MarTalks: Viax

B2B e-commerce is messy, complex, and full of surprises. But what if there was a way to cut through the noise and actually move fast?

In this episode, I sit down with Lorenzo Ramponi, Andrew Martin, and Brendan Gualdoni to talk about:

✅ Why legacy e-commerce systems are a nightmare – and how composable commerce actually makes life easier
✅ How Brendan transformed Wiley’s entire e-commerce stack—without a complete rip-and-replace
✅ Why pricing, subscriptions & CPQ shouldn’t be a separate system—seriously, why is this still a thing?
✅ How VIAX became the secret weapon for digital transformation (hint: it’s more than just headless APIs)
✅ What big-name platforms like Salesforce Commerce don’t do well—and why VIAX fills the gap

💡 Takeaway: The fastest way to win in B2B e-commerce? Break down silos, move fast, and stop waiting for outdated tech to catch up.

🎧 Listen now!

🔹 Are you stuck with a legacy platform that’s slowing you down? Let’s talk! ⬇️

#MarTalks #ComposableCommerce #B2BEcommerce #DigitalTransformation #EnterpriseTech

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Martimox, the number one podcast for e-commerce and marketing applications. MarTMux is devoted to covering the latest technology developments that drive the global Commerce ecosystem from advertising to last mile. Enjoy all of our content at RosensteinGroup.com slash Martimux-Podcast.

SPEAKER_03 0:24

I'm your host, Darrell Rosenstein. Today we're going to be speaking with both Viax founder, Larry Ramponi, and Brendan Gladini, the former CIO of several firms that have gone through full composable commerce digital transformation. I appreciate you guys joining me today to talk about B2B, composable commerce, and CPQ. And before we get going here, if we could, Larry, could you give us uh a little bit of your background and what it is that got you into this crazy game of e-commerce?

SPEAKER_04 1:02

Well, when I was a kid growing up, I always imagined I'd be uh just kidding. But um so my background no nobody says that, right? My my background is uh working in the industry, about 20 years. Mainly on the technology side, prior to starting Viax, I started a uh implementation firm where we focused mainly on the kind of Fortune 500, you know, large enterprise manufacturer space, implementing commerce systems, integrations, DRP systems, CPQ, uh, etc. And Viax is really born out of this kind of gaping need that we saw in the industry for a new system to address the complexity that we saw across every single project we were on.

SPEAKER_03 1:47

So well, you know, I completely neglected to introduce your colleague and co-founder, Andrew, and uh that was on purpose because I'm just a rude bastard, and I'm I'm sorry about that, Andrew. I'm really sorry. Andrew, why why are you here?

SPEAKER_01 2:03

Yeah, uh same as Larry. Uh uh Larry and I have actually been working together for a long time, well over a decade at this point. So spent a lot of time seeing a lot of these problems firsthand, yeah, and just excited about finding new and innovative ways to solve this stuff for people like Brendan.

SPEAKER_03 2:19

So you're both kind of curious, I take it. I would say so. Yeah, I would say that that's generally a good quality to have if you're uh trying to solve problems for somebody else. You gotta ask some pointed questions. So, Brendan, you've been on the receiving end of uh, I don't know, a couple thousand pitches for enterprise software this so far. And yet here you sit willing to talk about it. And I'm gonna I'm gonna take the leap here that it's not just because you survived, but because uh some value was added to your organizations in the process. And can you give us a uh 30,000-foot view of of your career and what you've been up to?

SPEAKER_02 3:03

Yeah, definitely. Uh, and thanks for for inviting me. Yeah, while uh Andrew and Larry were riding their bikes, dream out e-commerce as youngsters. I've been, you know, kind of in the trenches with things of internet, web development, e-commerce, DMSs, anything that produces HTML and then also reads HTML. I'm talking mobile, you know, other devices and stuff like that, and figuring out that the platforms that you know are most valuable to C levelers, what's you know, power sales, where are we selling? And some of those platforms were just not flexible or fluid to new channels or new ideas or even new platforms of marketing. I mean, now you know there isn't an e-commerce platform out there, for example, for specifically for social media or for influencers or anything like that, let alone just you know generic direct-to-consumer e-commerce or B2B e-commerce. So I've been yeah, on the receiving end of all of it and gone through all the major players, you know, I'm not gonna list all of them here, but you could probably pick all of them out of the you know Fortune 100 catalog as they were evolving and trying to sell their software and figuring out what differentiates you know one from another.

SPEAKER_03 4:22

So uh do you have any favorites? Favorite software, favorite company? Well, you know, I think we could put this in two categories. I think we could put it in, you know, favorite software. Uh-huh. And we could also say, you know, your favorite sales motion that you've been involved in. And you know, Larry and Andrew obviously uh we're rooting for you here, but you know, I'm I'm asking this, you know, out of the blue. I'm curious. So, you know, any favorites, Brennan?

