Brad Gustavesen, CMO, and Jon Gibbs, Partner Program Manager, of Slatwall Commerce join the podcast to discuss Ultra Commerce's acquisition of Slatwall and Slatwall's integration with Kontent by Kentico.
Intro
Welcome to Konaverse. A conversation experience platform hosted and curated by Konabos Consulting. Konabos is a global technology leader and while, this podcast will be connected by technology. The glue is human stories and narrative.
Akshay Sura
Welcome to the Konaverse. This is Akshay Sura
Matthew McQueeny
And this is Matt McQueeny.
Akshay Sura
Today we have with us today, Brad and Jon from Slatwall Commerce. Welcome, guys. I know you have two big pieces of news to share with us today. Hot off the presses. So Brad, take us away.
Brad Gustavesen
Yeah, thanks a lot, Akshay. So our big news is, which just released publicly about a half hour 45 minutes ago, is that Slatwall Commerce has been acquired by Ultra Commerce, which we're super excited about. We'e really looking forward to going to market with with our combined platform technology. Traditionally, both companies have really served a different place in the market. But what we're seeing more and more of is that, you know, smaller companies need features and functionality that traditionally, you know, larger enterprises have wanted and enterprises are really transforming themselves and looking at selling in different ways. So it's a really great offering. And, yeah, we're excited to sort of let the cat out of the bag and let everybody in on what's been going down around here for the last month or so. So it's exciting.
Jon Gibbs
Yeah to add to that, you know, one of the super excited about too from a partner standpoint is, you know, what this means for us is to be able to grow our partner network out, you know, tenfold now where we have a lot more resources at our disposal. So that's something that we're looking forward to, as well. So I just want to point that out
Matthew McQueeny
Brad, in mergers and acquisitions, you know, you always hear synergies and it sounds like it was a real good complementary mix here. Could you talk a little bit more about that?
Brad Gustavesen
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I think one of the things that, you know, you know, any company, any software platform, you know, sort of becomes known for doing certain things really well. You know, if we were to ask our partners ask, you know, Slatwall customers, you know, what is it that that really differentiates Slatwall from some of the other ecommerce services and platforms in the market. And, you know, a lot of that comes back to, you know, number one, that we have a really great capability around subscription commerce. Two, that we're API driven, you know, we have a, we have a strong API core, which, you know, enables you to do multi site, multi channel, headless, certainly, you know, really that modern sort of stack. And then the last is, is we have we've built up over time, a really robust, sort of in-platform suite around reporting intelligence and workflow. And that's always a piece that sort of gets forgotten about, right, when, when, you know, a store gets launched in the sort of like, well, how do I figure out what's going on with selling all those, all those sorts of questions that the marketing team asked the dev team asked. And on the ultra commerce side, you know, they've really been innovative with the idea of, you know, an all in one platform, and allowing someone to come in and really hit that that initial pain point, with, you know, where they need to sort of fix their digital commerce business, maybe that's, you know, order management. Maybe that's the PIM and the product data, and really getting the catalog really sort of organized and set up. And then where Ultra Commerce has seen a lot of traction and interest lately, and we all have is in the marketplace space, there's a there's a ton of innovation there, a lot of companies are really looking to figure out how they can tap into and create, manage and into and sort of work with a with a marketplace concept in some way. And they're really ahead of the game there. So it's gonna be really exciting to see when when those sort of, you know as there's progression, you know, on a lot of those fronts in the E-commerce space, you know, how the new combined company and technology fits in there and has a really compelling offering for a lot of companies sort of, of all size, which is, which I think is a lot of fun as well.
Akshay Sura
That's awesome. Congratulations, guys. And we had the chance to meet a couple of the guys from Ultra Commerce and they seem like really nice people to work with. So I can't wait to see what you guys have to put out there.
Brad Gustavesen
Absolutely. Thanks.
Akshay Sura
Then Jon, for the second one, what's the second announcement you guys have going?
Jon Gibbs
Yeah. So for a long time now as well being a headless commerce solutions. We've invested a lot I'm heavily into headless integrations, and especially on the content management side. So certainly within the content, CMS space, being a pretty robust, headless content management system, you know, that's one platform that we're excited to launch an integration with between Slatwall and Kontent today. So, you know, there's a couple of things that come with that, you know, one is to say, an integration is great, which we have between both platforms. So the idea that, you know, I can be a marketing person, ecommerce manager working within my content, CMS space, but then I have this integration, headlessly in Slatwall. And I can associate products and pull the entire catalog into the CMS space to create a very fluid experience. So that's something that we're happy to show anyone if they're interested to see. But the second part of this idea behind the integrations is, you know, those are great, but when it comes time to launching a project, where do I start? And what can I do with that? What if I want to do a proof of concept? What if I have a client who wants to see something?So the integration, that's the first piece. The second piece is we've launched an E-commerce react template starter kit that goes in combination with that. So you know, the idea is a developer can come in and basically download the React starter kit template off of GitHub, which is publicly available. And you know, they can basically connect into their content space by creating a content CMS plug-in instance. And then within literally, you know, 5-10 minutes, you can be up and running with, you know, both the integration and the React storefront starter kit, and you can have a proof of concept that you can go to town with pretty fast. So that's something we're pretty excited about. That's our, that's our announcement today, we've been working pretty closely with the Kontent folks on there and too and they're excited for us, you know, what some of the feedback that we've gotten, I know initially from some of our other partners, as well as they're excited to see the level and depth of the integration that we did with the custom element and the product picker as well, just to create a super fluid experience,
Akshay Sura
Yeah I had the chance to see that thanks to the demo, Jon. And it actually looks really nice. Kontent is one of my favorite headless CMS out there. But it seemed like a very seamless integration with the custom elements, like you mentioned, which is really cool. Because you don't have to do a lot of manual things. Everything's done for you for picking products, or categories and stuff. So and that spinning up the site was also pretty quick. So that was awesome.
