TechForge recently spoke with Adam Bateson, VP of Sales at Umbraco, who explained the benefits of hyperautomation and a digital workforce, as well as the importance of sustainability.
Can you tell us a little bit about the company you work for?
Umbraco is the largest open source CMS for Microsoft.net. We are a Danish software company that’s been around for about 17 years, and we’ve been in the US for a few years now – initially there were just one or two sales people working with our business partners. I joined less than two years ago, and since then our team has grown to nearly 20 people in Charlotte, North Carolina.
We are primarily a US sales and marketing team, but we also have some support staff. We have a Sunshine support team at Umbraco based in Denmark and the United States, as well as a new team in Vietnam to support our customers. We also have developer relations, which is important because we are open source and we have a large community.


Speed to market will be an important key factor for Umbraco. If you look at G2 comparisons, you’ll see that we market very quickly to small sites, mid-market, and even the large enterprise clients we work with. We provide faster, on-line service from the beginning of the project. If you compare to some of our proprietary competitors, we generally offer lower costs because we’re open source and therefore don’t have a license. We make money by providing service, support and add-on products.
I think the open source nature of Umbraco is our secret sauce. We have partners and customers who come to us who only want to work with open source vendors. Therefore, I think the ability to innovate, customize, and change mid-project by accessing the code gives developers greater flexibility. We also have a very intuitive interface. It’s a great technology for content editors and marketing teams that keeps you safe, yet easy to use and doesn’t require access to a developer to get the job done.
We also have Umbraco Market. It offers about 200 Plus packages, some free, some paid, some from Umbraco itself, but also created by business partners, some of which are MVPs from our community. Even some of our employees have built some of these software packages, and they’ve really helped future-proof the investment in Umbraco to allow new customers or existing customers – if they come up with a new idea or a new innovation or something they need to do online – They can use these bags and springboards to achieve results.
What’s the latest on Umbraco?
We’ve just launched version 14 in beta, which delivers some really great new features, particularly in the backend for developers, but also for marketing teams.
We are also launching Umbraco Commerce in mid-2023. We have powerful integrations with companies like Shopify and uCommerce for those who want an out-of-the-box commerce solution. But Umbraco’s business is a little different. It provides a toolset approach for people who want to build something more customized for their online presence, and it does provide the toolset to do that and do things that might be more specific to the needs matter.
I heard you recently launched a sustainability challenge. What does this involve?
Sustainability is very important to us. Not long ago, we started looking at how we could become carbon neutral as a company. We recently published our second impact report, our second consecutive year of doing so. Focusing on our carbon footprint got us thinking, maybe we should help educate our partners so they focus on how to embrace sustainability?
Many of our partners are already doing this and are very good at it. But I think getting a community talking about sustainability is really the purpose of the Sustainability Challenge, and it actually gets transferred to the customers.
As a result, Umbraco customers, whether through an agency or working directly with us, can build more sustainable websites. What this does is it actually ends up making for a faster online experience and potentially allows you to make more money and draw more eyeballs to the site, if that’s what you do online. So it can be converted into dollars and cents. Some of last year’s Umbraco Award winners are excellent examples of highly engaging, sustainable websites.
If you look at some statistics, Gerry McGovern talks about the cloud being run by about 70 million servers, and the European Commission talks about 5% to 9% of electricity being used just to run the internet. If we consider running solely on fossil fuels, this is a real problem when 3.7% of greenhouse gas emissions come from the grid, which is comparable to the aviation industry. These numbers are compelling and really deserve our attention on how to become more sustainable in everything we do online.
In 2023, the company is also launching a new Platinum Partner Program, which complements its current Registered, Silver and Gold partnerships. Can you tell us about these different partnerships and their importance?
The Platinum Partner Program, or new partner model, launched last June and is a credit-based partnership that’s somewhat unique. Partners invest funds and receive back in the form of points above the amount they invest, which can be used to purchase Umbraco services and add-ons for their customers.