SPEAKER_02 4:48

I do have a couple. There is a uh, you know, a top tier. My most recently favorite is Viax software because it's solved the bigger problems. It's and it's not just the bigger problems, it's solved other things that I was unexpected to even find. One of the things that is lacking as an example in e-commerce, generic e-commerce platform, is subscriptions. Everyone's like, oh, just use this add-on or another piece of software to integrate with, or another composable piece. I'm just like, well, why do I need a separate thing to do something that sounds like invoicing and tracking, you know, recurring revenue? So subscriptions was was one of them, which is you know a basic use case that's come out of a lot of the composable stack, and a lot of the software that was driving it was all these incremental cloud vendors were like, hey, we're gonna charge by the hour, by the minute, or per second. And then some of the SaaS solutions were taking advantage of that and we're doing the exact same thing, and people selling on top of those needed something to track that. And how do you buy that? And how do you, you know, make revenue off of it? That was one of my favorite uh things to do, which is really unexpected in e-commerce because you think about retail e-commerces, you're buying shirts and dresses and you're shipping those things, and okay, you're done. Okay, we'll worry about returns later, not even talk about that, but what else can you do with it? And that's where it gets tricky.

SPEAKER_03 6:14

Well, you know, you you actually took Wiley and Express to full stack composability for their e-commerce stacks. And I'm curious about the rest of the organization, what their frame of reference was, what their positioning was in terms of had anybody spent all of their career capital on selecting and implementing one of the legacy products that you were about to rip out? Did you have a CFO screaming at you? It's like, what do you mean there's a SLAs? You gotta be kidding me. That's that's ridiculous. We can't do that. Or did you have a CE going saying, how long another replatform? What is this? What were some of the challenges that you faced that uh you had to address before adopting composability and and Viax?

SPEAKER_02 7:02

Yeah, definitely. So it came from you're right, 100% legacy monolith that was running everything. I mean everything from CMS to search to you know, carton checkout, everything, even order management and some of the integrations were going through the system. And in a world where, you know, a B2B company that has multiple products, multiple brands, multiple channels of selling and types of bundling, it becomes really difficult just to say, hey, I need a website just to sell my physical product and digital product together as an example. That was seems like a simple challenge, but if you have a large system that's you know really dependent on a product master, for example, to take care of that, it becomes difficult to actually roll that out. Or on the flip side, since this is Mark Talks, you know, if my CMO wanted to change the navigation on the e-commerce website, you had to do that through the e-commerce system because it was all bundled together. And you know, then we'd have our retros, and they would say, Why are we doing this? Why can't we go faster? And then therein lies, well, we have to change our platform. If you want to go faster, you have to have something that's more nimble. I can't take the same uh you know 1990s BMW and put a battery in it and call it an EV. It's just not gonna work. You need something that is flexible, you need something that is born in the cloud. That is a pretty big thing. So, yeah, talking to a CFO's perspective, hey, have we fully capitalized this thing? That's always been the big, sorry, fully depreciated, and you know, because it was a capital investment. And moving to some of these newer systems, you're talking opex investment, which is a different discussion. The difference is I would equate CapEx to long waterfall project versus opex is like try it, proof of concept, implement it, test it out, see if it works. You're not fully vetted with it. And that's with a lot of these composable systems that are flexible enough to say, hey, I want to just try it out first, see if it'll work. If it doesn't, we tweak it. If it does work, let's move forward with it. I think the proof of concept was was one of the bigger differentiators and drivers of the discussions with the C-level organization.

SPEAKER_03 9:30

Well, you know, that's always been the reason that I'm shocked more companies haven't discovered composable or or adopted it yet, is they're stuck in the world of depreciation.

SPEAKER_02 9:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 9:46

Their technology is depreciating, it's become less efficient, it's becoming more of a pain in the butt. And they could move to OpEx, where, you know, with cloud native solutions, hey, you know, if it doesn't work, guess what? We just changed our architecture so that we can adopt a new solution in a month, in a week, you know, in a day in some instances. You know, anything that's got an open API and that's cloud native and it has microservice architecture, it's like, but uh, you know, uh, there's a lot of, I think, legacy, legacy human capital that has been spent on legacy products that uh people are very hesitant to say, well, you know what, that might not have been the greatest $20 million decision we made. Now, we're talking about demandware with uh what you were struggling with there at uh Wiley and Express, correct?

SPEAKER_02 10:37

No, Express was actually Oracle uh Commerce.

SPEAKER_03 10:41

Oracle, okay, so that was ATG.

SPEAKER_02 10:43

ATG, correct. And you know, okay, that was an on-premise, you know, fully hot cold redundancy, you know, big capital expenditure. Wiley was primarily hybrids, but it also had a lot of smaller legacy e-commerce systems and B2B systems in in place. So it was, you know, different types of animals, but still the same architecture that was just dragging everything down. Where you know, at Wiley, it's hey, I need a website to do X, and if I need to go to hybrids I need to do another license with it. So I need to have its you know, own system. Even though it was we're not on premise, it's in cloud. I would say it's not in cloud, it's actually on cloud, it's just lift and shift to the cloud data center. We never, you know, because the architecture couldn't take advantage of actually using everything that you can in cloud.

SPEAKER_01 11:34

Yeah. I think that's been uh something that we've all seen for a long time, right? Is so much of what enterprises were able to do and could evaluate was really driven around license structures, right? You know, it's how instead of going off of what's the what's the need to the business, what does this process look like? What are we trying to accomplish? It's you know, how many seats do we have for this? You know, what is our license structure for this?

