On-Demand Webinar: Creating Digital Experiences with the Bloomreach Experience Cloud (brX)

Here's what you'll learn in the webinar

Creating user experience for our customers - this is our focus topic, which is more relevant than ever in current times. What has long been common practice in B2C and is demanded by the user, the B2B user of a commerce platform also expects. For large mid-sized companies in particular, it's all about building the customer relationship with the end customer directly and not leaving the market to platforms like Amazon, for example.

3 Key Takeaways:

1. how can B2B companies build customer relationships with the end customer directly and efficiently in today's digital world?

2. How can Bloomreach's Experience Cloud increase conversion rates and optimize the customer journey?

3. also learn about the advantages and disadvantages of the different variants and which success scenarios our customers were able to realize with it.

Transcript of the Webinar: Digital Experiences with Bloomreach

Introducing

Angela Meyer: Welcome to today's diva-e webinar on creating digital experiences with Bloomreach Experience Cloud. Today we're answering the question of how you create a unique user experience that meets customer needs, especially in current times. The webinar is split into two parts: first, Oliver from our long-time partner Bloomreach starts and explains how Bloomreach has set up its product to address this business challenge. And then André follows and explains on the basis of customer projects which variations of the integration of commerce and content platforms there are, which advantages and disadvantages the different variations have and which success scenarios our customers could realize with it. I'm glad you both have time today. Let's move on to a quick technology check. And that is, there is a question box on the right side of your screens. And it would be great if you could write a short hello, a sign in here, so that we can also see whether the technology is working. And at the end, we will have enough time to answer your questions, or if there is something that is burning under your nails, then fire away, we will be happy to answer your questions. And it looks very good, we are getting greetings here from all over Germany, from the Black Forest among other places, Bavaria and everywhere you have connected today. That looks very good. I would say we can already start with the content. Or rather, a little round of introductions beforehand, right, a few words about me, I'm Angela, I've been a senior marketing manager at diva-e for around four years and I look after the webinars and I'm the moderator today, right. Oliver, maybe a few words about you?

Oliver-Daniel Bogatu: With pleasure. Greetings from Upper Bavaria, I greet everyone very warmly from the office in the mountains. I'm looking forward to the- to what's coming up now, I'm looking forward to the, to the exchange especially, to your questions that we might have then or also there what, you can discuss with each other afterwards. I am Director Sales for the areas Germany, Austria, Switzerland. And everything else then in my presentation, gladly.

Angela Meyer: Okay. André, a few more words about your job and person?

André Lähr: Exactly. André Lähr, I've been involved in cms, e-commerce and marketing technology for over 15 years. I've been with diva-e since 2011, there in the consulting area, supporting our customers in the realization of their digital projects. Yes. Exactly. I'm happy, just like Oliver, to be able to tell you a little bit about us and our approach today. I hope that I'll be able to reach someone, that I'll have something interesting to tell you out there, and I'm also looking forward to the questions that will come afterwards.

Angela Meyer: Great. Exactly. Then I would say, let's start. With Oliver and your part about the Bloomreach Experience Cloud.

Oliver-Daniel Bogatu: Wonderful.

Angela Meyer: I'm going to turn the broadcast rights over to you.

About Bloomreach

Oliver-Daniel Bogatu: Wonderful. Thank you very much, dear Angela. Now we'll go to the-, then we'll go in. Oliver Bogatu, Director Sales Bloomreach. First of all, I want to tell you a little bit about our milestones to Bloomreach. Bloomrech was founded in 2009 when friends Raj de Datta and Ashutosh Garg, he was a scientist at Google at the time, came together on an idea that any online experience could be massively improved if it was tailored to each person. The two started with an idea that ended up in an intelligent algorithm that could understand the search language of customers, helping companies automatically deliver web pages that matched the searcher's intent to get to the top of the search engine just by doing so. In 2016, as it became increasingly obvious that the worlds of content and commerce were inextricably linked, Bloomreach partnered with Hippo, which is a Dutch market-leading open source web content management provider, to develop the first digital experience that combines content search and merchandise together. In 2018, brX, which is our acronym for a digital experience platform, was first named a visionary in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms and in 2020, this year, Bloomreach officially opened its German entity and is crossing a very special milestone internationally, as 20 percent of all e-commerce experiences in the U.S., are enabled and driven by our technology. I also don't want to fail to mention at this point that the very successful collaboration with diva-e has been in place since 2012. That's a quick look over our locations. Our offices are in Amsterdam and London, as well as in Bangalore, in Boston, in Dallas, and our headquarters are in Mountain View, California. Our product development is based in Bangalore, India, so I think we're pretty broad in terms of our presence and in terms of our ambition. In total, Bloomreach now currently employs just over 300 people.