Points can also be used to purchase training and support for your own business. It allows Umbraco to dedicate our time to dedicated partners for marketing and co-marketing activities, sales activities, lead generation, technical support and real technical discussions. Level, whether Platinum, Gold, or Silver, indicates the level at which a partner has achieved Umbraco certification.
What trends do you see in content management this year?
We see the big trend of headless. The main technologies we provide, Umbraco Cloud and Umbraco Heartcore, are both headless CMS. This allows companies to separate concerns between backend and frontend in development. As a result, you have more integrations and more flexibility in developing your online presence or app.
Another big issue is personalization. This has long been a challenge, but with some recent technological innovations, personalization has become more advanced and this is really making a difference for customers who are building their online presence.
The third one that I think is interesting is voice search optimization. My daughter, when she texts her friends, all she does is speech to text, so I think speech to search is just a natural progression and a subtle change in how we cater to different end users online. And, for some types of people, maybe this is the only way they’ll use search in the future.
What are the advantages of a digital workforce?
They will undoubtedly increase organizational productivity and increase flexibility. I think an important factor that may be overlooked is the ability to attract the best talent and retain employees. It’s important for young people joining an organization to have really good abilities to work remotely and securely. A truly great digital workforce or workplace platform can attract this talent and retain the best and brightest.
When it comes to managing a digital workforce, I think you need to have the right tools. You need to have good collaboration tools. You need to be able to work remotely and safely from anywhere, and you need to be properly trained to do so.
How does hyperautomation benefit companies?
This is a great question and very topical. Hyperautomation is a huge change for businesses, for any customer. It’s a bit like the Tailor Swift fandom, it’s happening right here and now whether you like it or not – and both are on an exponential growth curve. The big change in hyperautomation, especially as it relates to IT infrastructure, is the dramatic reduction in errors. If you implement a hyperautomation strategy effectively, and you don’t go around interfering with it, you can really reduce errors significantly once you get it up and running.
This means fewer critical incidents within an organization, which can often bring down entire departments for hours to days and cause real damage to the business. I think some of the savings through risk reduction and efficiencies are a big deal.
Regarding the challenges of hyperautomation, especially for enterprises with legacy applications, how do you integrate with hyperautomation? Are you running a new hyperautomation project in parallel? So how do you account for the cost of legacy systems? Or are you integrated? Or are you trying to use hyperautomation to update or refine a tradition?
I think these are some of the big questions that enterprise customers face. How do you budget and cost for ongoing management and use of scalability? It is indeed a big challenge.
Another issue we see at Umbraco is that employees can feel fearful. They don’t want to be replaced. They need to understand and be educated on how their role is evolving within the company. How they might be needed to accomplish less automation type functions and more functions where gray matter is applied.
I think data privacy is another big issue, especially for senior executives using hyperautomation. You don’t want to access publicly available artificial intelligence tools and then somehow make some secret information available online.
What are Umbraco’s plans for the coming year?
Taking place in June 2024, Codegarden is Umbraco’s major annual event in Odense, Denmark. We’ll have close to 1,000 people in the city – a lot of developers, community members, business partners, technology partners – all employees will be there. So that’s very exciting.
We’ll be publishing a lot of news and information here at Codegarden. We will also be hosting a smaller version of the US festival in Chicago later this year, along with a partner forum. So we do a lot of events, on average we attend or host an event every other day at Umbraco around the world. So we do a lot of activities and a lot of open source community work.
We will vigorously promote sustainable development. As a result, you will continue to see information from us about our website’s sustainable practices, our internal corporate sustainability, and our business partnerships.
I think as an open source company we do a lot with the community. So you’re going to continue to see innovation from the community and growing global market share from sales and marketing. We are already expanding in the United States, but we will continue to expand into other markets. Outside of the United States, we also manage the Canadian, Australian and New Zealand markets. Late last year we launched a data center in Australia, so we will continue to see more of these around the world.
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