SPEAKER_02 12:00

Yeah, and that's interesting, Andrew. You mentioned the the seats piece of it, because I remember a CFO saying to me, it's like, well, how many seats are we using? I'm just like, no, no, no, it's not a how many logins do I have to the e-commerce website? It's like the capacity of the software is I need more products to sell, and that's how you're gonna get your ROI through this thing if you want to go down that route, versus yeah, I know they're demandware and others are seat-driven applications.

SPEAKER_03 12:26

Yeah, use-based is the way of the future, and yet there's half of the uh I think thousand largest e-commerce sites running on the planet are still on those legacy architectures. Yeah, so there might be some opportunity out there. So, Brennan, uh one of the biggest advantages that I see in Viax is their process engine. And that just to me looks extremely effective from a managing your invoicing, a managing your sales process. Can you walk us through transitioning to the process engine? How straightforward was that implementation?

SPEAKER_02 13:05

So I'll let Larry answer that, but Larry, let me just give a little color and set you up on this. So the interesting thing about Viax and the the original use case that I was going after was I need something to do subscriptions and then eventually take over direct to consumer e-commerce. But then the interesting thing about the platform without actually buying more seats or capacity is there's other things I can do with the applicator or this software that will solve business problems throughout the organization. So that's when we got into you know, process engine and how can it take a prolong, a homegrown system that was, you know, basically we, you know, Wiley is a 200-year-old company and we created our own monolith, which is on the front end, which is the product, the marketing, and e-commerce all matched together. And then on the other side of that is SAP, which is another big unmovable object, but they needed new capabilities, and that's like, well, wait a minute, we have Vyx, we can we can use this thing in the middle, and everyone's like, well, how do you use it? I'm like, it's headless, it's API driven, it's scalable, and they're like, Well, our thing is so special. And then that's when Larry would come in and say, Larry, tell them what the process engine is. Absolutely. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 14:25

I mean, the idea of the process engine is, you know, kind of the current state of the world is we look to address channels with point solutions, right? So we have commerce serving, you know, your end channel, maybe your D2C channel, your B2C channel, uh CPQ systems, you know, and your different sales channels, direct sales, indirect sales, whatever it is. And what we found over time is all of these channels have a number of things that are in common, right? There's workflows, there's parties and organizations, there's services and goods that they're transacting over, there's operational data that you want to be able to bring to these different channels. So with Viax's goal was to, you know, one, empower channels that you have, right? So in Wiley's case, in the commerce channel, you know, bring things like subscriptions, order management, invoicing, those type of things. But then also allow you to expand and build new offerings in other channels, right? And and Wiley has done that. So they've looked to, you know, CPQ-like functionality in their research department because we've built something that could address a lot of differ uh channels in different ways. And the great thing I think what Wiley found was you didn't have to do a rip and replace to you know start this implementation, right? We sat kind of in the middle underneath their different commerce systems, and over time they were able to sort of deprecate one after another and really have Vyx kind of run the entire thing. And now I believe the front end is um a simple, was it a web flow application?

SPEAKER_02 15:53

Oh, React. Well, it's composable. There's React, there's Next.js, yeah. So there's Webflow.

SPEAKER_04 15:58

Something as simple as that. You know, if you want to deprecate, you know, these licenses, right, that we talked about, you know, there's an opportunity to do that. It's a much different approach than kind of what's out there right now.

SPEAKER_03 16:09

So you had the folks at Wiley, they've been in the book business for a couple of weeks, as you said, you know, a couple hundred years. They built their own special baby that everybody loved and that they'd known. And you come in the door saying, hey, there's a better way to do it. And Larry essentially says, look, you're only doing business through maybe three of the channels that most companies would be doing, six, and we can have that going for you in a matter of weeks. How quickly did your team start seeing the results once you adopted that, Brendan?

SPEAKER_02 16:45

Yeah, so let me just just give every even though yeah, Wiley's been around for 200 years, we're primarily known for books. We own dummies.com, but the majority of the business is in research. And with research, we're developing intellectual property on behalf of authors and PhDs to, you know, publish papers and in journals and other uh you know IP-based work. The interesting thing is with the process engine and talking through this with a CFO or CMO or CTO, actually, is sometimes we don't know what our product is. We keep evolving. Yes, it used to be, yes, we're gonna ship a physical book. Okay, now it's we're gonna send you a PDF, or now we're gonna send you a link to a subscription that is courseware, which you can also read the book there, or you get access to a service or something else, or you get access to these videos or digital type of media. All those different things in a normal retail world would make a retail e-commerce head explode because it's like, wait a minute, how do I meter the subscription? How do I gate the login? And how do I count that against them for like, you know, how are they using it? How do I deliver this digital product through an order management system that's only physical? And these are some of these intricate things that we don't think about, but the amazing you know, CMOs and CPOs, the organization come up with, and they're like, we just want to sell it. Can't we just put it in the cart and sell it? It's like, yes, we can sell it, but then we also have to figure out how to fulfill that and give the customer a good experience throughout the whole thing instead of them, you know, doing a big marketing blitz and just landing on a page and then they're off and done. We need to keep them in our ecosystem because we want to keep selling to them because they're gonna come back through a process of research and and and through an author's journey that you're just not gonna just submit a paper and you're done. They go through multiple iterations and it has to have that consistency throughout.