Bloomreach's leadership team is considered one of the most visionary in Silicon Valley and a global leader in digital commerce. Raj de Datta, Co-Founder and CEO, became one of Silicon Valley's top forty companies. He has several appearances and public speakers on topics of the future and Digital Influence. I would like to briefly introduce here two other Board Members by way of example who have come. One is Brian Walker our Chief Strategy Officer, he was a long time market researcher for commerce technology for Forrester Research and previously Head of Global Commerce Strategy Officer at Accenture and Strategy Officer at SAP-Hybris. You're probably seeing a lot, a lot of LinkedIn post from him right now for that, that we generously grant data from e-commerce with our customers. We think that's very, very important. So it's good for you guys to take a look at that. Adding Rob Rosenthal our Chief Revenue Officer, he was previously in South America and Latin America. He led the high growth market segment there for Adobe Experience Cloud, enterprise business and is responsible for new customer retention. Briefly on our advisory board, Bloomreach has a very experienced advisory board, which has included partners from longstanding, very successful venture capital firms, such as Bank Cap, as well as other independent board members. So that, you guys already have a bit of a business card of our company.

Bloomreach Experience Cloud

But let's talk about the Bloomreach Experience Cloud now. First, the question:

What does it take to successfully engage internet customers today?

And there you can say that shoppers today want to experience engaging shopping experiences on the internet. And the must-haves in digital commerce, from our point of view, are that, exceptional product discovery, in-depth product content, highly effective visualization and, of course, predictable, simple shopping experiences, everything that can generate friction somewhere must be reduced. But that alone is not enough. We believe that you need to differentiate yourself by convincing your customer towards even richer and relevant content that is engaging and inspiring. We need contextual merchandising, individual experiences that are fully personalized and consistently contextual across all digital touchpoints. But why is the perfect shopping experience just so hard to design? There's a very simple view of this, which is the clear statement that commerce platforms are designed precisely not to increase sales and conversion, but to process transactions. Let me illustrate that a little bit graphically. There is no build-in or build-with in the omnichannel approach or a front-end with all the cool UX features of a monolithic e-commerce platform. Because it is only developed for one sales channel. And if companies now start adding special themes here, it may improve performance, but it doesn't necessarily make it easier to manage this platform. The data that is collected is not used effectively to optimize the user experience, and in the end - as you may have experienced in your daily work environment - you have chaos and the top management level starts to tear the thing down and completely reset it. To put it in a simplified way.

The new approach to growth, and direct growth that is ROI driven investment, is the Digital Experience Platform. Bloomreach is specifically designed for flexibility and revenue growth. So we've just heard that the monolithic presentation that is the e-commerce store that's set up a single channel is just hard to innovate. Has an average UX and it means a lot of manual and therefore financial effort to constantly evolve the whole box via upgrades. To really win in today's digital age, the solution is to take a headless API oriented approach, behind which lies this very same decoupled commerce platform approach. Instead of relying on a monolithic platform to deliver and manage both the back-end and all the front-end aspects of a modern online store, which is what it's all about, companies today are moving towards a modular approach where they can quickly integrate the technical innovations they need for their front-end tools and development.

