SXSW: The Future Of Open Source Content Management

Open source content management systems are fueling digital transformation and have become an essential tool for the enterprise, Dietmar Rietsch, CEO of Pimcore, said in his SXSW Interactive speech, The Future Of Open Source Content Management.

Here are a few key takeaways from Rietsch’s talk:

The future of open source CMS software is to enable digital transformations.
According to Rietsch, open source content management has evolved beyond managing just blogs and websites and has become an integral part of the full customer lifecycle and the underpinning of a brand’s entire digital experience, including apps, social, and more.

“Basically you have to adapt to consumer behavior,” Rietsch said in reference to the future of open source content management. Rietsch presented statistics that show 76 percent of people say marketing has changed more in the past two years than over the past 50 years, and 87 percent say digital transformation is a competitive opportunity.

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You have to obey the rules. It’s about experiences and how you utilize technologies in terms of the user experience. Change has to occur or else you have a really big problem,” Rietsch said.

Open source content management is a growing player in the enterprise space.
Sixty-four percent of companies that leverage open source projects are enterprises, Rietsch said, and 93 percent of those enterprises said their organizations’ use of open source tools has increased or remained the same in the past year.

Things that are critical for future of open source content management

Along with consistent data being key to modern open source content management, Rietsch added that in order to be truly omni-channel open source CMSs must deliver experiences across both digital (social, mobile, desktop, etc.) and traditional (POS, web-to-print) channels.

“Content should fit the needs of the consumer,” said Rietsch. “It’s all about targeting and delivering your message.” He added, “modern content management systems are mostly framework driven, taking the approach where you can build anything. An API driven framework approach is the core to keeping modern in today’s digital transformation. It’s crucial to have so you can connect your CMS natively to all kinds of third-party applications to really communicate your content.”

To keep up with the future of open source content management, Rietsch said it’s imperative to incorporate these things into your business strategy:

• Integration –  To combine various sub-systems into an overall IT solution. This includes service-oriented architecture that is hyper-connected, content-as-a-service (CAAS), and taking an API-driven approach.
• Automation – It’s about the user journey and adapting to personas to increase conversions. This includes behavioral targeting, using personalization and content targeting, using content commerce to raise and optimize conversion rates, using contextual content, and using single-source publishing.
• Consolidation – This includes creating lean and simple IT systems to reduce complexity and allow better flexibility and better time-to-market. You have to harmonize the IT structure, said Rietsch.
• Differentiation – Orientation wise, this includes the blog engine and user experience platform. Customer wise, this refers to being able to differentiate for agencies, developers, integrations, end customers, and CMS users.
• Transformation – This includes being able to integrate a company’s master data in a single system so that marketing, sales and IT can all leverage it.

Rietsch ended his presentation with the conclusion that the future of open source content management depends on taking a customer-centric approach.

“Everything is about experiences so that the content comes together from different sources,” he said. We must get more intelligent and provide the right tooling to the right people. Rietsch concluded, “open source content management is a digital transformation enabler and a critical piece of any enterprise.”