SPEAKER_03 18:49

The customer experience, the customer journey is you know the heart of the value prop for composable, right? Providing that consistent experience across channels. And I, you know, that's that is why I'm such a fan and I'm doing this and I'm talking to you guys. I think I'm shocked that it hasn't been adopted as quickly in the United States as it has in Europe. But hey, you know, uh let's keep talking. So I just wanted to go back to the point that I asked earlier about, you know, once you'd make the decision to adopt Viax, how quick were you able to show the naysayers, the guardians of the legacy baby, that hey, look, it works, it's better. See, everything's fine.

SPEAKER_02 19:45

How quickly was that? So I'll give you the the how we actually how I pitched it internally because there's that's as big a part of the problem as actually, you know, getting the green light to do it. And the what I did was you know, I met with Larry and Andrew and wrote up a quick plan and said, look, can we do a proof of concept very quickly? And they're like, Yeah, sure. Let's you know, give us a small subset of of products or a subscription-based, whatever, whatever it is. And within six weeks, we had a working cart that was also working with some of our uh Wiley's APIs directly. I'm talking like tax calculation and a couple uh product catalog coming out of out of hybrids. Eight to ten different integrations, CRP integrations, tax calculations, and yeah, yeah, and obviously some of it was was stubbed out because it's a POC, but we actually had a working prototype up and running that it was like, okay, now let's start. And we have something to start with. We have you know the React components that were already there. We had you know the catalog structure that was put in inside of Viax. We had some of the integrations that since Wiley has adopted APIs in some areas and it can expose them securely, they were actually already plumbed into the VIX environment, you know, on day one, which is very, very fast. And that that was one of the biggest benefits, and that's just speed. But the other benefit is we could start on things in parallel, and we didn't have to sacrifice, like what you're saying, the customer experience. Normally it's the back-end software or some sort of software implementation that leads to a crappy customer experience. We didn't have to worry about that. Because, you know, one of my things when I'm looking for software, I besides it being cloud native, I want to make sure they have API, whether they're headless or or not, but every interaction, whether it's headful, meaning you have a web page, but it should have an API that I can do whatever I need to do with it in case somebody asks me, like, hey, can we do it a different way? I'm like, okay, it doesn't work that way out of the box, but I can, yes, plumb it, digitally plumb it. However, we need to.

SPEAKER_04 22:01

Yeah, and I think uh just one additional point there. You know, we talk about the systems that kind of hold us back. You know, one of the big areas where we see success is in the MA scenario, right? So now you just you don't have a single ERP, you have 10, 20, and 100 ERPs, which we've seen. You have multiple configurators from different product families. How do you unify that experience across your channels? You have salespeople having to go to different sites to configure this product based on this product family. So those are the areas where you know we see a lot of value with Vyax and you know getting people up and running pretty quickly.

SPEAKER_03 22:37

Well, Larry, let's let's talk about that a little bit because you know your role there and Andrew. Andrew, you're still there, right? Yeah, Andrew. Sorry. Sorry, you know, we're gonna bring you in, dude.

SPEAKER_04 22:49

Andrew has the best hair in the company, so that's why we always bring him on.

SPEAKER_03 22:52

You know, I get I can't say enough about great hair product, it's changed my life. So, Andrew, uh, thank you for I'm gonna have to get your notes. Well, actually, we'll put those in the footnotes for the podcast. That'll work. Larry, you're in the Obi-Wan Kenobi chair there. You essentially have to guide young Brendan slash Luke on his quest to you know be a hero. And he lets you know what his challenges were internally and with the people that were involved and the processes, and also technologically. How did you guide Brendan to actually, you know, realize that value for Virex?

SPEAKER_04 23:38

So one of the first things we do with any of our customers, uh, Wiley, obviously included, is we run workshops very specific to solving the problem within our system, right? We talk about several things. What are we transacting over those goods and services? What does that workflow look like? Who the parties involved, all things that you model out within our system. And it gets the customer speaking in a similar language. There's a framework now to model out a solution. You can actually model the solution in that workshop, right? That we have visual tools that allow you to build out those workflows. Then you start to build confidence. The business can see exactly how that flow looks. We had some great quotes from the Wiley team, you know, that we were breaking down silos. Teams that had never communicated in the way that they did in the workshop are now, you know, working together. So those workshops are really important for us. Uh and it's something that we iterate over. So we typically do them with our customer and our partner that's doing the implementation every couple of months. So there's an iterative roadmap journey to that solution, right? We don't have to think about it in terms of that giant three-year waterfall project. You know, what is it we want to accomplish next and how you're going to model that? And then that's really the idea of the software, kind of flipping the paradigm on its head a bit, you know, not be confined to where the point solution offers, but building a system that allows you to build your offerings. So uh, you know, through those workshops, I think we gained a lot of confidence on that roadmap.

SPEAKER_01 25:03

I think the other thing you see in those is, you know, to Larry's point, you know, being able to go into Viax in those workshops, actually build those processes out, have visual representations of those models. We have a customer of ours, we were talking about, you know, that as they kind of went into their process of understanding what where they were going to go next with some of these things, it took months, like, you know, almost a year to kind of define what their current state process looked like, right? After they went through the these workshops on the Viax side and got it modeled out, right? Then they have a visual representation, what this looks like that everybody's in agreement on that's easy for them to understand and you know make changes to. And it it really adds these kind of tangible benefits outside of you know the anything kind of technical or application stack-wise, of just kind of getting everybody really on the same page of understanding what the how they want these business operations to function.

