Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - An update from Storyblok with Marcus Paterson

Innovation is powering a quiet revolution in content management.

That is the view of Marcus Patterson, Head of Sales for Asia-Pacific at Storyblok, who believes the future lies in "headless" content management systems (CMS). Storyblok, founded in Austria in 2017 and now used in almost every country around the world, is aiming to reshape how businesses manage and deliver online content.

Patterson explained, "Storyblok's mission is to deliver the best content management system that validates and prioritises content management innovations and enables teams to deliver their content in a fast and reliable way." The company operates entirely remotely, with its international staff working across Australia, Singapore, Vietnam, Taiwan and further afield.

At its core, Storyblok pitches itself as a "pure play CMS provider", rivalling platforms such as WordPress, Sitecore and Drupal, but offering what it describes as a new generation solution. "Storyblok is a global, SaaS content management system," explained Patterson. "Headless is just a term that enables an organisation to build a martech digital stack using best-of-breed capabilities."

The term "headless" CMS is on the lips of marketers and technologists worldwide. Unlike traditional CMS where the front-end (what the website looks like) and the back-end (where content is created) are tightly coupled, a headless CMS separates the content from the display layer. This flexibility gives companies the freedom to design unique customer experiences across channels and devices.

"You don't have to any longer look the same as everybody else and your competitor stack," said Patterson.

This flexibility is already enabling striking innovation among Storyblok's 160,000 users. Patterson pointed to a broad spectrum of use cases spanning the globe. "Sydney FC in Australia, timely with the Women's World Cup, relaunched their membership website to launch their new stadium earlier this year. They did it in double quick time – they were amazed at how quickly they were able to build their new site. Most importantly for them, it drove membership uplift and engagement and those were the two key metrics that they wanted."

At the opposite end of the spectrum, large operators are taking advantage of the technology's reach. "Vicinity Centres in Australia runs large shopping centres. They use it for smart screens to help customers navigate through their shopping centres. Tesla in Germany has a kiosk now where customers can configure their Tesla on a smart screen. A large South American telco provider, Cairo, uses it at huge scale with 70 million customers. These are just some of the illustrations of the breadth and innovation that customers can create using Storyblok," he added.

Given the gnawing buzz around artificial intelligence, it's perhaps unsurprising that the conversation turns to where AI fits in. "We don't directly in our product, but increasingly AI is being used as an add-on to our product and many of our partners have built AI tools. It's really cool what's happening in that space–being able to automate content generation for internal approval, being able to insert things like digital images that are created using AI on the fly as you're building your content," said Patterson. "We're just starting on the AI journey right globally, but there's no doubt we'll see much, much more use of AI in CMS going forward."

The market for content management is no less competitive than ever, with major household names eyeing the corporate market. But Patterson argued Storyblok offers two distinctive advantages: scalability and its visual editor. "Storyblok can suit organisations from very small to incredibly large, so it's very scalable–that's the first thing. The key differentiator for us, there's probably two that I'd like to call out. One is our visual editor."

He described how traditional web development required content managers to fill out forms or code, then publish, only to discover if the changes worked as intended. "Our visual editor is real-time, so content creators are able to see the changes they're making, the content they're creating as it appears in reality on their website. That's the key benefit."

Pricing is also an issue for many organisations, he explained, with hidden costs and surprise bills when traditional services hit usage thresholds. "Storyblok's very predictable pricing – users, spaces and traffic are the three dimensions of our pricing that organisations can typically manage and predict very well."

As to the wider industry trend, Patterson is adamant that headless is the future of CMS, largely thanks to businesses' desire to break free from restrictive, monolithic systems. "It comes down to this new pervasive trend towards composable web architectures," he said. "It's moving away from these monolithic enterprise systems that were average at best across a wide range of functions, to a best-of-breed model where you can clip in and clip out new capabilities as they come to market, so you're always being innovative and progressive in your martech stack and you're not locked in for a long time to what we would call a legacy architecture. This is a modern architecture – you put core content management at the centre and then add on the capabilities that you need to tell your digital stories the way you want to differentiate your brand."

The company's presence in Asia-Pacific is rapidly expanding, despite the lack of physical offices. "Really exciting growth for us," said Patterson. "We're a startup, we're moving on from the startup and starting to grow internationally very fast. I think we've now got something like 160,000 users in almost every country of the world. We're a globally remote company so in APAC, just the same as in Europe and the US, we have no offices – all our team members work remotely. We've got Australian staff, Singapore staff, Vietnamese staff, Taiwanese staff, and we're just loving getting out and telling the Storyblok story to organisations in New Zealand and Australia, our two tier-one key markets, and starting to grow really strongly and getting some really valuable logos under our belt and there's more to come," he said.

As the industry faces significant technological change, Patterson and his team are relishing their place at the centre of it. He concluded, "Exciting times ahead."