Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Gerrit Kolb, CEO of CoreMedia (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How do you do it?

Gerrit Kolb: Most traditional web content management systems typically rely on an approach where the delivery of the web page is left to the web server. This means that you basically have a static environment that you can change a little bit with a little JavaScript. Our differentiating factor is that we have a component called the content application engine (CAE). We have developed a technology where we have a very scalable infrastructure and we have our own delivery infrastructure, which is highly scalable. Whereas if you wanted to scale in an environment where you are using just a plain server to do the rendering of your web experience, you don’t have the flexibility to do the contextualization and personalization. Also, we’re not only able to generate HTML, but also any stream of data that you could envision.

Sramana Mitra: You’re talking about the mechanics of rendering. I’m more intrigued by the rules of contextualization. Let’s take a use case. Condé Nast just announced that they’re going to have their editorial people get involved with their advertisers to generate marketing content on a sponsored content. I imagine the next step from there is to insert e-commerce into the Condé Nast. If that were to happen and if you were handling the content there and trying to integrate with a commerce engine, how would you know, for example if there is an Armani that is being merchandised, what content to pull?

Gerrit Kolb: We have a rule-based engine at the heart of it. We’re not generating web pages. We’re generating fragments. The way this happens is the CAE is able to pull information from multiple sources. For example, one of the sources might be the campaign management or specific campaign that you’re running. By the time that request comes into one of our servers, what basically happens is it looks at what information is available based on the request. It might be log-in information, your device, or your time zone. Then it’s able to ask if sources are internal or external. You can have external or internal context. The attributes of those data sources of context sources, as we call them, become available for you in the design process.

If you’re coming in the evening from an iPad in the city of New York where your normal location would be California, I’m rendering a specific promotion for you. I know you’re in town and on a mobile device. I know that you’re traveling. All these things become available, technically, to the CAE where you can provide a rule and combine it. It is then stored in the repository. Then the editor or the person that is actually designing the contextualization process is able to combine all these attributes from those context sources and articulate rules. Most of the time, they’re also connected to specific taxonomies to see what automatic content can be rendered as a result of the specific combination of attributes that you’re asking for.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Gerrit Kolb, CEO of CoreMedia
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