SPEAKER_03 25:57

I love that term, breaking down silos. And it's certainly refreshing where you have, especially in a large organization, entire teams, entire business units that haven't coordinated, collaborated in any meaningful way with the rest of their organization, suddenly, thanks to a technology, able to do so. And composability definitely offers that in spades. I I'm gonna get a little more specific here. And I know that in your evaluation process, Brendan, that you were talking to Salesforce Commerce, but I'm gonna go back to Larry here and say, Larry, comparing Viax to Salesforce, what specific gaps does Viax fill that uh the Salesforce, the legacy of Salesforce Commerce platform can't?

SPEAKER_04 26:52

Yeah, I mean, you know, whether it's Salesforce or any other platform, just areas around complexity, especially around pricing is a big thing that we see now. And Wiley's a good example of it. So traditionally you would go to VRP, you know, or a system like that to execute pricing. Never intended to be you know the customer facing or customer experience master, right? And these commerce systems, you know, just don't have the capabilities to handle that type of complexity. But now what we're doing with Viax is you know you can master your pricing wherever you want, but the execution of that pricing, right, in in a very timely manner, subseconds is done within Viax. So the ability to execute pricing that you would only traditionally look for in ERP, you know, could now be done in another system and unified across channels. Things like configurations, product configurations, subscriptions, you know, product sourcing. So, you know, a lot of time we look to a marketplace, right, to add additional, you know, either third-party vendors or inventory from other sources. You know, why why do we need another system? Isn't that just a source of inventory? So the idea now that you have all these capabilities to serve any one of these channels is really the benefit of Viax. So, you know, we we were born out of complexity. Like we cut our teeth uh, you know, for some of the largest companies out there and saw the problems. So we built the system to be able to address those. And I'd say overall, most commerce systems are pretty light when it comes to you know B2B functionality. And as a result, companies tend to sacrifice requirements, right, and experience because of that. Because now I have to bring data capabilities and how do I get these things to a unified experience? And and really that's the goal of the bikes.

SPEAKER_01 28:28

Yeah, and I think one thing too is we purposely don't call ourselves a commerce platform, right? There's great commerce platforms out there. I think what one of the things we've seen is, and we've seen it through our interactions with customers, is that a lot of these core commerce capabilities are really being commoditized in a good way for the customers, right? Uh a lot of these things are a lot easier and cheaper to do for simple use cases, kind of like Larry and Brendan were talking about. So if you have now, you know, cheap, easy to stand up systems that can handle managing your e-commerce D2C style website, you know, doing carton checkout type behaviors, what to Larry's point, what are those complexities? What's the sophistication in your business's competitive advantage that still needs a home, right? You you don't want that to be your ERP system, right, from a performance perspective. So where can these things live? So that's that's a big thing that we've been excited about being able to help list.

SPEAKER_02 29:22

Can I add on this one? Because I think there's also two things going on here. Back to your breaking down the silos and then where Biax fits in. So just let me just paint a quick scenario. We're in a room with the head of architecture, we're in the room with marketing, we're in the room with the product owner, some of the business operators, that they never actually even talked to the vendor, the VIAX team. And instead of you know just getting up there and demoing something, probably showing a video of the company or or a video that was you know pre-recorded of a functionality, Viax was in there showing the functionality in real time. They're showing they're demoing their own system. And what was the silo breakdown was actually the moment when somebody in the room says, Oh, can the system do X, Y, and Z? Because from a back to a marketer standpoint, the person who cares about the customer journey, they're like, it's just pricing. You're just changing a couple numbers on a web page. Like, come on, guys, how hard can it be? And really, it, you know, if you have a complex product, it can be very hard. And if the product also has multiple discounts with a consortium or some other agreements with even countries, it becomes very, very complex. And when somebody in the room on the business side, well, can it do this? The answer to YX was like, I don't know, let's try. And in real time, actually implemented that use case. It's like, oh yeah, it can do that. What's your next question? It was just like it was like a perpetual demo of like, can you do this? Yes, we can do this. Of like, oh, now we understand this thing can do a lot more. And it's the complex things like the pricing, which is a big thing, but then also a lot of legacy and large companies have multiple order management systems. So it's like, how do you fulfill that thing? Because of the revenue recognitions are different depending on if it's digital or physical or wherever that product actually gets fulfilled from their order management system. That was one of those aha moments that I saw, but also shows how Viax is different from uh pick your favorite Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, or Shopify, even from that point of view from strict e-commerce.

SPEAKER_03 31:32

Well, you know, I think that one of the things that uh we've come across here is that in the presentation process, you you did have a stunning live proof of concept. It was not just a demo. Andrew had fabulous hair, Larry was very shiny. I mean, everything went right from the initial consideration phase. Let's talk about the adoption phase and the developer experience because that's something that I think doesn't get discussed enough. It is tough, and this is coming from the recruiter, it is tough to build a great technology organization. People come and go, they're ever more mobile in the e-commerce world. So you've got to do a lot to make your people happy, and one of them is give your engineers a great developer experience. Can you describe for me what your technologists thought about working with Viax?