And that means when companies move in the -headless direction, they decouple the e-commerce back-end from the presentation layer. So that you can use the transactional system that best meets your business needs. At the same time, however, you get much more speed and flexibility to implement cutting-edge UX web technologies, of various kinds, to deliver across diverse digital channels. It is now very important to me to give you one more thing, at this point, a Digital Experience Platform independent of your existing e-commerce system architecture, be it now with SAP be it a Salesforce, be it an IBM Websphere, a Commerce Tools, however be an environment, set up independently. Sets with it, if desired, only in certain parts various UX performance frontends very important to underline. Then does an analyst like Gartner on DXP and briefly read out a report here, a report on the 2020 Magic Quadrant Digital Experience Platform, Gartner defines DXP as an integrated set of technology that supports both the creation, management, realization and optimization of contextual experiences. And we are seen as the only visionary by Gartner on this right now.

What is BRX, so what is Bloomreach's answer to a Digital Experience Platform?

It's sort of a set of services to improve the conversion rate, from the first visit of the digital customer to just the transaction. BRX consists of five modules, which is Search and Merchandising, we have a Content Management System, Recommendations and Inducements, and of course SEO, yes. The interaction of these individual components, generates a Digital Experience Platform. This in turn is supported by an intelligent index. Where just our MI and AI tools are working behind it in the background, in the topic on topics like personalization, targeting, AV testing, our dashboard, and so on and so forth. That in turn is fed by the backend, as we've already heard, can be played out headless at whatever touchpoint the BRX is needed. So now I'm going to give you a very brief look at our in our dashboard. Intuitively simple our marketing, merchandising tools, I just want to say BRX is not just fantastic for developers, it's specifically designed for the business user. You surely know that even the simplest layout changes or setting a simple AB test internal - without internal IT board their service provider is not even feasible.

We offer you a user-friendly interface, in every work level, with which you yourself and thus completely without any IT or programming knowledge can not only create or edit content, but also track its use and optimize and measure performance. So, this is what I always call my Million Dollar Chart because you certainly have the question at this point: How does a Digital Experience Platform really work for me, for my company? And I would now like to try to explain this to you with an illustrative example. As we just heard, it all starts with importing data through our back-end API's, this comes from your CM, your product feeds or just from your e-commerce platform, okay? When we embed that content into our product, then everything is propagated through our intelligent index. The data is divided into different areas, so that's product, content, transaction, or marketing data, and that serves as the basis for all the personalization that we then do for your customers. After importing this level of data, we create it through a set of business user tools available. Now with these user tools, you, or your teams, can easily create content or search results, build merchandising campaigns, or run AB tests across myriad variables. Yes.

So now, before anything is played out to your customers, all of that data is processed through our AI engine, which is making sure at this level that the content and products that your customer or your buyer is now seeing are completely personalized, meaning relevant to that singular customer and optimized for the factors that your company is most interested in. This can be, for example, that the business rules that you define yourself, for example, high margin products that you want to push, represent these business rules. Of course, this can also be done at different levels or in different countries. The variants for this are virtually without limit, so that rights or management can then be controlled centrally. All these functions are now provided via a series of APIs and can now be used individually or together. So it means when your developers are building Digital Experiences for new digital touchpoints, you can now use these API's in conjunction with any form language. We have software development kits and more.

That's our advantage that developers get, the complete flexibility and so of course they are independent of the tools that you use or any software languages. Together with the personalized intelligence will be, which comes from our AI Cloud, these will be made available and played out via API. So now this can be used completely via - now this can be used completely personalized front end in conjunction with your e-commerce platform. Either through existing interfaces or with newer headless platforms such as Commerce Tools or from the ground up through the way the platform works. I think there will be some questions about that as well, which maybe then can be clarified individually afterwards as well. I would like to give you a few KPI's at this point now, such a platform is of course built-, we also deliver on a large scale, these are the last KPI's, the personalized page views over two thousand search queries-, we are ultimately specialized with our solution on omni-channel and omni-touchpoints services and there I find our approach completely built on the provision of content via the SaaS cloud, via the corresponding cloud itself so the cloud hosting is a completely cloud-based solution, so I must say.

