I headed back to Odense, which is about an hour and a half’s train ride, including a 25km stretch across the sea, directly west from Copenhagen airport, for this year’s Business Partner Summit looking forward to meeting up with some old faces and learning all about what's happening in the world of Umbraco and, more importantly, what the future holds. The centre of Odense, a delightful Danish town and the birthplace of Hans Christian Anderson, is a spaghetti like collection of cobbled streets linking pretty squares bounded by collections of bars, cafes and restaurants which spill out onto the cobbles. New and old buildings sit alongside each other incongruously and the absence of cars, combined with plenty of greenery, make for a very pleasant town centre with that certain Scandi vibe. Everyone is friendly, polite and of course speak perfect English, to our shame. They’re also completely compliant when it comes to crossing the road, everyone, and I mean everyone, waits for the little red man to turn green before crossing even if there’s not a car in sight. To be fair the bigger risk of injury comes from the thousands of bikes using the omnipresent cycle lanes which can be easily mistaken for footpaths until you realise the bike heading towards you isn’t going to stop.
Further out, especially in the dockland area, there has been a lot of regeneration with new office and stylich apartment blocks sitting alongside the older industrial buildings and warehouses many of which have been converted. It was in one of these older warehouses, called Alfred & Kamilla, where I joined over 200 attendees drawn from the Umbraco Partner network which is a wider and wider global community having expanded to 266 with 45 Platinum, 124 Gold and 97 Silver Partners. The UK remains the biggest group with a 31% share, followed by the Nordics at 23% but now joined by the US which has matched this, the rest of the world is 13% while the Benelux region takes up the remaining 10%.
Umbraco is supporting this network with a broader range of activities and services across all these regions including webinars such as the recent Forresters presentation, though leadership articles, third party collaborations with organisations like G2 the tech review body and of course events of which Codegarden remains the headline. Services to partners based on use of the new credits based system have seen an increase in Cloud as well as support, training, licences and events. Johnny Kristensen, VP Sales Europe outlined the commercial journey and CMS marketplace which continues to grow at 6% per annum and Open Source CMS at 11% with 60% of businesses expecting to increase investment into Content management systems. Umbraco as a business continues to grow at over 25% year on year.
Johnny Kristensen VP Sales Europe, Umbraco
I always look forward to CTO Filip Bech-Larsen’s presentation because he shows us not only what Umbraco has in the development pipeline to enhance the platform now or imminently, but he also outlines his vision for the future and where he thinks things are heading which is fascinating. He used a neat lighthouse analogy to frame this as it cast’s light on a key area but the light can also move.
Filip Bech-Larsen Chief Technology Officer, Umbraco
Top of the list, inevitably, was AI because it’s top of everyone’s list right now. Filip highlighted some of the current issues, such as cost and the chip shortage, which he felt might limit its use to those bigger players with deep pockets and that the challenges of emissions is going to become a bigger issue given the computing power needed to run AI and what this means for the use of power in datacentres. We’re currently in a massive growth phase which hasn’t yet reached ‘the peak of inflated expectations’, after which there is usually a ‘trough of disillusionment’ when people realise its limitations, before then growing again but within the ‘slope of enlightenment’ and then reaching the Plateau of Productivity. Ultimately the practical uses will overtake the hype with a expectation that 80% of businesses will be using Gen AI by 2026. From a CMS perspective Filip believes AI will create more content to manage because 85% of the content journey happens before the CMS. The use of AI will make it easier to create content with benefits such as validation of the tone of voice in copy and suggestions on how to fix it, or the creation of summaries from a body of text. Umbraco itself is a platform to build on which can include AI.
Personalisation and even Individualisation will be more important as research shows 71% of users demand personalisation which provides a tailored experience based on groups of personas and market segments. Individualisation takes this to another level with user specific experiences which AI will play a key role in enabling and is bringing significant uplift in areas like ecommerce with intelligent prompts to repurchase a consumable product for example leading to an average 15% increase in revenues.
Filip’s third lighthouse was search, mentioning - as many have - that AI creates a significant risk for Google because AI has the ability to learn user intent and context to provide unique results. Umbraco’s structured data enables easy search for AI tools.
Finally, Filip talked about the ‘orchestration’ of an increasing number of data sources from ERPs and CRMs, onto PIMs and DAMs within ‘best of breed’ composable solutions, otherwise known as MACH - microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native and Headless. The leading research body Gartner is predicting that by 2025 70% of businesses will adopt composable DXP platforms and 60% of ecommerce will follow the MACH principle. This approach sees Back end for Front end APIs such as Enterspeed providing the link between websites and whatever data sources they link to, including the CMS which suits Umbraco ideally as a platform to build on because it’s loved by developers and editors alike.