SPEAKER_02 32:34

Yeah, before I answer that, let me just give you like the background of you know traditional e-commerce systems where you have these teams all working on the same website, but are part of different organizations. I'm talking the struggle between the back-end engineer and the front-end engineer. And then if you go even farther back, it's okay, the back-end engineer, the front-end engineer, the DBA. And what about, okay, let's throw DevOps in there? And then wait a minute, the front-end engineer who's really more caring about how it looks than how it actually works. So you have all these different very highly skilled, but niche skilled that don't cross over. And moving from something that's, you know, legacy like uh Oracle Commerce or an SAP hybrid, is you can now elevate some of these other engineers that have been pushed into the corner. So because it is not only cloud and we don't have to implement any infrastructure, including cloud infrastructure. So now I'm talking about going completely serverless. And what that has enabled is this old language from the 90s, JavaScript. And the JavaScript engineer is now like the key engineer. And we just have JavaScript engineers across the organization because in some instances, DevOps has been encapsulated with Cloudflare and web services. You don't need a database because we don't have a database. Firex only has APIs. I don't know what the database is. And then you have front-end React engineers, or you can have sorry, front-end JavaScript engineers building React or back-end JavaScript engineers building a node serverless. So it allowed those multiple teams to become one team, and it also drove costs down because now we didn't have to have both specialities. But then the other thing from a developer experience is hey, here's an API, just go ahead and use it, or stub out this API if you're working on the front end. It just made things go faster and gave them the tools and empowered them to try new things and to you know add, you know, part of my job as an IT leader is to get shit done for the C level organization. Part of my job as an IT leader to my That's in the job description. That's in the job description. It is, but also to my employees. I'm there to help upskill them because I want to help their careers. I want to add lines to their LinkedIn. And one of the ways to do that is to say, look, how they've changed their careers, taken it into something that's more modern, more generalized instead of specialized. Now they can go across different things. And it doesn't matter if the front end is WordPress, they could still use Vyx. If it's Webflow, they can use Vyx. If it's React, Next.js, you know, you name it. Even some of these DXPs, you can plug Vyx into it, which makes it, you know, it makes for a happier engineer, quite honestly. And that's when you start. No one's ever gonna say, hey, I'm a happy engineer because I have Vyx. But what they're gonna do is come to you one day and say, hey, I tried this thing out without even being asked to do that because they saw a customer need or heard something in the meeting and took you know a couple hours of their day to do something, which is refreshing because it's like, oh, I didn't think about that. Does this fit in and where can we, you know, move from there? Does it add value? So happier engineers.

SPEAKER_03 36:01

Well, you turn them into problem solvers. You turn them, I mean, I think of composable as you know the purveyors of yes to the organization. It's like, yes, we can we can try that. And usually the answer is yeah, we can do that. That's just it's completely new. It's completely new. And I think that being able to sit in that chair as a CIO or a CTO has got to be a hell of a lot better than it has been for the last 20 years. Like, wow, we yeah, we can try that. Yeah, the engineers, oh yeah, they'd love to try that. Let's get it.

SPEAKER_04 36:38

Yeah, and just getting out of maintenance mode, right? And and actually working on innovative stuff. It's just it you get out of the kind of the mundane, you know, uh monotony of just supporting anymore.

SPEAKER_01 36:51

Yeah. And I think that the other side of that coin too is to your point on that, Daryl, getting a chance to say yes. And, you know, I think some of these commerce teams are you know more familiar with you know, kind of moving quicker on things and having these kind of shorter duration projects where you're you're driving towards value quicker. I think it's a whole different part of the organization a lot of times where you're you're used to managing, you know, large legacy systems that are business critical and it's an ERP system or a large WMS system, right? And I think the thing that is always always really exciting to see is see those folks get into this process, right? Um like the pricing example is a great example. That's almost always done for large, complex B2B organizations. That pricing is done in the ERP. When they see that they can, you know, quickly adopt new business models and use VIX to drive the pricing on that, you know, being able to say yes for a commerce system is, you know, in a much quicker standpoint is is great, right? But when you start talking about this in terms of ERP timelines, right, these things are measured in vastly different amounts of time. So yeah, it's it's just uh order of magnitude different that's great to get people excited about.

SPEAKER_03 37:57

Yeah, I think I placed the enterprise sales executive that closed the first transaction for Demand Tech, the first major enterprise license. I think it was with Target. It was a very large deal, seven-figure deal. I think it was 13 months to get that thing live. 13 months. And that's still Demand Tech still underpins pricing for IBM. That's still their offering. Profit logic still underpins Oracle.

SPEAKER_01 38:28

It's 20-year-old technology. And there's ERP projects that are taking, you know, a literally a decade, right? So it's like, you know, that you know, they again, there's just there's things that just out there that are people are used to things taking a long time, right? So getting to that point, if you can get people excited about being able to say yes and being able to drive value quickly and being able to break things up into the meaningful pieces where the business can see that value quickly, yeah, it's it's always great.

SPEAKER_04 38:53

It's a major, another major area where you know the a lot of companies now are migrating you know to the latest version of VRP, and especially now when you want to keep this clean course, you know, how do you get that functionality to regions that maybe on the end of that 10-year scale, right? And a platform like Viax plays really well in between to kind of um you know allow those organiz or those regions or channels or whatever it is to still continue to innovate.