Our eco-system in Germany, or in Germany, Austria, Switzerland is very, very broadly positioned, all of them preceded by diva-e, with whom we have the most long-standing cooperation. And maybe a chart about our customer structure, it's important to me that you see that it's not just a topic for retail, but it can be used in a wide variety of industries, from travel to education, government retail, of course brands, fine-tech companies and so on. Finally, I have a chart for you, because in the last few weeks I have been very, very much in talks, or have also attended, with our partners, with customers on the subject of Covid-19 in connection, of course, with the challenge of what to do. And I want to pass this to you without comment. "E-commerce was a high priority before, now it's the only priority. Most are running many point solutions and have messy environments." I went into that. "We can't reduce costs massively by consolidating the spend with our platform." Because a lot of money goes into consulting and further development of agencies. I actually want to read you the last short-actually, because time is running out. "Investing in a new enterprise eCom solution is a big investment, now in the crisis we reconsider clever alternatives with better business results and ROI as a big chance of saving." With that, I'm through and want to end. And I'll hand the screen right back to Angela. And I'm looking forward to André's presentation.

Angela Meyer: Yes, thank you Oliver for your input on the Bloomreach Experience Cloud. I've directly passed the rights to André and now we're looking forward to the customer projects. Pros and cons.

About diva-e

André Lähr: Good, wonderful. I hope you can see my screen. According to my instruments this should be the case. Then thank you very much Oliver for your exciting presentation, thank you Angela for the moderation. Then I would like to start with a few words about us, who maybe doesn't know us yet. We are setting ourselves up as a transactional experience partner. And what does that mean? In a nutshell. Companies want transactions. Customers want experiences. And we want to be the strong partner that can achieve that with our customers. In other words, we are not yet satisfied with our customers' customers having great experiences, but only if they turn into transactions for our customers. Only then do we see this partnership as meaningful and successful. We are represented throughout Germany and have eight locations, which means that we can generally work relatively closely with our customers and closely with our customers in person. We see that as a success factor for our projects. We have eight hundred, or a little more than eight hundred employees, and we have a turnover of around eighty million.

Briefly, something else about our portfolio, as I said, in order to be a TXP or Transactional Experience Partner, and to be able to participate in the economic success of our customers, it is of course a prerequisite that we offer services in our portfolio that lie along the entire digital value chain. To this end, we have divided our portfolio into four areas. There is planning and innovation, which is essentially what you know as consulting in the classic sense. That is, there is strategy consulting, there is platform consulting, system selection, in other words, all these topics that are essentially found in the run-up to digital projects, but of course they are also present in the projects. Then there's Platform and Experiences, our engine room, so to speak, where the technology is created, where all the products and solutions that we build for our customers are created. The next point is Growth and Performance, if we want to grow with our customers, we want to support them, we also have to support them in part with services from Performance Marketing, but that's not all, if the business develops and functions, it also has to be technologically and technically well positioned, in terms of stability and scalability, which we map through our cloud services and application management and other things in this area. Last, but not least, the data and intelligence area, I don't think I need to say this here, it doesn't need to be said here anymore that data is the basis of economic success in the digital world. So we have our own department that takes care of this and works with our customers or supports our customers in collecting data, interpreting it, visualizing it and ultimately initiating optimization measures. Well, that's a little bit about diva-e, and we'll be happy to provide more details later if you're interested. Now back to the content. We just got so a bit by Oliver an introduction to commerce and e-commerce platforms, I have yes also in the announcement so a bit the perspective of the realizer, what really runs with us in the projects, with our customers so that one has so a bit of a framework, which customers and which sizes and which- what I'm talking about at all, times so a selection of commerce customers, which in some form similar to what follows now, corresponding initiatives directly and concretely to customer scenarios. Simply for reasons of confidentiality I think but that's also not a problem at this point. Good. Commerce.

diva-e and Bloomreach: scenarios between customers and commerce.

