MarTech Interview with Jon Stewart, President at ZenSource

Jon Stewart, President at ZenSource chats about the key martech trends that modern marketers should be adept with in this Q&A with MarTechSeries:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Jon – tell us about yourself and more about ZenSource?

Throughout my career, my focus has been on designing and implementing content management systems (CMS) and digital experience platforms (DXP) for organizations across a wide variety of industries. After years of observing the same common friction points across platforms, I decided to build my own platform alongside the current ZenSource core team. The result is a platform that is less complex, yet more scalable for even the most extensive enterprise organizations.  ZenSource brings together the strengths of open-source and Drupal, specifically the low-cost entry point, the vast community of modules, and the freedom to customize any feature. It also integrates the luxuries of proprietary platforms including the high level of security, support, and ability to scale for large enterprises.

While ZenSource provides the foundation for website and web application creation, we also provide our clients with a team of top-tier architects, developers, and trainers in the industry. Each client has a dedicated local support team that has an in-depth understanding of your business and the specific needs within your unique environment.

How is the SaaS market for CMS and cloud hosting evolving today: what top trends will dominate this sub segment in the near future according to you? 

Composable technology is playing a large role in how organizations approach their tech stack, specifically how they architect their applications. Composable technology at its core introduces the concept of selecting specialized, modular components to build an application. It allows components to be deployed over the cloud, connected via API, and typically fosters greater openness and collaboration between developers, leading to the decentralization of the tech stack.

As the CMS and cloud hosting markets evolve, I anticipate the growth of composable technology because of its ability to provide organizations with an easier way to scale as their business needs evolve. Traditionally, an organization would be more locked into a single platform for their CMS and web hosting, whether it be a particular vendor license or a homegrown/on-premises solution.

This model forces organizations to redesign and re-platform more frequently, and as a result, never realize their full digital roadmaps at scale. One of the reasons why open-source CMS has become so prevalent today is because of the open API-first architecture and ease of connectivity to third party applications and modules. An organization can build a best-in-class CMS foundation that taps into third-party modules through an API to integrate new features as functional and business needs grow over time. For CMS, I see this trend continuing in terms of how platforms can make these integrations easier to achieve, faster to secure in market, and more robust in the options and offerings available to connect.

For cloud hosting, the emphasis on securing the cloud is more important than ever. With more applications being deployed over the cloud, the transformation of remote business practices, and the expanding attack surface on the Internet of Things, the risk to cyber security is increasing. The emphasis we put on securing the cloud, specifically looking at automation in security design and data privacy policies, will be a huge focus for the near future.

How do you feel AI is set to reshape the larger martech market and what skills should today’s martech-kers and marketers focus on to stay updated?

For AI to operate effectively, it requires a massive amount of data to help shape an application so it can self-learn and improve accuracy. Learning how to interpret that data and help shape it into a marketing web experience will be essential as we scale AI. The intersection of data and user experience facilitated by AI is paving the way to reshape the larger MarTech market and impact the digital tools that we design. For example, using AI to personalize web experiences is one of the biggest trends with untapped potential. As a result, marketers should stay up-to-date on machine learning, predictive analytics, and understanding how to interpret data into actionable results to improve user experience.  

In the realm of cybersecurity and MarTech, AI plays a crucial role in analyzing traffic patterns to hosted sites, effectively identifying anomalies and autonomously detecting potential attacks. With the escalating threat of cyber-attacks, reinforcing your security measures with additional layers of defense and automation can prove instrumental in promptly identifying and thwarting malicious traffic.

For example, leveraging AI pattern recognition to efficiently process extensive server log data enables the system to discern suspicious patterns from the norm in web traffic. This proactive approach significantly enhances the capacity to prevent potential attacks before they compromise the integrity of the system.

What are some of the website hosting, development and overall trends that you feel more brands should stay updated on, to ensure better web experiences for end users?

The concepts of standardization and reusability, specifically related to the development of a design system, can help brands ensure better webs experiences for their end users. Starting at the Figma design level and building a design system through full stack development on both the front-end and the CMS side can greatly improve efficiency and time-to-market. It also allows brands to free up time and resources to focus on the unique needs of their users. A robust design system that is battled and tested provides a brand with a foundational toolkit that not only offers scalability for their content, but also flexibility to elevate their user experience. For instance, a more efficient build with reusable components can allow brands more resources to allocate towards usability testing, design exploration, and pushing the envelope for cutting-edge user experiences.

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Can you talk about some of the leading tech brands you feel have a robust web journeys: what takeaways from those would you leave us with here? 