Kristian Egebæk-Carlsen Head of Cloud, Umbraco
Next up was Kristian Egebaek-Carlsen, Head of Cloud at Umbraco - otherwise known as Kec - who is always an engaging speaker and was typically self-deprecating with the occasional touch of sarcasm. Umbraco’s Cloud hosting uses the same Microsoft Azure platform that we also use for all our websites, and benefits from the scalability and security that comes with Microsoft. The benefits for us, as developers, of using Azure through Umbraco Cloud is that it’s managed by them so updates and security patches are applied automatically across all sites, whereas we have to implement these individually. However, and without wanting to get into too much technical detail, the historical obstacles for us have been the deployment pipeline [how we upload code into a site], the lack of load balancing [splitting sites across multiple servers for better performance and resilience] and the lack of several environments [we use a QA environment for our own development, a UAT environment for the client to test and then the live environment]. It’s great to see that these issues are being addressed with ‘CI/CD’ for deployments integrating with Github, ‘development’, ‘staging’ and ‘live’ flexible environments. Load Balancing is due early next including ‘auto scale out’ which essentially extends the resources available to a website as needed such as peak usage, but then scales them back when not needed so clients only pay for the services they need, again this is something we do manually. There are some other new features in development too, dedicated project databases, dedicated organisational features, integration with third party login providers [i.e. login with Facebook] and a new resources dashboard which provides data on CO2 use per project which can be used part of client’s sustainability agenda.
Matt Sutherland Head of Technology at true Digital and Bjarke Berg Head of CMS, Umbraco
It must be obvious by now that the day’s agenda is pretty full and fast moving, after Kristian there was a joint presentation by Bjorke Berg Head of CMS Umbraco and Matt Sutherland the CTO from True Digital a Platinum Partner. Bjorke explained that Umbraco is essentially a toolbox which allows you to build what you want to build, which is exactly why we use it! The platform is becoming a serious player in what he classified as the ‘upper mid-market/low enterprise’ level, which is again why we use it. In many key areas it delivers above many enterprise level platforms that have 5 or even 6 figure annual licence fees plus serious implementation costs, but being Open Source of course there are no licence fees. Umbraco adopts Microsoft’s professional best practice and is aligned with their .Net release cadence, which is a new update every November, plus another in between then every 4th version being long term support. Each update introduces new features and functionality, for example Version 13 saw the addition of blocks in the rich text editor and a new content delivery API, and version 14 which has just been released a new management API and more end points. A significant upgrade to this is on it’s way too, so significant in fact that they’ve called it ‘Bellissimo’ and it will be a new back end client with a raft of enhancements - web components to avoid dependencies [making it harder to break], more extensions, machine to machine authentication, block level variations, global blocks, lazy loaded published content [to improve performance - it loads content as the user needs it], improved search to allow editors to weight search terms and the ability for editors to collaborate on the same content. Matt from True than talked through some of their projects that take advantage of some of these features, notably a suite of sites for Aardman animation which uses one CMS project to power numerous front ends for different B2B abd B2C sites each with specific brands.
Bolette Kern Product Owner DXP and Rasmus Bollerup Client and Business Developer at Illumi
Another joint presentation followed, from Bolette Kern Product Owner DXP and Rasmus Bollerup from Illumi and agency based in Odense, focusing on Umbraco Commerce which we use extensively at bd2. However our ecommerce sites are mostly B2B whereas Bolette focused on B2C explaining that consumer ecommerce sites increasingly need to tell compelling stories to gain a user’s trust. Over 80% of customers are using digital touchpoints as part of their buying journeys, whether that’s entirely digital if buying online or partially online and then purchasing in store. As consumers we do our research online, read the reviews, check stock and pricing and increasingly we want to find out about brands and whether they share our principles in areas such as sustainability, ethical practices and equality. 88% of consumers consider the authenticity of brands to be a key driver in their decision making process which brands need to support in order to drive conversions. Many brands are harnessing this new relationship with the customer by using user generated content [UGC] which ranges from publishing reviews, which has become critical in sectors such as hospitality, and using users’ pictures and videos which might not be as polished as glossy marketing pics, but they’re genuine and therefore more relateable.
‘True brand love goes beyond best practice’ claimed Bolette supported by screengrabs of atypical catalogue websites with flat product shots on white backgrounds in standard grids. Which is a fair point as you see the same type of user interfaces used over and over. Whilst using accepted norms is logical, as people know how they work and what to expect, deviation from this makes the user experience more memorable. Emotive design stands out because it’s unique so it delivers a more memorable UX. This can incorporate sensory content such as real life scenarios that showcase a product in use. The combination of all of these, when designed and implemented well, can present products better and therefore drive sales. Rasmus from Illumi then talked through one of their case studies for Odense Marcipan, which has 4 brands offering various cakes, sweets and constituent products. As well as a conventional product catalogue and cart, the sites make extensive use of recipees to inspire bakers to make their own cakes using products from the site combined with typical kitchen cupboard mainstays like sugar and flour. These recipees combined with a neat feature to bundle ingredients from the site into a cart which a user can then adjust as required to make into an order.