When we say our customers make transactions, our customers simply want to sell stuff. And commerce and a commerce system, a commerce platform is the first choice, and there's nothing wrong with that. The Oli has already been presented, in its execution. It's just that we are reaching our limits with the commerce system alone and our customers are reaching their limits with the commerce system alone. And I would like to explain a little bit here what these are, what is being brought to us. Why a commerce system is no longer sufficient to serve our customers. So essentially the whole part about authoring, that is, about several editorial flexibilities, if you will, editorial tools that you have, it's about how to design templates, modules, how easy you can do it, Oliver talked about the fact that you need a service provider if you need a new template and so on and so forth. There are possibilities created by CMS or management in general to improve that, or even to make that not necessary at all. But then there are also editorial processes that are more complex. There are topics such as internationalization, when you are internationally positioned, you do not want to maintain the content twice and three times and above all not redundantly. You try to reuse a lot of content, and if you then mix it up in different languages, in different countries, in regionally different content, you very quickly end up with a complex construct, which you can usually map with a professional content management system, but you won't get very far with a pure commerce solution. Now we are very often, and also with the customer portfolio what I have just shown to entrance and also very much in the B2B area there we have to do it very often with complex products.

That means, these are products, where you can't conclude from the product name and the product image what function it has, so a layman of course not anyway, but even the customers, our customers have problems with it, what offers itself then is content-heavy additional information, so everything that no longer wants to pack on a product page, no longer on a product detail page, something like area of application, project descriptions. Something like that to explain to the customer what this product is actually good for, where it fits, where it doesn't. Related to this is the findability, I once used the analogy, store the look from the fashion sector, fashion sector, somehow. Similarly, we can and do this with our B2B customers who have products that are difficult to find from the customer's perspective, which means we can present them in context, you can imagine, I'm now the operator of a car wash and I'm looking for some parts in some form, this can be presented visually, that the store, that the retailer presents itself at the point. And the customer finds products in the appropriate places, where he would also look for them in the real world. These are all content and media-heavy topics, so also not where a commerce system usually feels comfortable. Still, we don't want to make it look like that at this point by having a second system. I don't think that was the case a long time ago, when I saw a store on the left and the content management system on the right, the website, and you're always jumping back and forth between systems. The aim is to create the experience system in the box, so that the uniform interface is there, it should be possible to personalize, so that we have a personalized search and do not have to search for products in different places, stop. When we're ready and say, "Okay, now we have to do an integration somehow," then we're usually or very, very often asked the question, "Which approach is the best now, you do this relatively often, you must know your stuff?" And with such a little smiley, well I want to affirm that here, there is not and there really is not. And we're not just saying that because we want to sell a few consulting hours again, I want to break a lance here. I would like to back this up at this point, because there are also reasons for this, which may be obvious, but I would like to emphasize them again, because in all of our projects there are differences in the area of sales volume, i.e. how much is ultimately sold, how large are the shopping carts, how large is the traffic on the platform, what reach do I have, am I international, am I national, which target groups do I address? Which buyers, which system do we use, do we use electronic purchasing systems, do they search by product numbers, do they shop by lists, whatever, that's a, because to every project in B2B is different.

Also the question, where do I market my products, in which channels, is that purely the website, the app, is that marketplace, or similar, those are the things that usually differed many times. Then there is also the initial situation, there are always boundary conditions, through existing system landscapes, so that is - I myself have never experienced that a customer has really started from scratch, that you really say, I'm throwing everything away, my complete digital landscape, and start again from scratch. As a rule, you always have at least one EAP, perhaps even a PIM or a DUM, at the start if you want to go in the direction of a digital operating channel, and then a framework condition is already set by the choice of system, which may be different under certain circumstances. Also, the determination of the products that one wants to use, through corresponding technologies, through cloud or non-cloud, these are all initial situations that are not always homogeneous. Last not least, the time, so even if in front of it, if with the first two everything is exactly the same, two years go into the country, and you would make again another solution, the reason is simply, as Oliver has also just presented, that the products or the manufacturers of the products continue to develop, thereby always give new combinations and it makes sense at the point, so always interesting, at any time - so at any time, if I have such an initiative in front of me, just look again.

What new developments are there on the market, what can I use to proceed more efficiently with my solution?