Spotify consistently tops my list for robust web journeys. The reason for this is because they have created an omnichannel presence that puts music, audiobook, and podcast content at their users’ fingertips at virtually every touchpoint. Controlled via their apps and web experience across phones, wearable, cars, desktops, and more, Spotify can syndicate a user’s account and audio preferences from one central place. Additionally, their ability to capture user data and listening preferences to proactively recommend new options continuously engages the user.  The key takeaway here is the growing device-agnostic nature of the web world and the importance of an omnichannel environment. Moreover, the ability to learn about the user from a logged-in experience and proactively recommend content based on their activity is becoming essential across industries. Managing content from a central location and publishing it seamlessly in real-time to multiple channels for consumption, is now crucial, rather than nice-to-have, as users are increasingly adopting more devices to consume tech outside of standard desktop and mobile website channels.

Adjacent to tech brands, I think there are many consumer brands with some of the best examples of robust web journeys as they leverage technology and use it to enable and design smart user experience and content strategies. Patagonia is one of the best examples of this as they use wayfinding tools to find products, powered by an impressively intuitive taxonomy at the core of their shopping experience. This allows users to self-select, drilling down and personalizing their experience. With each selection, the experience refines more granularly to the point of conversion. Building an intuitive and powerful taxonomy is not a new concept, though it remains an extremely important one to create a compelling web journey. In Patagonia’s case, the emphasis on intuitive categorization, nomenclature, and clear design and content changes with each selection contribute to a remarkably clean web journey.

With your experience in leveraging Drupal for website development across regulated industries, what key considerations should businesses keep in mind when selecting a CMS for projects in healthcare, higher ed, financial services, or manufacturing?

Security, scalability, and ease of use are the three most important facets of CMS for these highly regulated industries. From a security standpoint, it is crucial to ensure data is stored properly and encrypted in transit and at rest. Keeping Drupal up-to-date with the latest module patches, security releases, and version upgrades will setup a brand for success.

When it comes to scale, the key is in architecting Drupal correctly from day one to accommodate for future growth. This involves designing the system to anticipate additional locations, entities, and other elements that may come into the web experience. Place extra emphasis on designing Drupal to handle multi-site management with more complex workflow and permissions for CMS users.

And lastly, place the extra emphasis on not only business and functional requirements, but also CMS experience requirements. The CMS needs to be as user-friendly as the site experiences to be successful to scale content. Since Drupal is so customizable, it’s imperative to design the admin authoring experience for the needs of its users to remove any friction. Doing so upfront while testing site releases of Drupal with real content and real users will help pressure test its viability. Doing so iteratively allows for time in development release cycles to hone in the experience for its users.

For those who may be interested in migrating from proprietary to open-source platforms, what are some benefits that open-source affords them?

When moving from a proprietary to open-source platform, you are automatically unlocking the knowledge base of a shared community of code contributors. Drupal has a massive community with thousands of developers across the globe contributing modules that anyone can install or modify to accelerate their own implementations. Additionally, open-source CMS is free to install and develop on instead of requiring a license. You will have to ensure you have the right team in place to help support it, however the cost of ownership is far less expense of an investment. As you install on more environments and add users, you won’t be charged more like with proprietary solutions. Additionally, open-source CMS platforms generally require less resource-intensive hosting specs, which means more cost-effective hosting.

How does the migration from proprietary to open source impact the overall security and scalability of web applications, and what best practices can businesses adopt to navigate this transition successfully?

When MarTech, data privacy and open-source enter the same discussion, historically it raises some questions about the suitability of open-source CMS and DXP’s. It is important to recognize that not all open-source platforms are created equal, and the level of effort an organization must invest to secure their solution varies widely. The reality is that Drupal is one of the safest and most secure open source CMS frameworks available. With the release of version 8, the Drupal community transitioned from a custom PHP solution to utilizing Twig and Symfony, both of which are universally accepted and well-documented open-source frameworks. With each subsequent release, the Drupal community has been diligently working to remove degraded legacy code and minimize risk of vulnerabilities. Moreover, the Drupal community has a very regimented change management process and security advisory board review process for its core modules. As a result, developers and IT professionals have access to thousands of approved modules to build their Drupal CMS solutions. Thousands of developers in the Drupal community have their eyes on the code day-to-day, reporting vulnerabilities on top of an already buttoned up Drupal security patch release process. When the platform is paired with a secure Drupal cloud hosting provider and implementation partner, an organization can place extra emphasis on crucial aspects like user access control, data encryption, and Denial of Service protection, ensuring a comprehensive approach to security and data protection.

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