So I figured we start with a little bit of intro of the two you and then a little bit of intro of the project and then we'll get into questions and I'll try and feel some questions from the room as well. So if you hear something put up your paw and ask the question. Thank you. So, good afternoon all. My name is Steve Ward. I'm the IT Director of the British Safety Council. I've been with the charity for about 20 years and over that time we've been on, as you can imagine quite some digital journeys. The project that I worked very closely with David and his team at Reading Room was the inheritance of a web platform designed for one website with a lot of complexity, quite a complex digital architecture. And moving that across to a truly multi-tenanted architecture because as our charity group have set up separate charities and new brands and operations over in India there was a need to have multiple sites. I won't go into much more detail about that because as we talk through this I'll talk a little bit about those complexity and those challenges and how David and his team helped. Yeah, thanks very much, Steve. So, I'm David Lillington, Managing Director of Reading Room. As Steve said, I tend to lead the consultancy division of the business. So when Steve had the situation he finds himself in right now we work together with the team, put the right people into the room and that's all. Thank you very much and I think the first question, I'm going to change them a little bit, I know you had a chance to see the questions in advance. So just to screw with you a little bit. But this is because I'm curious. So where did the choice to go composable come from? What was the considerations before? Did it come from you or the partner? It was actually both. It came from me but because of the input from the guys at Reading Room. So, I'd inherited a complex architecture. So a website that had not long been being built, talking to multiple systems, our Salesforce, which is the heart of our system, digital learning platforms, payment gateways, etcetera. And this site had been built at not insignificant cost and it had been badged as a multi-tenanted site. So when we we span up assistant charity of our place in mind that work in mental mental health space and I was asked to plug, make some minding, just plug it into this new architecture. And when I started to take a look, I found that we're actually working with Umbraco but rather than taking that best of breed breed approach that you spoke about, we shoe horned in, we customized heavily the platform to get it to talk to our back end systems and rather than going for a best of breed off the shelf product, we try to build out our own - and that's the royal me, not me. So when I engaged with a number of potential suppliers, what Reading Room offered was first, not a supplier relationship but a partnership but actually a real deep dive into our technology and what their technical architect started to kind of introduce me to was this concept of look, you've got a really tightly coupled architecture. If you try to change this, it's gonna break here. If if you try to upgrade Umbraco you're now using it in a way that wasn't designed to be used. When you upgrade, when you put a package on, you get issues and we were using it off an open source e-commerce platform. I won't mention mention the name, but when we start to look at upgrading Umbraco we found that this platform didn't support the new release and furthermore the guy in the shed that built this had fallen off the face of the earth. So we're in a real predicament here and it was the technical, the technical guys at Reading Room that started to talk about abstracted responsibilities, modular design, getting a platform and use it in the way that it was designed to be used and then looking for the best of breed sub solution to take off the shelf and use that in the way that it was meant to be used and that's how we fell upon and Ucommerce there. Yes, I absolutely agree with what Steve said. I think the thing that I'd like to layer on top of that is we could see the direction travel, they were looking to what we're looking to achieve in the direction travel they were doing from our perspective, I don't think that the maturity of it was quite there at that stage. So from our point of view, what we did was take a bigger leap backwards and then start to really understand what it was they were trying to achieve. And with the relevant technical architects then start to build a very future fit solution very much around that composable idea because clearly that was what they were looking for, but it wasn't quite architected in a way that would be future fit and that was our role from that point onwards Thank you for that. And interestingly, what was the you didn't do to it and somewhat, but the choice of in this particular setup of Umbraco and Ucommerce what sort of thinking about that? The cost of Umbraco was interesting. So the platform we had before was Umbraco where a Microsoft-based technology stack I kind of knew of Umbraco I knew that we could use it differently as I said the price is very, very interesting, but it's important when you're going for that kind of of an open source platform like that and we've had our fingers burned with our ecommerce solutions, you've got to make sure that there's an entity behind that, that you're not dealing with a man in a shed that could just fall off the face of the earth. And Umbraco is an incredible product actually because you get the security and the R&D and the effort and the improvement on a platform. And the cost. I mean it's just incredible. With Ucommerce we looked at a couple of different options, Ucommerce for us gave us a really good functionality fit, some of your marketing features are really good. There was another product out there that on the face of it looked much more native to Umbraco but that was a small man and white team, again: man in a shed. My fingers burned when I began to understand Ucommerce a lot better and I began to learn about the close relationship you have with Umbraco. because Umbraco was partner with Sitecore at the time, I don't know if they still do but my concern was that Umbraco would focus on the relationship with Sitecore because that's a big product that's expensive. It's got big ticket clients. Once I understood the relationship between Ucommerce and UMbraco, I felt that Umbraco would always be part of the Ucommerce roadmap and vice versa. Great price point. Not quite as good as Umbraco but a great price. Great set of functionality and I must say that since I've began to use Ucommerce, your customer success model now and I know that it's in its infancy. I've worked with Salesforce and some of the big companies many, many times and it's a fantastic approach if you're giving direct support to your end user and you're cutting it and it's, you know, this is how you as an end user leverage this package. The more they get from the package, the more value they see, the more sticky they become. It's a great value point for the customer. Great value point for the vendor of course, because you've got more chance of those renewing. So I hope that answered your question. Yeah, coming back to the point around Umbraco. So it's an agency, we're a tech agnostic agency So we start looking at the problem rather than the tech, however, it was very clear from British Safety Council that they actually did have a preference for .net. So we narrowed it down to .net and then Umbraco, we couldn't say how many hundreds, tens of hundreds of sites we've built with Umbraco over the years. We've got a .net team of over 14 developers. So for us it was a no-brainer we're talking about, we love using