When enterprise publishing and technology companies think of WordPress, they almost always think of WordPress VIP as the premium hosting solution.
In this episode Amit Sion interviews the CRO of WordPress VIP, Jary Carter to discuss what it takes to continue to operate as a world-class industry leader year over year.
Transcript:
Amit
Over 40% of the web is on WordPress, who founded WordPress? Automattic. Automattic also provides a hosting service -That is WordPress VIP. XWP is proud to be one of the first gold VIP partners. Tonight I have the pleasure to speak with Chief Revenue Officer of WordPress VIP, Jary Carter. Good evening, and welcome to the XWP Tonight Show.
Welcome to the show. It’s great to have you here.
Jary
Thank you. It’s wonderful to be here. I appreciate you inviting me on.
Amit
Jary, in 2020, the year of the beginning of lockdown, it seemed that many businesses were investing in their online presence. WordPress is soaring. Why do you think it’s such a popular Content Management System?
Jary
Yeah, that’s such a good question. We believe that content is actually at the heart of enterprise growth. And really now business growth. And especially in a world where companies got locked down from in-person interactions. Digital experience and a digital presence became more important than ever for companies. And really, content is at the heart of that digital experience. And so content became really the heart of digital transformation. And nobody makes content easier to create, publish, distribute, than WordPress. So we saw a pretty, pretty large jump in market share. And we also saw a really big jump in customer acquisition at WordPress VIP.
Amit
Likewise, for XWP, we saw a great growth, and it was quite exciting to support these organisations that were faced with this difficult situation and had to transform—they had to take a new stab as to the way they run their business.
For our origins, XWP became a WordPress VIP partner when we migrated News Corp Australia to WordPress. This was many years ago, and a big project. They had 90 brands, and they are one of the biggest users of WordPress in the southern hemisphere. For WordPress VIP, what gives you the confidence of being their hosting platform?
Jary
That’s a great question. And we do this, not just for News Corp Australia, but we do it for companies like Capgemini and Abril and the RedBook Group, and Salesforce, who is now a very prevalent customer of ours, who we’ve really sort of helped through a digital transformation. There’s a couple of things. One, we really have a best in class platform, first of all, that boasts smart, proactive security, a great user experience. It’s tuned to performance for WordPress, and a WordPress environment.
We also bring together a best in class ecosystem. So we bring together an ecosystem around our platform of technology partners, supported integrations, and an ecosystem of agency partners like yourself, and your team to really come in and really understand our platform and deliver on behalf of your customers. So its partners in an ecosystem such as XWP that really also give us the confidence to, to take on really the most complex and interesting WordPress implementations that exist.
Amit
In your perspective, what do you see are some of the trends that people are experiencing in digital transformation?
Jary
That’s a good question. We see a couple of things happening. And if you talk to Gartner and Forrester, they’ll kind of reiterate these trends, at least from what we’ve seen in our interactions with the analysts, but we see kind of two things happening. One, you see certain companies and customers that are wanting to choose kind of the holistic, all in one, digital experience platform solutions. So these are the companies that boast sort of having a full DXP completely out of the box.
The only challenge with that is you have to fully commit to their product suite. And what we see is we actually see more sophisticated and nuanced companies that are actually creating their own digital experience and their own customer experience based on best-in-breed technologies. And where they feel like content is at the heart of this digital transformation. They’re choosing WordPress as the core platform for content and then they’re building on top of that and around that best-in-breed technologies that integrate with WordPress because WordPress, as you mentioned in the beginning is so ubiquitous from a product standpoint point, you know, just about every relevant technology company out there has an integration with us.
And we really offer the ability to integrate with best-of-breed technologies and allow companies the ability to create their own digital experience, based on the customer experience that they’re really trying to create which is really what everyone’s trying to create. Digital experience is just the buzzword, what everyone’s really trying to create is a better customer experience. And doing that, based on the technologies that are most relevant to their business, to their market, to their opportunity, is what we’re seeing a lot of companies do.
Amit
I really like the way that you express that, for XWP, when we engage with a new organisation, they’re coming to us and they say, “we want to migrate to WordPress, or we’re not happy with the performance of the website, what do you think of this technology?” I try to slow it down and say, firstly, what’s your business objective? What are you trying to achieve? Let us figure that out together, because that’s what we’re actually wanting to help with. And then the technology will fill in the gaps of what we need to do that.
Jary
That’s such a good point. Customers, at the end of the day, you’re saying the same thing I am, which is, everybody wants to create a better customer experience, that’s really and especially in 2020, and then the shifting world of digital transformation, people were really scrambling to try to create a better customer experience when they couldn’t have these live in-person interactions. And so we really try to start from that place with a customer, and then work back into what’s the technology? What are the suite of technologies that we can really help you navigate to create the customer experience that you want.
Amit
Finally, there are many WordPress hosting platforms out there nowadays, what sets WordPress VIP apart from the others that are around marketing their wares?
Jary
A couple of things. One, we talked about this sort of best-in-class platform. So we are a tuned platform specifically for the WordPress enterprise market. So that’s one, we offer some of the best expertise in the world in terms of support and consulting and professional services, that comes from our support team, which is incredibly proactive. So we don’t just sort of support the platform, as it were, we actually go fully into supporting the customization, the applications, the plugins, the integrations that a customer really wants to create the, the experience that they want.
So, Forrester talks about this idea of real practitioner support. And when we actually went through the Agile CMS wave report, we scored very, very highly in giving practitioners the support that they needed to actually feel confident in their experience. So that’s one thing that really sets us apart. The last thing I would say, is just the bringing together of the enterprise WordPress ecosystem, because we have customers like you talked about, and we talked about, like, you know, News Corp, Capgemini, Abril, AShed, Salesforce, because we have this bulk of customers, we also bring together this ecosystem of agencies, developers, global system integrators, technology partners that come in and really create this ecosystem for our customers that they can not only get the platform and hosting that they want, but they get the full ecosystem of support assistance and integration help that they need to be successful. So it really does differentiate us from maybe a more traditional sort of hosting platform that hosts WordPress and other technology.
Amit
Jary, I must say, we’re, again, very proud with the relationship that we have with WordPress VIP, the customers that we have with News Corp, with Rolling Stone, Variety, iOne Digital, so many. It’s such a great experience that I find that we’re providing together. I wanted to thank you for that engagement. And thank you for being on the show tonight.
Jary
Thank you so much Amit. I really appreciate the time and thanks for having me. It was really a pleasure.
Amit
Good evening, everyone. We’ll see you next time.