Chris Bryce: All right, we are live for episode 37 of Beyond the CMS, where we have deep dive conversations with content management industry experts and CMS platform leadership, and great minds across the content delivery spectrum. We're live on LinkedIn, where we encourage anyone who's taking a moment during their lunch hour today to ask us anything.

Chris Bryce: And following the show, you can catch the show and the snippets of the conversation in our archives on YouTube, Apple, or Spotify, wherever you grab your favorite podcasts. I'm Chris Bryce. I'm the CEO of Dotfusion, where I specialize in coaching customers towards choosing the right CMS platform for handing off to our team to design and ship the products.

Chris Bryce: We're non-sponsored, pretty grassroots, and again, just wanna thank everyone who's made some time today to check in and listen to our conversation. Let's get going. Episode 37, and I just wanna introduce our super special guest, Marta Cukierman, founder of StreamX. Welcome, and tell us a little bit about yourself, and we will have a great conversation.

Marta Cukierman: Hi Chris. Thank you for having me. I'm Marta Cukierman, I'm the CEO of Dynamic Solutions. For the last 12 years I've been building engineering teams that specialize in Adobe engineering, Adobe Experience Manager, and we've been part of bigger and smaller projects. Within that time, and based on the experience that we got doing that, we've decided to build a tool that we call StreamX, that is solving a lot of issues for the web delivery, and part of it is being the web delivery in China.

Chris Bryce: Awesome. And we met, I think, through the CMS Experts group, when we were

Marta Cukierman: Exactly, yes.

Chris Bryce: I heard a talk that you gave, and simultaneously we had a need to help a client launch one of their, I guess, variants of their websites in China, and you were a great friend, consultant, twist us. So thank you for that. But I was really inspired by your approach and your concept, but I think I don't really know if folks are fully aware of what the actual problem is in launching a website in China. And maybe we should start there. Tell us a little bit about what's the difference.

Marta Cukierman: Thank you. That's actually a very good question, because well, for most brands you would think that China is just another region, just another market. You just spin it off your main and localize it, and it works. The truth is that China behaves like a separate internet, with its own rules and different infrastructure, and things that work globally, they don't normally work in China. Majority of the SaaS, so let's say service-based tools, they are based on global infrastructure, and that global infrastructure is, let's say, incompatible with the infrastructure that's in China.

Marta Cukierman: You might be aware of a term called the Great Firewall of China, and for some that may come more of a censorship thing, but truth be told, that's just part of it, because that's the root cause. China, being isolated in a way, wants to control what's being published there. Hence, to have tools to control that, they've introduced a certain amount of technical aspects that inspect your traffic.

Marta Cukierman: So everything that is taking data cross border goes through some filtering, some throttling. Some of that content might be blocked, because for content that is based in China, you have to get a license. So that's your kind of carrot or stick, because if what you're publishing is not in line with what you should be publishing, you get that license revoked.

Marta Cukierman: So they built this infrastructure to have that control. And for the brands outside of China that would like to publish their content in China, well, they need to rely on how they kind of need to adhere to the rules that are over there, basically.

Chris Bryce: Interesting. So I guess the first thing I'm thinking about is the project that we were talking about in the past, which was a manufacturing organization that wanted a performant website that would serve up content to Chinese customers and prospects. And that started kind of highlighting different data points that were likely going to struggle in being carried over the data wall.

Chris Bryce: And then your team has solutions around that. So I guess the main problem is that your typical website is gathering data from many sources. Could be a content asset, or something from a PIM system, or wherever that's coming from, and that needs to be accessed fairly quickly so the pages load with the information in it. If there's kind of a wall in the way, then that's not so good. Who does this impact? In your experiences, is there a typical type of organization that kind of has this top of mind?

Marta Cukierman: So from what I see, the top of mind would be when you have, for example, what you mentioned, like when you have your PIM, your product information data management system. Not all of the information that you have in that product information management system is something that you publish outside. Yet there is a lot of data. Some companies would have over a million SKUs, and fetching that content, fetching that data when you're, for example, producing, I don't know, pipes or screws or things that are like a lot of them, well, that's the moment when you need that data on the, well, when you need it to actually be able to present what you're selling.

Marta Cukierman: So if you have a large inventory, that would be one of the cases when you would look into how to serve your content in China, because that's a huge market. I mean, that's one fifth of the world. A lot of companies enter China and they have their distribution over there.