Now I'll quickly jump straight into the individual scenes, I've simply compiled them because that's really what we're still doing out there, in the wild, today, or in some cases still doing. To close then also a little bit the circle, to what then the Oliver showed, what I find is a very progressive, and you there perhaps or also there perhaps a little bit to pick up at the point. On the one hand, we have projects where we have a so-called loose coupling, where we have two completely separate systems that don't know each other in the real sense. They are not directly linked. There rather at the place, the Commerce system delivers the page. A little bit displayed, that's what the page should be. With a blue frame, that means the storefront. The commerce system delivers the page. The corresponding content, that is modules, teasers and anything else from the TMS, that is individual content elements, are then reloaded by the user's browser.

That's a very simple, low-cost integration, you get up and running very quickly, but there are some disadvantages, like load times, things like that, you have problems if you want to somehow start playing out personalized content, handing out user sessions, if I want to be logged in and so on and so forth. So it's a very simple solution, where you can definitely use an NVP and test it, for example, in a landing page approach, if I include a few products here as well. By all means, there is the situation vice versa. So, and this is just for the sake of completeness, that can of course also deliver the TMS and pull the individual snippets from the commerce system. It always depends a bit on what I want to achieve with it. The next step is actually a full stack scenario, where both systems are again in the full expansion stage. That means from the backend to the store front with the CMS frontend in use, but here at the point linked via a delivery of content, from CMS to the store of the staff and may look a bit strange at first for someone who has already dealt with it, why do we use the frontend here to somehow bring that into the store? The observation is correct. At this point, the reasons are as follows, and it is also the initial situation that was the deciding factor here, at the time we did the integration, there were already two stores at the customers, based on Hybris or e-commerce, and there were also already two websites, or we call them channels, based on Bloomreach Experience Manager.

What we have written on the flags, because there are still many channels to come from the beginning of the CMS development is that we can use modules, templates, everything possible that we build there, cross-channel, that is, you should build once, define once and maintain in one place, technically in one place only wade, but should be available in all channels. Thus also in the commerce channels, and that was ultimately a decision that led us to adopt the HTML at this point, because it makes sense from a maintenance perspective and long-term efficiency at this point. We still take advantage of the independence of the commerce system from the CMS frontend in the- ultimately, because we have the content, or because the content is persisted in SAP, so it's also deciphered appropriately via search, and the user experience is integrated out there. Then we have an approach that is just coming up more frequently lately. Oliver has mentioned the topic and the keyword several times, the Bloomreach Experience Manager, is part of the BXT or BAX, which Oliver just said, can also be operated headless. At that point we combined that with Spryker, the background for the measure was that we have at that point for a customer who has a business-oriented corporate presence, who wants to use contemporary shopping features that he found in the commerce platform of Spryker, we want a fast time-to-market, half a year, and at this point we tried to integrate an enterprise CMS as equally as possible, because, let's say, the authoring options in Spryker were rather limited and we had a different requirement, and at this point we created a solution or are in the process of creating a solution. The professional possibilities of a CMS authoring accordingly with maintenance of preview for the editors about such an integration can map. The next, last scenario, which I have now brought here again today, is what we call the Experience Platform, which we once did for-or what we did for-customers, where we were involved very very far at the beginning, including system expansion and architecture development.

We started with the requirement to deliver products - the complete product side in over forty countries with over thirty languages, and ultimately want a homogeneous user experience to the outside world, it should look the same everywhere, but we have the challenge of an international homogeneous system landscape, which means that we have - each country may have a different EAP or the PIM is there, or there is no PIM, there is another data source, the product data, but ultimately we have the requirement that we are active in every country and can serve it with the platform. Last but not least, there were also high requirements for the findability of the products, i.e., search was very much at the center. Our tool has led to the following architecture: we have placed the search index, which is the basis for our search, at the center. Essentially used as a central repository, in which all other systems in principle as their own service system deliver their information, which we want to deliver in the front end, respectively we the user. The CMS at this point, which itself also stores all its information in the search index, has access to this index and you have the possibility via the authoring methods of the CMS to provide all possible content from the connected systems to the user centrally, so full flexibility with all the possibilities plus this personalization relevance, whatever the - we want to use from the Bloomreach Experience Cloud to present it to the customers there centrally. In addition, of course, such a structure that is somehow so component-oriented has the possibility that you are able through little monolithic bricks to provide individual systems or individual updates from a PIM or an EAP more or less in real time via the index to the customer. So there are then these nightly runs for all the product updates you don't need at that point. Exactly.