Umbraco Umbraco was the right solution. In recent times, also Umbraco improved their digital roadmap. It's very clear to see where they're going in the future. For clients that gives them a lot of comfort and stability and I guess piggybacking on that with Ucommerce as well. One of the tasks for us was to talk with British Safety Council and Steve in particular which vendor will be best for them to plug and play in that composable DXP setup. There were lots of different names thrown around at the time but we did firmly believe Ucommerce was the right solution because of that digital roadmap, it's absolutely critical that something is correct right now, but it also has the extendability for the future. That scalability for the organisation. Perfect, thank you for those kind works. I appreciate them. Any questions from the room? Everything is so clear for everybody. We're doing an amazing job here, I think. Cool, so let's switch back to composable, that is after all, why we are here. I'm wondering, you know, whenever we see something shiny to use this for everything, um but it's not always uh, the best idea to do it, right? So I'm wondering in your choice of composable and this particular approach, what were some of the challenges that you came across in the building project and maybe now that you're in production? The biggest challenge actually, that was coming here today and to say composable and not compostable every time I'm going to say the words, you know, when we're not gonna chuck it in a bin wait for it to decompose and Do you know what, it's a double and short When you're trying, if you're trying to do what we've done in the past and you're trying to build and you're trying to customize its, you, you potentially have more control and you can potentially get exactly what you want. But the overhead, the testing, the risk to ultimately build a product that just stagnates because unless you put R & D into an effort to change, it won't improve when you're buying off the shelf, you sometimes having to compromise the way you want to do things and you have to adopt the way that platform wants you to do things. And I would strongly urge that you do that. I've been in this game for a long time, I made that mistake many, many times. So it's quite in, in a sense, it makes it easier because you don't have to design it. You don't have to build it. You've got somebody out there that's got something that's tried and tested and works and works in a good way and guess what? In three months time you're going to get an upgrade in six months time, you're going to get some new capabilities. The challenge comes from selecting the right platform and that's where you partner with somebody that's an expert in that space, somebody that's technology agnostic. So you don't get ushered down the route because that's the technology that that they can provide and support and have expertise in, so that I must admit, I think I relied heavily on the partner there to take the complexity away, but on the flip side, you need to be an intelligent customer, You need to know what you want, your partner can only give you what you need if they not only understand what you want, but understand you, understand your strategy for the next 3 - 5 years and that's why the relationship with Reading Room is not one of customers, supplier, it is one of a partnership. The more successful, they make us, the more ultimately the more we'll spend, the longer we'll stay and the more successful that relationship becomes. So yeah, I hope that answers. I'm sure you have more. I'm not sure I do. The the only point I would add on to that I think is that people approach this from various different angles, value for money. It could be the best of breed. It could be their maturity in the cycle and I think the ability to be able to compose something either straight away or over time really is a great value when you sit down with an organization taking that big leap backwards when you're discovering in the first instance, which is typically what we do. Does it make sense to go for this great monolith? Does it make sense to chunk it? And then one final point is around getting buy-in from the business as well. I think it really supports the business decisions when you can confidently turn around and say there is no compromise here, this is delivering exactly what we need to Can I just add on to that piece about the buy-in? I had a really tough gig. My predecessor had spent an enormous amount on doing the website, badged it as something that it wasn't. And then I had to say we've got to make it compostable and go composable. And Reading Room really helped with that. The guidance, the clarity, the arguments they made were non debatable, which made those board conversations much much easier. Okay, thanks for that. Really, we're just getting started. Okay, when the whiskey comes, it's just going to run longer and longer. And I was thinking about the word "compostable" there, which is, it's interesting when you think about the recycling and all that because there is this point of composable, where the idea is to extend the life cycle of the solution. So hence the binds required between both parties. And the idea of selecting platforms is one that never ends right? Because Umbraco, Ucommerce, all the other bits may be the right fit today, but as your business change something else, you're gonna have to do it all over again, not in the same, you know, with everything, but just bits and pieces. It's the modular approach, isn't it? It's that I can play. It's the modular approach for those are great. So one thing that's very apparent between the two of you is the is the word partnership you both use. Right. So I'm curious as to you know what is it, how do you work together to achieve this level of confidence in each other. So I guess Steven has been really open all the way through the relationship. He was very open with some of the problems that he has in the organization which allowed us to really kind of deep dive into those at the beginning. And I'd say it's quite a trusting relationship. We've got news which isn't always good. We'll talk about it. You need to have that conversation. And I think that that relationship quite often doesn't happen between agencies and clients is very much held behind a veil of we won't tell you until there's a problem. So if we have something we're very honest. Absolutely. My buzz word is trust. And when we, if the beauty parade, you know, Reading Room were one of five shortlisted to three, they were by no means the cheapest. But what they presented us with was the truth and I can say without a shadow of a doubt if I'd have gone down some of the other routes, I would have found myself in a very similar situation as my predecessor found himself where you believe the sales pitch and it's all going to be easy and halfway through you realize there's an extra complexity etcetera and costs go up and time go through, time scales go through the window, we built our new architecture for one of our sites and we're in the process now of migrating the last sites through. I can honestly say the first situation. We haven't finished the migration yet. So the jury's still out on time, on budget, on budget. Excellent quality. And working with genuinely the best technical guys I have ever worked with. And there's something, I mean, I'm a technical guy. I'm a technical director of IT. I'm rubbish at the political stuff and the boardroom stuff, but the tech, the tech stuff I really know and to work with the guys at Reading Room. It's a breath of fresh air. It really is. So yeah, trust and and honesty, honesty and trust and skills. Skills last. Excellent. That's it. Thank you both.