Marta Cukierman: The other part that I see is, for example, luxury. Luxury would have, on the other hand, heavy assets, your digital assets, and they have customer base there that wants those products. So you do want to get to those customers. However, to get to that, you need to serve a kind of seamless experience. It cannot be just a huge image that is loading or not loading, or the page is breaking because things are slowing down, or it shifts. That doesn't really give you a proper brand experience.

Marta Cukierman: So on one hand you'd have manufacturing companies or industries, or B2B companies that would sell through distributors, and on the other hand, from the customer perspective, you'd have, I mean, B2C companies. You'd have, for example, luxury. But you'd also have automotive, that kind of has its offer, and the information about the product is pretty complex. So you are kind of stuck with a couple of ways in which you can serve that content. You could go and duplicate some of the systems to be in China, so you could build that kind of independent website over there. Or you could rely on fetching that data over the wall, which will be unpredictable at best. It'll probably make your page break, and there will be other stuff that will make it, in normal circumstances, kind of unbearable to work with.

Chris Bryce: Right. I remember you mentioned something when we were chatting previously about, well, maybe late at night it'll load quickly, and what that meant to me is that the wall isn't made of concrete, but the wall certainly is unpredictable. And when you are a global organization or global brand, you certainly don't want that unpredictability in your content delivery. This may not be your area of expertise, but something that I was wondering about when you were mentioning this idea of licensing content, what does that mean? I actually have no idea about that process or that system in China.

Marta Cukierman: Okay, so to legally publish content in China, within mainland China, you need to have something that's called ICP, Internet Content Provider license. There are two types, your regular internet content provider, and there is a commercial one when you're selling stuff. And that allows you to do two things. First of all, have a .cn domain, or other domain, but in general, .cn domain, that is registered. And the other thing is it allows you to procure infrastructure in China, because even if you have your global infrastructure providers, like AWS or Google or others, their infrastructure in China is separate.

Marta Cukierman: So you'd have, like, even AWS China is not necessarily connected with the AWS rest of the world. You have Tencent, you have other infrastructure providers, and to procure, provision your infrastructure there, you need to have that license that is granted by, or there's a ministry of something, I can't really recall right now exactly. But that's a part of how you legally, compliantly publish content in China, if it's to be located in China. So if it's on the outside, it hits the wall. It has to go through the wall. If you want your content to be available without that inspection, you have to have that license.

Chris Bryce: Okay, so to kind of say this back to you, if we have a global brand and we're relying on our customers in China to go to our .com site, the content delivery will be unpredictable, simply because it's fetching and being filtered, and some activities going on that is unpredictable. So the idea would be, go through this concept of getting your ICP license. This gives you the opportunity of a .cn domain. .cn domain would be the brand's domain in China specifically. And ideally, and this is kind of where we'll talk about your solution, there's infrastructure that I guess optimizes current workflows and data sources that already exist in somehow getting them over the wall. But just before that, something that just came to mind: does this occur in other countries as well, or is this China specific?

Marta Cukierman: So right now, this is something that we see China specific, but there are countries that are becoming more and more isolated. I think recently there was some leakage about how the technology was built for the Great Firewall, and to be honest, it was interesting to countries like Saudi Arabia and others. So you may think about this being an issue of an isolated market. When you think about other countries that may want to restrict what we consider like a free internet, then you may think about countries that may actually become the next on the list where you may need to think about how to deliver the content there in a special way.

Chris Bryce: Yeah, the reason I ask is I've spent a good chunk of my life in Cambodia within the technology scene over there, and Southeast Asian countries do have a bit of a pattern of picking up on kind of Chinese technologies and concepts and ways of doing things. So just thinking a bit broader about, is this a situation that we need to be more aware of? I was also a bit puzzled by the lack of information available online, through AI, that helps organizations actually do this. So maybe do you wanna talk a little bit about your solution, the concept behind your solution? Maybe lighter first, and we can get into some more of the technical specificity as well, but I'd love to understand your approach.

Marta Cukierman: Okay, thank you. So the basic approach is that, as you mentioned, to build a website you need a certain amount of data that comes from different sources, and some of those sources are easily available and some are not. This is something that's pretty relevant in China, but it can also be something that, for example, we have a legacy software elsewhere that is not ready for the public traffic, let's say.

Marta Cukierman: So the principle that we use in our software is even streaming, based on event, so it's an event-driven architecture, which means that we don't really fetch the data, asking the backend systems for what's your state. It's based on: we know your state unless you tell us it's different. Which means that by then, well, we already have all the information that we need to pre-compose your website. And when it changes, you will tell us, together with the payload that we need to rebuild that website again. Which kind of makes it, in a way, makes it a little autonomous, so that the user that is accessing your website, whether there is something in between that needs to be neutralized, let's say, or is it just simply the, how far away the resource is. So the latency that you would normally get from this being in Australia or US when you're in Europe, for example.