SPEAKER_03 39:21

Well, obviously, Viax has a very diverse set of commerce capabilities between pricing and subscriptions and invoicing. And I'm curious who's been a good partner for you guys going to market? From A, let's talk about other solutions vendors that you've found will really collaborate well with you. And then let's talk a little bit about the agencies that you think really get your value prop and represent it well and can deploy it the most effectively.

SPEAKER_02 39:54

Who's that one to? Me?

SPEAKER_03 39:56

That's to Larry. Let's go to Larry. Let's go to Larry.

SPEAKER_04 39:59

Yeah, I mean, look, we you know, we have uh you know a couple parts, I think part of the challenges, right? You know, that we've kind of highlighted are not only the executive level of an organization, but what a SI is used to implementing and how they're used to implementing and what they've been contracted to do. So, you know, we have a number of smaller partners. TMG is a great partner of ours. Uh Smith is a great partner of ours. Retusa, you know, has helped us over at Wiley a lot. Andrew, there's probably a couple, uh maybe some of the larger SIs as well. You know, we're looking at partnerships with a couple of commerce platforms. I think Shopify is really interesting, uh, you know, to be able to add some real heavy B2B heft there, allow them to expand out, or a customer that has Shopify expand out to use Shopify as the front end through multiple channels. So those are a couple of exciting ones that we're looking at right now.

SPEAKER_01 40:49

Yeah. And I'd say like the thing that uh that we've talked about here before, right? You'll you'll hear a thread that weaves through all this is complexity, right? Like it's there are people out there that understand the complexity that's within large enterprises that there's just a level of sophistication that's normally required. So, you know, but that doesn't always mean that it's got to be, you know, the largest partner from a size perspective. So the people that really understand that well are great to work with. And some of those are, you know, there are great GSIs with really smart, really capable people and teams. And then there's also great niche providers. So a lot of it comes down to, you know, even in the wily scenario, right? There's actually there's actually multiple VIX partners in there working on different projects, right? It's more about what does the team need to accomplish, you know, who in the organization is running as what teams are they used to working with, you know, what types of other skills are important to have in this, you know, kind of composable landscape, whole ecosystem play, what other systems are going to be involved. So I think it's important to have that kind of breadth of partnerships, but also, you know, I think it always comes back to us is the people that really understand the complex side of this.

SPEAKER_04 41:54

Yeah, and and our greatest partner, honestly, is the disruptor internally, Brendan. You know, the guys that we're successful with that aren't afraid to bring a new idea, you know, to the executive team, right? Like it's a challenge out there, right? I think there's so much religion in the industry, but you know, our our best partners are definitely kind of champions internally that aren't afraid to disrupt.

SPEAKER_03 42:17

Well, you know, I consider myself a heretic, and I really enjoy that. I like to be as disruptive as possible, ask my wife. She's not here right now, and there's a reason for that. But no, she's she's at work. Bremen, how did you first hear about Viax?

SPEAKER_02 42:32

Well, I was at I was getting burnt at the stake by I'm just kidding, by my my my CIO about bringing in a SaaS solution that I can actually run something. No, I'm I'm I'm kidding. How I heard about Viax years and years ago before I even joined Wiley, when I was looking at a new e-commerce platform for them, was evaluating lots of things, and that's when I stumbled across Viax. We had uh a mutual partner that was was helping me, and he's like, Hey, have you thought about this software? You know, at Express, it was Commerce Tools, and we were going with and but I also found hey, we could have used Shopify, it's not the right fit. And that's when I also found Biax back in how was it 2018? And then um started at Wiley in 21, and that's I was like, oh, this is a completely different beast. We need something because we're more complex. And back to Andrew's point, you know, things are more complex. I need to be things that are more simple for me because I'm the one who has to sleep at night. You know, if you guys want to implement something that's really heavy and overweight, well, that's gonna be different levels of sleep or lack of sleep. And that's how I met these guys and just kept in touch with them throughout the e commerce journey. E commerce is is not a very big space once you boil it down to the who's who in the network, and um was always running into them, whether it was at you know, NRF or uh other events that uh we just bumped into. Each other and kept talking.

SPEAKER_03 44:01

Yeah, I always want to know. I mean, I've spent a quarter of a century placing sales executives, so I want to know if it was one of those guys, one of my guys, one of somebody I know that it did it, but no, it was a partner. Yeah. It was a partner. That's that's handy. It's so so uh, you know, obviously, Larry, Andrew, people are talking about you, which is great. We like that. What's next for Viax?

SPEAKER_04 44:24

Yeah, I mean, you know, AI is the big uh buzzword of late. I think um, you know, we've implemented some of it in our developer tools, you know, coding and and documentation. And we'll continue to do that with uh some of the natural language models. But everything that we build within Viax is uh intended to be for non-technical users to model out their solutions, right? And the developers have their place, obviously. But to continue to develop out those user experiences for you know companies, business analysts, their business experts to be able to model out their solutions. And that's what we're continuing to do. And that's where we see the most value.