And now, to bridge the gap again, or to close the arc or the circle, like this. I think you mentioned it earlier with the dollar chart or something, I hadn't heard it before, but, yes, if we now try to draw a parallel, or rather, if I now compare it with what we see today, what a Bloomreach Experience Cloud offers, which we definitely didn't have back then, we started the project more than two years ago, it's the case that we could have saved ourselves a lot of time in all these areas by already having the possibilities back then. On the one hand, it's a bit of a shame when you look back, a bit wistful on the one hand, but on the other hand you can say that since the project has already been completed and the platform is already live, we have been a bit ahead of our customers in terms of time, but it's nice to see that our partners are developing in this direction and making life easier for our other customers in the future. And then we're almost at the end, our conclusion, and I think we want to do that together at this point, Oliver. I'll leave the stage to you for the first part.

Conclusion

Oliver-Daniel Bogatu: You're welcome, thank you, André. In the end, I think it's no surprise to all of you that we conclude that B2B versus B2C, e-commerce, that ultimately there are no differences or big barriers there, you have to pick up today in B2Me, in customers, industry customers just as, I say entertain now, just as a fashion customer who comes to a fashion platform, who also wants to find quickly what he's looking for, who wants to be inspired and so on and so forth, so these boundaries, are becoming thinner, blurred, the basic approach is the same today. In the same way, the observation is that today an experience cloud ultimately all the functionalities that really make up a user experience today can be implemented in one tool working together, so to speak. I even go so far, and this comes from discussions with customers who talk about re-platforming topics just from this challenge, even with self-developed back-ends or e-commerce solutions, the experience solution is feasible to set up just a modern content. Yes, and of course the wheat is separated from the chaff when you have mastered artificial intelligence and machine learning and have decades of experience here, which we bring as a company, and when I hear these buzzwords today, then it is usually only talked about a simple AB testing it goes far beyond that, of course, and the business matrix are developed by the meaningful use that the technologies incredibly upwards.

André Lähr: Exactly. Then I would like to emphasize again that such a, if we talk about a DXP, so a complete platform, then it is already so that one has perhaps a proper respect for it and I would like to emphasize again that the scenarios that I have seen, that I have shown, are quite sensible approaches, how one can also get there step by step. So it may be that you start with an e-commerce platform, that a CMS is a second step and that a search is a third step. This may even be necessary for technical or content-related reasons, because the organization may want to develop along with it, and you also have to grow with the technical requirements that you have when you immerse yourself in the digital world and sell products online, then optimize them accordingly, and then when you get into personalization and search. Thus, a platform is quite useful as a basis and for the start, even if you only use a few parts at the beginning. Or you can also use existing infrastructures. So that means, if you have commerce projects in the pipeline, just really think about such a platform approach, just remind yourself, inform yourself, as I said, the timing is important, what's going on out there at the moment, what can the manufacturers do, at this point already think about budgets, you won't get far today with an e-commerce platform alone. It is today already so that one builds at least one CMS in addition, that is actually so the rule, which we experience outside, and it will be tomorrow so that the next step comes. That means, if you have such a project before the chest, also to the steering of the expectation attitude internally, you look - you set up correctly, even if you do not make everything in the first year or in the first months, you make a plan to the digital solution, which you then at the end in a longer period of time have compiled. Alright I think so we are through and would be open, ready, looking forward to questions, first of all thank you very much for your attention.

Q&A

Angela Meyer: Yes, thank you André and Oliver, for your interesting input, here on the Bloomreach Experience Cloud and I would now just take the questions that have come in here, during your presentation and there was now just also specifically the question asked:

How do I know that BXP works for my business? Is there a way to simulate it?

