of a retail business, so you need to think about that.
Speaker 2:First of all, I would say that not every business should go in that direction. Some businesses are better off with what they have and if they work with a solution, which is good for them. But I think that there is a play for a little bit of a more hybrid, especially when it comes to the monoliths, and that's why some businesses say we can modernize some parts of our technology stack with maybe we replace the search, we replace the CMS or something else, but we keep the rest this way. I think doing it in steps and stages is a good way of embracing, you know, a composable architecture Because, again, not every business can do fully full blown, you know, in that direction.
Speaker 2:So, if you are a business and you listen to this podcast and you want to explore it, speak first of all to businesses who've done it, speak to the Mac ambassadors. You know there are a lot of amazing technical people who have done this kind of project, who've been really championing this kind of initiative, and I can personally connect to some of those in this industry and get a better understanding if it will be a good fit for your business or not. Again, don't do it because it sounds like it's fun and it sounds like it's going to be great for you. First of all, it sounds like it's going to be great for you. First of all, find if it's going to bring any value for you. The best thing is to go to speak to someone who's been through it, because it's not always going to be perfect. There are going to be some challenges. It may not work.
Speaker 1:So, first of all, seek some advice from companies or some individuals who've been through it and they can guide you and see if it's if it's a good fit for you as a business I think there's some really good advice and, having had many a podcast conversation around the composable transformations and reasons for for failure, success and challenges that came along the way and all that kind of stuff, the safe say that a lot of the time it was an underestimation from the business in terms of what was expected and the change that was going to be coming their way and having that whole business aligned.
Speaker 1:Everyone needs to be talking, everyone needs to be aware of needs to be put on the journey, um, and obviously the technical expertise and stuff as well. So I think that's some good advice et al um thank you for that. And uh, I think I guess the benefit we have now is we're kind of the best part of five years into the composable journey and you have got those people in the industry that you can talk to that have been through it maybe even more than one or two of them and they can really talk to you about past experiences and help you come to the understanding as to whether or not this is going to be the right move for you, because, as you also said, it's not for for everybody, but there are clear benefits to doing it. Take the Paul Smith example that we spoke about earlier on in the show.
Speaker 2:Absolutely there are. There definitely benefits around the total cost ownership, which is again a concern or a factor for a lot of businesses. Agility, you know, for you as a business know sometimes need to solve a certain problem. You don't need to replace the whole system, but you can actually rip and replace the problem that you're trying to solve. And you know we've been in this industry for many years and we all heard about, you know code freeze and you know you can't do anything in Q4 or in a peak period when you're with a mark architecture, with a composable architecture, you can actually solve the problem that you want to do. You don't need to take down the whole site. You can actually focus on that area and it can really help you also with speed to market as well. So again, there's really really important considerations here.
Speaker 1:Cool. So before we wrap things up then, I just want to talk a little bit about consolidation in the market because, um, it's something that we're seeing quite a lot, and particularly in the sort of the cms space we're seeing cms is sort of repositioning themselves to dxps. So really keen just to get your thoughts around this town and the effects it's having on the industry yeah.
Speaker 2:So I think, um, I mean the. The two which I know the best, that are closer to me, are ContentStack and Contentful. Both have invested in recent times in acquiring other platforms to expand their offering. So, contentful, doing a lot of personalization, which we touched upon earlier. A lot of personalization, which we touched upon earlier. They bought a company called Ninetale, which was part of the Mac Alliance, a composable solution, integrated it into their platform. Now they can offer it to their customers as part of the models that Contentful do.
Speaker 2:Contentful they bought a CDP, called Lightix I think, and they also incorporate it into their offering. They want to be more all-around platform than just be seen as a CMS. So they call it the DXP. I know some people like it. Not everyone likes it. Of course there are those who say that it's actually maybe it's not really composable anymore. It's not just best of breed, it's starting to become a monolith because it's becoming a much more bigger product than a CMS, others having the you know obviously the different opinion that they can actually see more of the benefits.
Speaker 2:I'm guessing that when you are a VC, firm-based company, you have a lot of investors' money. You need to look at how you're going to get this growth coming, you know, quickly. And both of these companies have a lot of smart people in in the strategy and in the leadership team and they figure out that those areas are the areas which you know there's a lot of growth, which is no coincidence. We spoke about those earlier in the in the program um. This is where the growth, a lot of the growth, is going to come from. So this probably one of the reasons why these companies are um going into that direction. They realize that actually they can upsell the product or they can broaden, you know, the, the customer base or the use cases that they currently have, and they can then generate more revenue for their business and for their investors you touched upon.
Speaker 1:I guess the key point there is. What I'm trying to make is that at what point do they then become a monolith themselves? Because if they're going to keep acquiring businesses to expand the services they're offering, they're going to go against the very principles that led them to be the business that they were in the first place. So yeah, I guess, at what point would you then say they are no longer best of best of breed and they are more a monolith?
Speaker 2:Well, if they go and buy a commerce engine and search and different things and they amalgamate it all together, then obviously they will be monolith. I struggle to believe that's part of the strategy moving forward. I don't think that anyone wants to buy today a commerce platform. There are not many projects at the moment to be one in that market. But the projects the one that market I think are are in those areas where they, where they make the investment. But I think in general, what you will see in the market, as happens in every industry, there has to be consolidations. There are too many tech companies in the market, um, that they offer maybe a niche product, a a niche solution. They can't really grow, they can't really thrive and some of them will be bought by some other more successful businesses who can then hopefully take these products and get them forward.
Speaker 2:The trouble sometimes when a big company buys another platform or another product, especially if it's a 2B company like Salesforce, adobe or Oracle, they can buy it because they have a lot of cash available and then the product is not getting developed and that's like the main I would say the main disappointment, that a platform buys another technology and they don't invest in the product roadmap because they just think it's actually a revenue stream for us and we're not going to pay too much attention to it because we think it's good, it's a revenue, it's a revenue stream for us, um, and you know, we're not going to pay too much attention to it because we think it's good as it is. It's not um, and I hope that any dxp, any company that make this kind of acquisition, they're not just taking it based on the current technology of this product, but they continue to evolve it, because if they don't do it, they're not going to win any additional business. That that's definitely the case.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, a really good point to end that on as well, and I think, with regards to the future innovation within the product as well, and how that can be continued to be developed. And you're not buying it for here and now. You're buying it for the benefits it can give you in the future as well.
Speaker 2:Lovely.
Speaker 1:Well, I think that's a good place to wrap it up, then. Thank you, thank you.
Speaker 2:It's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation. I hope the listeners as well, and if anyone wants to reach out to me on Mac Composable or anything, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1:I'm happy to have a conversation well, they'll likely see you at an event as well. I guess definitely what's next in your calendar?
Speaker 2:Tal. So the next one which I'm going to do, we're going to the K5 in Berlin. It's one of the big retail e-commerce events in the DACH region, so I have a vested interest there. I'm going to speak to a lot of our German and Swiss partners there and see some of our customers, and there's some other events coming in. But this is the the most up to up-to-date one which we're going to do nice, awesome.
Speaker 1:Well, look, thank you again for joining me. I also really enjoyed that conversation and, yeah, lots of takeaways from that, and I guess one thing I would say is for those that were still listening at the point in which we're talking about consolidation, I'd love to hear your thoughts and whether or not we'll see further consolidation or if it's kind of going to stick to where it it is now. So feel free to hit me in my dms, but anyway, thanks again and I'll see you next time.