Daniel Martins Umbraco Solutions Specialist Carlsberg Group
Global brewing giant Carlsberg are one of Umbraco’s flagship users, hopefully because it’s a great platform not just because it’s Danish. Daniel Martins is the inhouse Umbraco Solutions Specialist at Carlsberg Group having previously worked in agencies as an Umbraco developer, and he outlined how the organisation uses the platform. The first answer being ‘extensively’ as they have over 200 websites and 38 projects across the world. All their sites - corporate/brand, policies and ecommerce are on Umbraco Cloud, these integrate with the Enterspeed headless API which also integrates with Back end to Front end apps on AWS. Cloud gives Carlsberg complete visibility, access and control over all their online estate. Daniel went into some detail about the challenges of managing all these sites which cover 25 geographies and include 52 languages with dozens and dozens of project managers, content managers and editors all using the CMS. This diversity creates other issues especially with policies as different regions have different GDPR, verification and legal requirements with potential fines for any misdemeanour’s. It’s important for Carlsberg to control and track access to the CMS so this is segmented based on Projects, Websites and Languages but still meets the needs of the editors who need to display content changes immediately and avoid ‘copy and pasting’ content.
From a developer perspective, the cloud and API infrastructure uses a baseline rather than isolated development for a more efficient and faster process, and easier management including code management, maintainability and version updates. Daniel said that the approach has led to more collaboration across teams which has engendered a more innovative environment so he and his team are able to be more proactive and anticipate issues. This improved culture also makes it easier to attract talent.
Inevitably security is always a big concern for a large corporate such as Carlsberg, so they focus on detecting vulnerabilities before they happen. Daniel reinforced their reliance on Umbraco’s inbuilt security, the support Umbraco provides and how the APIs and integrations help to achieve this stressing that they look to be proactive not reactive and ‘expose secrets’.
As a long term Umbraco user, Carlsberg has older sites, some going back to version 7, that they’re working through to upgrade with the aim of getting them all onto version 13 by the end of 2025. The benefits of the upgrades have seen new features, performance improvements, reduced infrastructure costs and, as part of the upgrade work they’ve refactored code and removed older third party packages. Daniel, who is clearly an Umbraco advocate, stated that Umbraco is helping Carlsberg deliver key business outcomes - faster time to market and better quality with a scalable CMS platform which is a key part of their composable architecture. He’s also excited by the Umbraco roadmap with an improved back end, the block list editor and further performance boosts coming, added to by the ‘game changers’ for him namely payment handover, 2 factor authentication and CI/CD.
Emma Burstow Director of Devevloper Relations
Emma presented the final session looking at the perennial challenges of talent attraction and retention and how the Umbraco community can help. Anecdotally, the developer recruitment market at least in the North West isn’t currently as difficult as it was, especially during covid when demand meant it was virtually impossible for smaller businesses to recruit, there does seem to be quite a few more developers around. This is due to some top down rationalisation with bigger players reducing head count, some high profile casualties in the North West such as Wejo a heavily backed Tech Co which went under putting around 300 people back into the market, and some agencies have been making redundancies. I’ve also noticed that a few contractors I know, who usually go from job to job, are ‘open to work’ on Linkedin and recruiters seem to be pushing more CVs forward and hassling even more than usual. The Umbraco developer community is very active and Emma was keen to promote connecting with it and supporting it by hosting meet ups and building attendance time into the work schedule. The meet ups are well supported by those developers who really love coding and Umbraco of course. As we know, good developers revel in the challenges of writing new code, as opposed to just bug fixing, and the Open Source nature of Umbraco leads to lots of new code, collaborations and exciting projects which are more fulfilling and satisfying to work on. The challenge for businesses and their brands is to stand out as an employer that provides these opportunities, in what is always a crowded landscape, and that this needs to authentic.
In summary, the Business summit - like all Umbraco events is always logistically excellent with a great vibe - followed a tried and tested format but was fully loaded with session after session all of which offered information of value, from the continued growth of Umbraco as a business onto its ceaseless progress as an Open Source ‘platform to build on’ which is a next generation, API-first, composable DXP. Its capabilities and future potential were repeatedly demonstrated but perhaps best illustrated by Carlsberg, a $10B+ turnover global business which uses Umbraco as its only CMS to power 38 Projects with over 200 websites in 52 languages within a flexible and composable architecture.
Codegarden, the annual Umbraco tech conference, follows on over the next few days and developers from bd2 will be joining all the key sessions to capture further insights.