Brad Gustavesen
It's interesting. We, we talk a lot about about headless and you know, one of the one of the first pieces of feedback that that someone will say is, yeah, that sounds great, but where do I get started. And that's really what the what the storefront kit is there for. And it ends up being that you can take that because it's a it's a complete storefront, everything from homepage to product lists, all the content is coming out of Kontent by Kentico, all the way across through to like the My Account area filtering. And all this have, it's really fast, the theme itself is really lightweight. So someone can take that and just say, Well, I'm just gonna style that up. And that just becomes the store, right. Whether it's a proof of concept, or actually gets launched. Or for, you know, for any developer who wants to see a, you know, a real life example of it running, they can just go in and just use it to sort of pick and pull code snippets from and then drop that into whatever they've got kicking on the side and use it that way. So, you know, we've built it with the idea that it should enable and support either the marketing team or the dev, the technical team, when they're making a pitch to someone to say, hey, you know, this, this headless idea is a really viable option. We built this thing, it's up and running somewhere, you know, even a host on your local machine, it doesn't matter. You know, this took, you know, you know, 20 minutes, a half hour an hour, right to be up and running, I connected to here, I connected it there, great. We even have a sample data set available. So if someone doesn't even want to create their own products, they can just use our data set. And we really tried to make it as painless as possible, just for someone to start playing and figuring out will this work for me? You know, we think in a lot of cases it will it makes a really compelling case for someone who really believes that or has already invested a lot in the Kentico, you know, space, right? They're they're all in the got a site maybe that they really like or they know they want to use it to build out you know, a new site for someone and just haven't felt comfortable with, you know, the platform options they've got or they they feel kind of boxed in. You know, this integration and the custom element really give that it offers up another platform for them to choose.
Matthew McQueeny
This could either be for Jon or Brad, I know that you're both or Slatwall as part of the Jamstack Day and I'm very interested as my last question, what it's been like to be on the cutting edge of product development as this headless, Jamstack architecture and methodology has kind of taken shape and really only like five years?
Brad Gustavesen
Yeah, I think what's what's been really interesting is there's sort of two factors that are kind of piling on, you know, one is that very rarely is it just a simple storefront that someone wants anymore, right? It's, we were selling here, but you know, oh, it's got to the system has got to take orders from over here. And I've got two or three different websites, once once, you know, b2b, but I want to have a b2c channel, and they're going to need different content. So that's the complexity. There's a lot of juggling that's going on in this space. And whether or not you know, a business leader is walking into the room saying, I have to have a headless solution, they started describing the problem, and, you know, thinking about, well, you know, I really, I know I don't, want a lot of different services, to have to figure out, I know, I don't want to compromise on the platforms that I choose, and pick something that's really expensive, is too slow, you know, isn't gonna get me where I need to be now or in the future, you know, the idea of going in to a project to re-platform, or you know, take out something and replace it with with a new a new service, you know, is is daunting, to say the least, and then for someone to think well, yeah, I guess that will work. Right? I think the idea that, that you can really make a decision now, for something that will really work for you short term long term, cost of cost appropriate, fast to implement, you know, ticks, all those boxes, I was really compelling. And you just have started to see that. And now I think, especially over the last, you know, you know, Jon, feel free to disagree, but you especially over the last year, you know, it used to be that we found ourselves having to sort of explain the concept a little bit, and how it all works. And, you know, definitely within within, you know, 2021 you know, the the conversations we're having, whether it's with, you know, other tech folks, sort of in the E-commerce space, or, you know, your different marketing dev teams they've adopted the headless sort of approach and whatever term they're going to use, but they're already sort of sold on it. And now they just need to know, yeah, I understand it, do you think it will work for me? And what does that look like? So it's, it's, it's been rapid to your point. And you know, how fast you know, it's sort of grown and taken hold within the marketplace
Jon Gibbs
Yeah, we're definitely excited to be part of even even the Jamstack Day community that, you know, your team has put together as we're kind of pushing the envelope here with these integrations that we're doing, and just being a part of that. So, you know, to Brad's point, you know, for us, you know, all these things that we're doing, you know, headless API stuff, whether it's react or different technologies that people are adopting, you know, that's those are the things that we try to keep our ear attuned to the most, and getting feedback from the community as well. It's just important.
Akshay Sura
That's awesome. That's all we got guys, thank you so much for jumping on quickly and sharing your wonderful news with us. Congratulations and hope all goes well.
Outro
Technology can bring us together, it can make our lives better and more efficient in a myriad of ways, but it cannot replace human discourse and the magic that can happen by the interchange of ideas.