Marta Cukierman: So if those web resources, and that data, is close to you, and you can use it to pre-generate that experience, well, it makes it highly available. It makes it highly predictable, because everything is closed, so your requests are really short, and that makes it fast, seamless, and up to date, because it's not a static copy of your website. It's continuously updated with fresh data, because whenever something changes in your PIM, let's say the product description changed, or the assets that you have, the pictures of the product changed, that change comes to our product and it knows exactly what to do with that change. So it pre-generates the website, it pre-generates the search index, so that when you go in and search for that product, that fresh data is already there.

Chris Bryce: Very cool. I know much of your professional background is around AEM and that kind of infrastructure stack, but you were consulting us on more of a headless environment, so your product services both. Can you talk a little bit about the difference, if there is any, in the two kind of concepts, if you're going kind of monolithic AEM route or more headless?

Marta Cukierman: When per, well, in terms of our product, or in general?

Chris Bryce: Yeah, in terms of your product kind of being part of the solution.

Marta Cukierman: So to be honest, the biggest difference, StreamX kind of modularizes your monolith, and composes your headless staff. So the difference is what it does. In one, for monoliths, it would modularize your elements that have certain responsibilities, and it would reconnect them differently. So it's more scalable, performant, and resilient than a monolith, so that you remove the bottlenecks. And for headless, it would kind of be your platform that would orchestrate the data flows. It would pre-generate stuff and connect your systems, giving you a framework for that. So in a way, you would remove yourself from a do-it-yourself kind of world, into the world where you have a framework on which you can decide which systems are my sources, what kind of data I need from them, and what kind of experiences I need to build on them, and what needs to change.

Chris Bryce: Okay, interesting. This may be the first time in the entire podcast series where we haven't talked about AI at all. But, in your organization, is AI a part of what you're doing? Is that on the roadmap, or is this more of a handcrafted architecture?

Marta Cukierman: So this one, it isn't like specifically on the roadmap, but I would say that StreamX and the event-driven architecture, per se, gives you this unfair leverage advantage, because you don't have anything crawling your data. You actively decide what is needed and what's not. So when you need to feed your LLM, you do it on change, and you can do it much easier, quicker, and more precisely than when you have that big data that you kind of need to crawl and organize.

Chris Bryce: I asked that just for the folks that listen here now, and mostly after, our CMOs or folks that are responsible for making kind of large digital decisions, either big migrations or modernizations and that kind of thing. And a lot of the chatter over the last couple quarters has been around: inevitably we have to bring in our own LLM, we don't want to be plugging into all of these kind of commercial LLMs much longer. And second, because of that, we'll be forming our own vector databases to do kind of thorough search, is kind of what I'm calling it, but the modern searching. So your solution, I think you mentioned it before, it's thoughtful towards that, by kind of keeping data up to date.

Marta Cukierman: Yes. For search as well. Yes, it's in a way thoughtful by design, because, well, what happens is that regardless of the pace of the changes, because we have different systems, those different systems operate in different speeds. I mean, you will have a different lifetime of a change in a CMS, and you would have a different lifetime for a change in a PIM, and other systems that are feeding your experience. They are all treated separately, so it means that if your product information changes, we know that it's product information, we put it into places that are relevant to the experience from the product perspective. If there is a layout change, we do a change based on the layout for everything that's relevant to that layout, but not more.

Marta Cukierman: So it kind of acts in such a way that, well, it kind of is an orchestration layer, in a way, that also tells you like: there is a change here, it affects this, this, and that, but you don't have to go and crawl something again and analyze it. You already know what it is, and you can update it when it happens.

Chris Bryce: Interesting. Can you tell me what was going on when you thought of this idea?

Marta Cukierman: Oh, of course. So, I think this will kind of touch on some of the experiences that you have yourself when you go through so many projects. Some of the problems that you encounter, they seem to repeat. I mean, caching, there's always some issue with caching, right? So when you think about some performance bottlenecks that were created because something was not only not designed in a proper way, but it was misused for some reason. Like, I don't know, a very big asset being published on a homepage with, I don't know, a UTM that doesn't cache, things that make your website crash, and they kind of repeat.