SPEAKER_03 45:02

Well, I I love to hear that you're crafting AI onto the solution. It certainly, when I hear pricing, that is, you know, the generative AIs out there are spectacular, the uh application there. But again, when you're talking about developing workflows where you have in an acquisition intensive company, perhaps 15 or 20 URPs. All the analytics around that, yeah, being able to automate how you uh handle that invoice, big, big help. Absolutely. Big help. Well, Larry is uh and Andrew, you know, Andrew, I'm sorry, have I not asked you enough questions today? I you know, I'm I'm just starting to feel bad about that. I really am. You'll be on the Christmas card list, but you know, but that's that's we're we're way from that. So the adoption of full stack composable commerce is not simultaneous. You have many different components. You can swap out your content management system, your digital asset management system, your search provider, your PIM. You know, it the the list is pretty extensive at this point. There's over 110 members of the mock alliance alone. And during that process, there's often legacy solutions that are still providing some of that functionality. So I guess my question for Larry is how does Viax serve as a really great loop for that adoption of composable?

SPEAKER_04 46:38

Yeah, it's a great way to put it. You know, Viax really sits in the middle of this whole operation, right? You know, and and providing so you could think of an ESB. Traditionally, you may think of that as uh, you know, driving and and delivering data. What a lax is a schema, a really sophisticated schema to provide a unified API of all this data, right? So Viax uh has a very sophisticated schema that you would expect on uh B2B systems, ERP systems that can represent different data that you need to operate a particular channel, right? And we do that in a number of ways. We have an integration middleware built into the system. So you're not on your own to either find an ESB or figure out how to integrate different systems. We can do things where we can map our schema to an external API. So if you have 10 attributes of a product coming from a product catalog, an external product catalog, we'll pull those real time if you need to. So you don't have to send all of your data and do data migration. So there's a number of different techniques that we uh have built within the system to unify through a single API and then that experience of that channel uh intentionally sell, right? Um and then what we what I've seen in the past is if you don't have those things, and pricing and commerce is a good example, you have to kind of do a lot of custom coding to be able to represent that data in that external system, right? So we want to avoid that and add that single kind of unified API there.

SPEAKER_02 48:05

Perfect. If I can add to that one, because we we talk about the complexity of things, and one of the things that the listeners might not realize, so you can go to wily.com and you can buy a Wiley publication. We also own dummies.com, you can buy a dummies book on wily.com. You cannot go to dummies.com and buy a book, which is just the business model they the way they have it set up. But since we were replatforming dummies.com, we needed a catalog. And we used Viax as that catalog because we were showing the books on dummies.com, we just weren't selling them. But we had different types of attribution and pin data. And because of Larry, you were mentioning the integration, this was a big deal. We moved dummies to Webflow, which has an event-based system, and so does Viax. And a lot of times the our business partners were like, wait, I want to change the data in System X, which is you know, either our product master or if it's e-commerce, it's change inside of Viax, then how do you get that into other systems? Or in the case of the Dummies team, they wanted to only use the platform they were on, which is Webflow, so they can make a change to the product. And because of the way Larry has architected Viax, that event-based system is already in sync, and it was literally hours worth of work versus you know setting up a new, you know, custom integration, other things. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's just one of those things that we keep finding about Vyx, like, oh, it can solve this problem here, or it can make things' life easier here, or an engineer be empowered to say, hey, I recognize those design patterns that can overcome the challenges we've had before, and now I can actually just do it and we're done.

SPEAKER_03 49:47

Well, I think there's a technical term for that. NETO.

SPEAKER_04 49:52

We've thought of everything down. That's it.

SPEAKER_03 49:54

If you wanted to have any message make it out to our listeners today about BIAX and composable commerce to leave them with, what would that be?

SPEAKER_04 50:06

Yeah, I I'd say, you know, we're again where we have most success, and you know, these champions that we speak to usually have have seen or have felt the pain, right? And if if you're out there and you're feeling the pain and you feel like there's kind of you've tried all of these different solutions, there's nowhere to turn. Yeah, there is a new way of doing things, right? And VIAX was intentionally built to address all the issues that we saw across those platforms. So reach out and and let's have a conversation. Is you know, there's nothing obligatory about it, but would love to hear about some of the challenges that they're facing. Yeah, that but there is a new way to address these things and to get the market faster.

SPEAKER_01 50:42

Yeah, I think to Brendan's point, right? Like we like solving problems. I think you Daryl, you started off by uh line about there's kind of an inherent curiosity you gotta have to be approaching some of these things this way. So, you know, the success we were able to help Brendan drive at Wiley, right? Started with what would a proof of concept look like that would really drive value and actually you know show somebody moving the ball on this? Yeah, those are the types of things that we love to see. What are the hairy problems? What are the things that everybody's kind of avoided for the last five years because they don't nobody's been able to find a good solution for it? That we love to start with that type of stuff.

SPEAKER_03 51:17

Well, I uh have no problem recommending calling Larry and Andrew and getting a view of that fabulous hair that all of you are missing that are listening to this and not viewing it. I appreciate you guys coming on and sharing your experience with Viax. Brendan, thank you so much for bringing the user's perspective into this. And I wish you all the best.

SPEAKER_04 51:43

Yeah, thanks for having us, yeah. It was great. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 51:46

Thanks for listening to Mar Talks, the number one podcast for e-commerce and marketing applications. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and while you're at it, leave a rating and review. To find out more about how the Rosenstein Group can help you find the right leaders for your client development teams in Martech and e-commerce, please visit our website at Rosenstein Group.com.