Cloud, Content and Commerce

byte5 COO Chris Köhler is excited for what 2019 has in store. What topics interest him at the moment, what trends does byte5 2019 focus on? An interview with Chris.

2018 was the year of content commerce for byte5. What role will this topic play in 2019?

We started focusing on content commerce in 2018. Our biggest implementation was for a larger client, the publishing house C.H.Beck. More solutions like this will be realised in 2019. We have various products in our portfolio that we can combine in a sensible manner, depending on the client’s requirements. For our client Carrera, for instance, we are in the process of smoothing out what was initially quite a bumpy implementation when we took over. We will implement content commerce again and intensify our partnerships in the e-commerce area.

A strong partner network is one of the cornerstones of byte5. Which partnerships will be particularly important for the 2019 projects?

Well, there is commercetools, for instance, that we do not only use as a tool set in our projects, but that is also a partner with whom we will be working more closely this year. On 28 February, there will be our first webinar with Dirk Weckerlei, Head of Partner Management at commercetools, and Marcel Wege, our byte5 CTO. They will, with technical depth, report directly from project practice and talk about commercetools and Umbraco. Registration for the webinar is now open!

We will intensify our partnership with Ucommerce by certifying three developers for the latest Ucommerce version in spring. We will also strengthen the partnership with Findologic. Findologic is a machine learning-based search provider that is particularly strong in the area of ​​e-commerce. Using Ucommerce and Findologic, we have a number of projects commencing.

It is also worth mentioning that we have become an official Microsoft Azure Silver Partner at the beginning of 2019. We plan to achieve the Gold Partnership throughout 2019.

The Microsoft Azure Silver partnership means that cloud projects are becoming increasingly important for byte5?

Since the beginning of 2018, we as a company have been completely cloud-based with all resources. Customer resources have also been completely moved to the Azure Cloud. There are no longer any root servers.

When it comes to understanding cloud infrastructures, there are many agencies with deficits, but also system houses. These are environments in which the cloud is still only perceived as a collection of virtual servers, as it used to be. However, this does not remotely use the full potential or the possibilities the cloud offers – plus, this approach is incredibly expensive. Thus, it’s not a surprise to me that the need for our expertise keeps increasing when it comes to optimising existing cloud infrastructures: the same performance can be achieved at a lower cost and we achieve this by “only” modernising the infrastructure. We have moved away from virtual servers and now rely on the cloud, and on technologies such as WebApps, Elastic Data Base Pools, Azure Functions, and many more. Only by doing so, you get the real advantage the cloud offers: much higher availability, much higher security, much easier deployments and a much higher resilience for power peaks and the like.

What are other topics that concern byte5 in 2019?

Aside from cloud and content commerce, we will increase our use of JavaScript frameworks. We are already doing quite a bit of work in different projects with React and Angular. We will also continue to expand our team. We have been doing employer branding, active sourcing and recruiting for some time now.

We hired two new employees at the beginning of the year. Depending on the demand, our plan is to hire two to five new colleagues in the course of this year. Of particular interest to us are experts who master topics such as headless, content commerce, cloud, and so on and who are skilled with front end tech regardless of the platform. This will pave the way for PWA and app development.

And lastly: Which events are coming up this year?

The first big event this year is the next meeting of the CMS Expert Group. It takes place in London from February 26th to 27th. And then, of course, our own Umbraco Festival is coming up on April 5th. There will be fifteen sessions and sessions range from beginner topics to deep tech talks. Six weeks later, Umbraco Codegarden and the Gold Partner Summit will take place. Both events are always a real highlight for us. As every year, we also offer several Umbraco certification masterclasses.