Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Jason Wallis, CTO of Mozu (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Your point is well-taken that retailers need mobile sites and mobile presence. There are a lot of people who have platforms for mobile sites. What is special about what you do?

Jason Wallis: What is special and different is that the platform has one common data backend. The front-end is optimized for mobile and desktop. As a merchandiser or marketer who’s working to provide content, promotions, or any of the things it takes to provide the site experience, instead of having to do that in multiple systems, they can do it one time with Mozu. It’s synchronized out to all those places where consumers are instantly with no additional work or overhead required by the retailers. It’s just incredibly efficient at delivering consistent experiences and content across all the platforms that consumers are now using to interact with retailers.

Sramana Mitra: Whom do you consider as your closest direct competitor?

Jason Wallis: That’s a good question. When we’re talking about the simplicity and efficiency that you gain from a platform like Mozu, we’re very unique in that regard. There are other cloud platforms that are delivered on a similar format because they’re cloud as well. With the other platforms like Magento, you still end up having to cobble together multiple partners and multiple technologies to provide a mobile site and a desktop site in one place.

There’s another use case that this question spins into which is Bluefly. Bluefly is a fashion retailer. They launched on Mozu about a month ago. They have taken advantage of our native capabilities. Now, they have a mobile-optimized site and a desktop-optimized site. They also have a native mobile application. Their teams can manage the content for their native mobile applications and their sites in one tool. That’s a dramatic change for them. Prior to this, they had to manage all that in two separate tools.

What that meant was their native mobile app was just out of data and didn’t have the same promotions that were set up for their site. Now, that same team can do some much more. There’s not another platform out there that we know of that has that same native capability.

Sramana Mitra: You’ve talked about mobile. You talked about brands and retailers having to do multiple branded sites. Can you elaborate on that? What are you alluding to there?

Jason Wallis: It’s not uncommon for retailers, for SEO reasons or just for more organic traffic, to have niche branded sites where similar products may be marketed in different ways. As someone is out searching trying to find a product, they can come across it in multiple formats depending on how they search for it. As retailers start to optimize conversion, they typically start looking for those other branded sites.

I can go back to the Jelly Belly use case. They have a product called Beanboozled where they have these speciality flavoured beans. They’re all these different crazy flavours. They have a branded experience around that that’s separate from their Jelly Belly site. What we see a lot of retailers struggle with is, if they are in multiple markets, they all make big investments in their primary markets, but when they replicate that experience to a secondary market, all the work they put in that primary market doesn’t transfer over so the cost to move to those regions is exceptionally high.

On the Mozu side, since it has got one common backend and it’s multi-lingual and multi-currency, a lot of that data does scale very well and you don’t have to set it up over and over again.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Jason Wallis, CTO of Mozu
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