CMSC Media Candid — BloomReach Partners

By Erika Jones

July 31, 2019

#brconnect19, Agency, AI, BloomReach, BloomReach Connect, Bynder, CMS, commercetools, Dept, Digital Experience, DXP, ecommerce, Elastic Path, Gorilla, Group, partnership, Passage

Last month, the CMSC Media team took to San Francisco for BloomReach Connect 2019. The week was filled with discussions of digital experience and innovation. Ellie Somfelean and I had a chance to connect with many leaders in the industry at this event and conduct interviews to get a sense of what trends are making headway. You can see some of our exclusive interviews with BloomReach executives here.

CMSC Media explored the conference hall at San Francisco’s Midway to chat with representatives that have partnered with BloomReach.  We were interested in finding out what motivated each of these companies to work with BloomReach, and sponsor the event. Our media team was also keen to understand the value propositions each of their company shares with BloomReach to unite them as an attractive partnership force.

Our interactions feature six of BloomReach’s biggest partners: Elastic Path, commercetools, Dept Agency, Passage AI, Gorilla Group, and Bynder.

One resounding take away from these interviews is just how enlivened these brands are to be partnering with BloomReach. When asked why they partner with BloomReach, many partners responded that they strive to offer their customers best-of-breed solutions and that BloomReach supports them in that approach. “We help empower customers. We want to create more of a best of breed approach to their technology stack, so to do that Elastic Path noticed that Bloomreach is really one of the best brands out there in the whole digital experience management space,” said Christian Desrosiers, Business Development Executive from Elastic Path.

Having these best-of-breed solutions available creates an environment for customers to have the best possible experience. Commercetools’ Chris McCann said, “Being able to adopt a best of breed approach by way of commerce tools, which is a microservices platform, and then allowing to acquire products like, you know, BloomReach’s CMS or BloomReach’s search and merchandising really brings a very powerful brand experience to customers.”

These partnerships allow customers to reap the benefits of not only BloomReach’s technology but that of their partners as well. Take Passage AI, for example. They are a conversational AI platform that provides highly accurate chatbots functions and works towards having functional voice commerce across all devices, such as Alexa. Passage AI is used by some of the top brands in the industry as a BloomReach Partner. “[We] work with BloomReach customers to enable their shopping experience everywhere,” says Mitul Tiwari, CTO, and Co-Founder of Passage AI. 

The common thread with everyone we spoke to was related to the customer experience. The goal is to make things easier and faster while using all of the latest technology available in the digital experience. “We have a new partnership with BloomReach,” says Brad Kofoed, Vice President, Global Alliances & Channel at Bynder. “We think [it] is going to help customers become much more successful in what they do and really enable them to use technology to support some of the processes and some of the people that are necessary to get digital assets that are approved and that are new out into the places where they are actually going to produce the business value that they were designed to produce.”

Our second question was about which value proposition their company shared with BloomReach; essentially, the common bond that makes them a great partner. By having a clear understanding of the unique offerings these connections with BloomReach provide their customer bases, we get a better sense of the benefits the partnership holds.

One recurring response to the question was in relation to implementation time. Chris McCann’s answer was immediate: “Speed to market.” Today, everything has to be nimble because customers need their projects completed quickly. By partnering with BloomReach, implementation times are proving to be exceedingly efficient.

“We are trying to deliver super-fast rapid implementations for our clients,” says Dept Agency’s Managing Director, Harvey Turner. “I think how we can work closely with BloomReach is [with] that combination of pace in terms of product velocity in terms of what [BloomReach] is delivering as sort of that absolute best-of-breed in terms of search and merchandising.”

Again, partners were mentioning how BloomReach is a best-of-breed solution, and how offering top technologies is a high priority. Gorilla Group’s Director of Business Development Joseph Patrevito told us that, “we try to bring best in breed services and platforms for our partners and as a best-in-breed offering, BloomReach is able to accomplish that goal for our clients.”

Erika Jones

Erika Jones is a Tech Reporter and Content Marketer with CMSC Media. Erika enjoys combining her creativity with her technical skills through graphic design. She has a background in communications and marketing and has a flair for social media and content creation. Erika is an avid traveller and enjoys seeing firsthand how technology connects us all in business and pleasure.