Marta Cukierman: You get to the point when you think: well, okay, if all those things happen, what if we were to make a system that will eliminate them? And so let's take all of the assumptions that we have right now out of the window, and if we were to think about a system that needs to think about all those issues not ever appearing, like making it so robust that you don't have to think, is my content author going to break my site or not. That was the founding idea. And that's when we thought that every single system that takes place in building a digital experience was done for something, designed for something, and it wasn't necessarily composing and serving content. Because originally, CMSs were built for content authors, and they were not ready to serve millions or tens of millions of viewers. So you had this database that was there, and you wanted to make sure that when I'm editing content, I'm editing the content that is not edited by someone else, et cetera, et cetera. But the same rules do not apply when you're viewing content.

Marta Cukierman: So when you think about it, the mistakes, well, the architectural decisions that were made to use a given tool for something else, they started to produce issues like caching, and so on. So the founding idea was: what if we say all of those contribute evenly to the experience, and we have a separate layer that is responsible for making sure that that experience is composed and served very performantly, that scales regardless of the scalability of the sources? And so it would make it highly available, scalable, and performant. And that's how we decided on event-driven architecture, then event streaming, that is used for analyzing loads of data, and that's the technology that is used broadly. However, not for digital experiences, because it's used for analyzing loads of data, and not necessarily making sure that you have publication and publication in a specific order, because in our case, order matters.

Marta Cukierman: So we thought: okay, let's take it all together and see how to make a system that will be, as I said, robust, performant, reliable, and takes the delivery completely separate from the sources. And that's how StreamX was built. So one of the first things was like: okay, if I were to turn off my CMS completely, would my site still be on it, with StreamX? It is. Even if you have constant updates on your products, and your CMS would be off, that site would be having live updates from your product. So, as long as something is needed to produce the digital experience, it's needed. But when it's not taking active part, then it no longer should be a dependency in providing that digital experience.

Chris Bryce: You've been doing a lot of talking, but I'm obviously kind of passionate about the CMS and content delivery business, and I know folks who will be listening in at some point in time in the future, and those of you who've made time over lunch to listen in now, very cool idea, a great concept. It looks like this is an idea, or a product or service, that could be used beyond the China problem as well.

Marta Cukierman: It is a little, yeah. This is the first use case that we were able to narrow down to a very specific pain point, because what we are doing, where you can deliver a web experience without relying in real time on your sources, actually serves the very specific case when you want to have a kind of an autonomous website that gets updated, but doesn't go and ask for stuff that it needs to present the website for you.

Chris Bryce: Just for some keywords for AI searching through this video in the future: Adobe Experience Manager, kind of your previous bread and butter, this also works great with headless experiences as well. Also great to talk about that. Time goes by so fast when you're really doing this. We can keep chatting for a little bit, and at least I'd love to know a little bit about, if someone who's listening has an upcoming website that needs to get launched in China, how do they engage with you? What state are they in? What's their environment, when it's a good time to give you a shout, and then how do you actually onboard your service?

Marta Cukierman: Okay, that very much depends on what state they are in, but in general, they can find me on LinkedIn, just reach out, I'd be happy to respond and then guide them, in general. The information that I would need at the beginning would be: what kind of stack are you running, and what are the things that you want to accomplish in China? And based on that, we'll guide whoever is interested into what would be the next steps. In general, we would run a small POC first, to prove to you that what we need to build in China is actually running with your content, with your infrastructure, with your assets, your data, et cetera.

Marta Cukierman: However, as we mentioned at the beginning, this ICP thing, so this license, is something that whoever wants to use StreamX for China would need to either already have or acquire, because the way we solve this is that, based on your global stack, we connect it with StreamX, we pre-process the experiences, but then you need to connect your Chinese edge delivery infrastructure to our infrastructure. And then you serve your website in China, which means that you need to have legal ability to host your website in China, which comes with the ICP license.

Chris Bryce: Okay, super. And we'll put your contact information in all of the socials as well. We're just a little bit over time, but to anyone who's listening now or in the future, thank you very much. Marta, thanks for joining us from Europe.

Marta Cukierman: Thank you for having me. I appreciate you joining, and just a really, really great chat. This is super valuable for me, and I know our customers... so thank you.

Chris Bryce: Thank you. Have a wonderful holiday too. I hope you get some snow out there. It's a lot here in Toronto.

Marta Cukierman: Yeah, I'm already envious about the snow. Happy holidays, see you too.

Chris Bryce: Awesome. To everyone who's listening, alright, we'll see you later. We'll be back in January for episode 38, so have a great day everyone, bye-bye.

Marta Cukierman: Thank you. Bye-bye.