Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Gerrit Kolb, CEO of CoreMedia (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. Can you give us some examples from your customer base where this kind of content–commerce fusion is happening on their website as we speak?

Gerrit Kolb: One example is Homebase. Homebase is using IBM system in the back-end. Then, we have JD Group who is using SAP in the back-end system. What usually happens is that people consume content form internal and external content editors. Then, they link it to specific offerings. They specifically create topic pages. Homebase is probably the largest retailer of home furniture and garden furniture in the UK. This is a very seasonal business. In the Fall season, you have different offerings and different stories. One thing they do is take pictures of those specific seasons. They have automatic flyover areas where they position their products directly in the story of a family that is going to picnic.

Sramana Mitra: What is your competitive landscape? There’s a whole bunch of content management systems out there right now including a European company that is quite big. What does the landscape look like? Who has what capabilities and how does the rest of your industry view this emerging trend?

Gerrit Kolb: Typically the biggest competitor that we have is Adobe from a content management perspective. Two years after we went into the space, they also went into the e-commerce space. There are other vendors out there. These are really things where you don’t really need to have the scalabilities and you don’t need to have integration with your product catalog.

The second biggest competitor is the limited capabilities of the commerce systems. When you buy commerce systems, everyone’s going to tell you that you can store a picture with your product and that can be rendered out to websites. It’s only by the time that people are getting into this that they understand this doesn’t help them. Having a picture doesn’t drive traffic and doesn’t provide conversion. The initial sale is probably more because of the in-house capabilities. On the second sale, it’s probably more because of Adobe.

Sramana Mitra: What about CMS like Sitecore? What kind of capabilities do they bring to the table?

Gerrit Kolb: It’s a good product. They generated their own commerce capability. We don’t see Sitecore a lot because they’re a .NET implementation and we’re a Java architecture. People are usually using either one or the other. When you go into a pure Microsoft shop, they’d most likely go for Sitecore.

Sramana Mitra: Is there any system out there in the market that does what you do and has a full commerce engine?

Gerrit Kolb: The only company that would come close to what we have and has a commerce engine would be Sitecore.

Sramana Mitra: Have you looked at the capabilities of WebLinc? They’re doing some very interesting personalization and fusion of community and user-generated content into the e-commerce websites that they support.

Gerrit Kolb: There are a couple of vendors out there that are specifically following a SaaS approach. They take the product and infuse specific information into e-commerce sites.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Gerrit Kolb, CEO of CoreMedia
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