The secret (open) sauce for renovating your Customer's Digital Experience

Five years ago our company Komosion started grappling with our own disruption problem. We had a proprietary Content Management System - which allows people without coding skills to easily publish to websites - that was getting old.

Since we developed our CMS in the early 2000s, the global industry had consolidated.

It had also evolved. A web publishing system was one piece of “backbone” technology that increasingly had to work with other pieces, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, electronic Direct Mail (eDM) and social media channels.

We considered a myriad of options: rebuild our platform offshore – we looked to Vietnam and the Ukraine, but remained unconvinced. White label another proprietary system … or even abandon the space all together?

In 2014, we hit upon the solution: disrupt ourselves and give better value to our customers, using Open Source software.

There are two dominant platforms in our world: WordPress, typically for smaller sites and Drupal for the heavy lifting of enterprise web publishing - think The Whitehouse's website, NBC and Warner Music Group and websites for all its artists, a myriad of universities and so on.

The major, global proprietary competitors in use in the Australian market are Adobe CQ and Sitecore. The table below helps tell the story.

At home, travel behemoth Flight Centre’s global network of websites across 42 brands is powered by Drupal.

Thomas Julien is Head of Digital at Flight Centre. He’s a veteran of technology and data-driven marketing, hailing from Virgin Australia where he and his colleagues successfully set out to disrupt Qantas and other big boys.

Of open source in general, and Drupal in particular, Thomas told Komosion: “I’m a large advocate of Open Source. If you talk to any IT engineer, it’s what they grew up on, it’s what they worked on, it’s what they know, and you have the best support around it.“At Flight Centre we are delivering daily, we can release patches daily with confidence in the release. There are no hidden surprises of: ‘How does this work?’ Everyone knows it inside and out. You can hire people who have experience and who can bring to the table better ways of how you’re working with the platform, where in the proprietary world you’re pretty hamstrung.”

At Komosion, we view Open Source software a bit like most people might view generic drugs – identical in function to their branded, proprietary counterparts only unencumbered by hefty license fees.

It’s why we decided to rebuild our old CMS platform and take it to market as Kanvas.cloud, powered by Drupal.

We offer a bundled subscription that includes maintenance, support, hosting, an upgrade path and other marketing services – but no licence fee – that money is much better spent value adding to your web presence. Via APIs, accessed through an easy-on-the-eye back-end dashboard, the system can interoperate with all other core digital marketing technologies.

It was launched in May and is already used by publishers, hoteliers, financial services organisations and not-for-profit clients, among others.

For those organisations that don't want a subscription service, we also custom-build Drupal and WordPress websites.

Says Thomas: “You don’t get much for licensing these days, so it would be better putting in to actually delivering products to our customers, than paying for a box to sit there humming away with someone on the end of the phone call.”

He’s also very kind when asked about the strategy work that Komosion has undertaken in support of Flight Centre’s new focus on its Customers’ Digital Experience.

“Sublime! I think, can I use that word?” he says. “Komosion is sort of part of the fabric at Flight Centre. It’s not an us and them, its, we’re in this together and we’re going to solve this together and that’s a great relationship.”

If you’re interested in using Open Source (Drupal, WordPress or Kanvas.cloud, powered by Drupal)  and renovating your customer’s digital experience, we’d love to help. Contact [email protected].