Compose

Speaker 0: Welcome back to Leap Week. And today, we want to talk to you about composability and the evolution of Directus into a flexible backend toolkit that can solve for so many use cases. It's fair to say that Directus very much started out life as a headless CMS, an API driven solution for providing data to front end applications. The Directus Data Studio is great for authoring content. And with roles and permissions, it is well suited to authoring and review workflows.

But this really just scratches the surface of what Directus is capable of.

Speaker 1: Hey, everybody. I'm Matt Miner, director of demand gen at Directus. That's a lot of words to say. I do marketing stuff. Today, I wanna talk about a narrative that we're seeing pop up more and more in the software development world.

And before our big announcement, right after this, I just wanna be able to give you a little context so you understand, really, the the full lay of the land of of why we think this is important, and that's this concept of composable architecture. Yes. It's another buzzword that we, as the tech industry, love to make up seemingly every year, for no reason. But this one's actually gaining ground, particularly in larger organizations and for good reason. I wanna preface this with the fact that I've been doing a deep dive for what seems like the last year, but it's actually been the last 6 months, reading reports, talking to customers, and more really just trying to understand what this term means.

Spoiler alert. I don't think anybody knows what it means. Everybody is just kinda making stuff up, when it comes to it. So some think it's a mentality in the way you run your organization. I've even seen some of our competitors who will not be named, try to stick claim for it.

Call it composable x. But I just wanna, tell you today what we think of it. And if it fits your organization in the way you think about things, then that's great. Really to kick this off, I wanna talk about, one of the most interesting things I came across when I was reading all of these mindless reports and, having great conversations with customers, which is this, concept of Conway's Law. So Conway's Law in of itself, if you think about software development, the traditional sense of it is if you have a team that's distributed globally, they're more likely to create modular architecture.

If you have a team that is, located pretty much in the same place, co located, they're more likely to create monolithic architectures. And it makes sense because, you know, global teams usually have their own tech stacks. You think of, like, teams of 7 that are, you know, multiple teams at organizations, and then teams that are together typically are on the same wavelength using the same framework, same tools, things like that. So when you apply this to the concept of composable, there's two sides of the spectrum, and you're probably familiar with this, which is there's the buy, and there's the build. Now as a nontechnical marketer, I typically lean towards the buy side, which is I see a problem, I just go find a software or SaaS that fixes that problem, and then I'm able to quickly get over it, really fast.

But the problem is is I have to adapt my the way I work around that. You can think of this getting to a point of where these teams have their own siloed data tech stacks, like, just absolutely crazy. A lot of security concerns there, and we have to adapt to the way that the software works. On the other side of the spectrum is this concept of building, and I think most of the audience here, which is, you know, technical folks, tend to, you know, lean this way, which is, I see a problem. I wanna build something to solve it, and I wanna build it specifically to what our team needs to solve it.

So you get plenty of, flexibility on that front, but you're not able to move as fast or as quickly. We think there is value in that side in being as close to being able to build something as flexible as possible for your team. But there is that overhead of maintenance and resources that could be going into something that's, you know, nonessential for for your products or nonessential contributing back to revenue and growing the business. That's why we believe composable to us is, you know, being able to build those apps from elements that everybody understands, the same foundation, that is flexible enough to work with, any framework, Nuxt, Next, React, Vue, and from the same kind of I've already mentioned it, but foundation. So let's talk about where we have been as an industry and where we're going as an industry.

Now we're at this crossroads of composable and this concept of it. Previously, everyone's been forced into this buy or build mentality. Like I was saying, nontechnical teams really prefer to buy things. Technical teams tend to wanna build them. Nothing wrong with either choice.

There are a few drawbacks. I wanna think about this in the terms of, like let's say you've got a wedding at the end of the week that you just find out about, and you need a suit. You can go to the suit store, buy something off the shelf, and have it, and go to that wedding, and probably get made fun of because you look like a kid in a giant suit. It's not tailored specifically to what you need, but you get it fast, and you're there. The other side of that is going to the suit store, getting fitted for your exact needs, specifications, and then not getting that suit on time, on the timeline you were promised.

And then that's even a worse scenario outcome because you're just wearing a T shirt to the wedding. That's really what this old world, new world difference is, is because, you know, let's fast forward to today and what composable enables, and that's you getting custom tailored at the store. And then just like an Amazon delivery, getting it on your doorstep within 1 to 2 days. It's the speed and the flexibility of having both. And we think it is possible.

You just need 3 things in place. 1 is you need a hub for all of your teams to be able to work from. That's technical and nontechnical. No code for the nontechnical teams. Low code or heavy code for the technical teams, that everybody can interact on and be able to create the things they need.

2nd, you need to have this powered by APIs. So all of the things that you're buying mix with the things you're building, and everything is in beautiful harmony like an orchestra. And then, really, the third thing is it needs to be flexible enough to work with your business. You can be able to cloud host it and not worry about the infrastructure costs and the setup and the maintenance, or you can self host it if security is a large concern of yours and, you need something on prem. We think the flexibility between all three things is really the key to enabling this composable architecture that everybody seems to be talking about.