Oliver-Daniel Bogatu: Yes, that is a very good and very valid question. Yes, we can of course provide scenarios via a send box so that a customer can measure his current KPIs with the KPIs of the XP solution, this is possible within certain limits and is of course also very strongly based on the plus three hundred customer solutions that we have already built, but the question can be answered with yes.

Angela Meyer: Very nice, yes exactly and if it should be more concrete here, please also approach Oliver or André, we can then also simulate the projects. So. The next question would be, yes, regarding the time span:

How much time does it take to integrate the Bloomreach Experience Cloud? Do you have any examples of customers, how much time is needed?

André Lähr: That's of course a difficult question because it- I just made it very clear that there are always different goals and requirements and anything else but regardless of that there are of course timeframes, I mentioned earlier one of the integrations, one of the essential integrations, I said that, you can also talk in the context of integrating a CMS of a commerce system of a platform, yes, even if you look at the definition of Gartner again, insofar, we do such integrations, that goes if you drive a very agile approach, in the context of a few weeks to have first steps outside, I say something like eight weeks, you can see the light of day depending on how agile you are, but it really depends a lot on where you want to go, to what extent you manage to really show that agility, so of course if you had somewhere in the most complex scenario, and say you want to replace your complete business processes, If, on the other hand, you start somewhere in the international arena in a country where you may not yet be doing any commerce, then you can of course start with very few, small features and then develop from there. In the more complex regions and there you are really in a position within weeks, so I say two months, to do something like that, perhaps the first attempts really out there. So that is also something that we support and endorse. What we also experience in the projects. In this respect, yes, I don't know, after two months I would say and yes, and after that it also really depends on what else comes.

Oliver-Daniel Bogatu: I might now add a little bit flippantly, André, you could imagine that there is an American software company out there, always with velocity in mind, so speed and ... #00:55:10#. So we want to enable the customer quickly to be able to quickly also show business results versus their previous version.

Angela Meyer: Great. So and I would now include one more question here. Before we then end the webinar for today, due to time.

And that is just on the question of whether the scenarios that you guys have talked about now would be typical for B2B or B2C. Which ones are most common there?

André Lähr: Since I have presented the scenarios, I would say I'll start, maybe you can also say something from your experience, Oliver. So now I have to think for a moment, but almost all of the scenarios were on the B2B context. But all of them on the level what I showed there doesn't matter essentially. What I said there and what I showed there actually applies to both scenarios. The advantages and disadvantages accordingly also applies to both. B2B and B2C. What we have not included in the overviews and the scenarios is the more complex reality around 2B, when customers have individual prices, we have more complex purchase prices, with decisions, approvals, a customer structure, a customer account structure. These are all so topics, where then really the B2B and B2C differs. But if it is all supposed to look nice and convenient at the front, these are the things that essentially still contribute to the fact that the projects become more complex. That certain requirements, we have it just about Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, that there is quite always to evaluate against the background of B2B and B2C. Because there you have different ratios between the number of transactions with customers. And that must also always fit, an AI or machine learning in the B2B area must also be used differently in some places. But essentially, from the scenarios, to answer the question, to go back to the question, it's already the case that this applies to both.

Oliver-Daniel Bogatu: Yes, I can underline what you said André. From our point of view, the ideal landscape for a DXP solution is multiple countries, languages, an incredible number of SKU's, so the more complex, the more effective the XP solution. And you can find that in B2B as well as in B2C.

Angela Meyer: Great, then I would say due to the time now, that all other open questions, will be answered by our experts afterwards. And now I would like to point out again that you are welcome to browse through our newsroom and register for further seminars that we offer with our customers and partners. And otherwise, thank you now for your time, Oliver and André. And thank you for your participation. And looking forward to the next time, thank you for your time and being there.

Oliver-Daniel Bogatu: You're very welcome.

André Lähr: Thank you very much, it was a pleasure to meet you.

Oliver-Daniel Bogatu: Thank you very much, goodbye.