I wanna just talk a little bit about an actual application of this. So we work with Copa Airlines, which is a, you know, $2,700,000,000 airline based in Panama. Over 5,000 employees, 16% increase in engineering headcount last year. Now you're probably aware of the issues that airlines faced earlier this year. A lot of passengers were stranded, because of the legacy tech debt that a lot of them had accrued.

And we love Copa because not even just with us as a customer, but they're taking a proactive approach, and, honestly, probably the most proactive we've seen in the industry, in making sure that there is no tech debt and there is technology efficient as possible. We started working with them last year. They came to us for an internal content management system. They wanted to share, like, news with their employees and have, notification systems, so they built that. Within 2 months, they had it up and running.

This year, they wanted to move their entire marketing website over to it because they found that their nontechnical and technical teams were able to get a lot of usage out of it. And everybody really enjoyed the experience. So their entire marketing website, which is huge for a company like this because 70% of their sales come from their website, and it has to be reliable. So they launched that on Directus, incredible website. They actually reduced their load speeds from, like, 6 seconds to, I think, like, 1 to 2.

So it was a huge boost for them in that arena. And now we're talking to them, about using Directus as, like, kind of an internal tool builder, app builder, things that they can provide to their customers that aren't necessarily just CMS based. So it's really cool to work with them and see this trajectory that they're taking with it. They're finding a lot of usage out of it outside of just that, like, classic CMS, which is where they started. It was the proving ground, and now there's a lot of, flexibility and things that they can do with it.

So just to reiterate what I said at the beginning and wrap this up, there's no clear definition of composable architecture. But what brings us confidence in the way that we talk about it and we see the path forward is we see 100 of users doing exactly this every single day. And just to wrap it up with a case in point, we asked our community of 10,000 developers and engineers, like, how would you describe Directus? And the funny thing is we didn't get a single response that was the same. That's awesome for folks that have discovered us and are using us for multiple use cases, but that's not awesome for new potential users that could be overwhelmed by the capabilities and what to do with it.

But as we start to refine the product, grow with the awesome support from the community, we feel like there's so much more than it could be used for other than just this content management, use case, which it's really strong for. But there is a lot of other things you can be doing to get value out of it. So today, I wanna introduce my friend, Bryant. He's gonna show you our first step at being a truly all encompassing toolkit for teams that would allow you to move fast, yet scratch that builder itch that I feel like we all have. We call them operating systems because you can truly build full comprehensive software that ties together multiple applications, to help you become more efficient.

We're releasing AgencyOS. That's what we've dubbed it, as the first example of an all in one system, that's purpose built to show off some of the incredible functionality that you can build with Directus and truly take a composable approach to your architecture. In the future, expect us to, you know, release and build more, Events OS for managing events, Deals OS from sales teams managing deals, and and so on and so forth. But, again, I'm getting ahead of myself. That's the marketer in me.

That's down the road. So, yeah, let me go ahead and kick it over to Bryant to show off, AgencyOS. I think you're really gonna like it, and thanks for listening to my rambling.

Speaker 2: Thanks, Matt. Running a digital agency is challenging. There's a load of us in the Directus core team who have done it in a past life. There's so much to it beyond actually delivering projects. And it's those other bits that often make or break client relationships.

Yet, to get your operating system set up often means you're stringing together many different rigid off the shelf tools are burning hours and hours of potentially billable time developing your own solutions and practices. Agency OS is everything you need to get your agency off the ground or improve tooling for your existing company. It's based on familiar, extensible open source tools. Directus for the back end and Nuxt for the front end. Here's what it offers.

A great looking website to promote your work and convert visitors to leads and booked meetings. Look on brand in minutes. Swap your colors. Add your logos, and set up your fonts using a simple theme config file. It's backed by a super easy to use headless CMS with live preview and content versioning.

A back end CRM slash project tracker to manage your entire project workflow. From first contact, creating proposals and managing pipeline, to managing the actual day to day work with projects and tasks. Leverage the project templates to make planning and managing larger complex projects easy peasy. A private client portal to provide superior communication with your clients. Agencies that make it super easy for clients to do business with them will be more successful than those who leave client experience up to chance.

Clients can self serve within their portal, get updates on projects, pay their invoices painlessly, and get gently reminded to deliver the files, content, and other info you need to complete their project. Agency OS is the perfect base to compose your own solution. Instead of hoping and praying those off the shelf tools, will finally work together exactly the way you need them. We've just published a bunch of videos to show you how to get the most out of each module. To get started, just follow the setup instructions on our website and you'll be on your way to a better agency in no time.

Speaker 0: Directus has come a very long way from where we started, and it really can be the operating system for your entire organization. Today we used agencies as an example but we see real estate leaders, airlines, online stores, and educational institutions base their whole organizational backbone on Directus as a composable data platform. Tomorrow we're heading back to directors 10.7 to announce and highlight our latest release, but for now you can check out agency OS using the links accompanying this video. So until tomorrow, bye for now.