Transcript: AWS re:Invent 2022 Partner Profile: Arc XP

Steph Stricklen: I am Steph Stricklen with GeekWire Studios. We are here at AWS re:Invent, and I am joined now with Joe Croney. He is with Arc XP. He’s the vice president of technology and product development for the company. How are you?

Joe Croney: Good. How are you, Steph?

Steph: Fantastic. I appreciate you making the time. There’s a lot of folks who maybe aren’t familiar with what Arc XP does. I’m excited for you to tell me a little bit about the company for folks who might be interested, need that solution and they don’t even know it yet.

Joe: For sure. That’s a question we’ve answered a lot here at AWS re:Invent. Arc XP is a digital experience platform. And what that platform has is a set of tools for great storytelling and presenting those stories on the web through great experiences.

Steph: Now, when we talk about that, let’s talk about it from a legacy media perspective. That’s where I got my start as a news anchor for NBC News for years. Creating content across a lot of platforms is key and not using disparate tools, but it extends beyond legacy media into other businesses, enterprise businesses and beyond. Tell me a little bit about that.

Joe: Yeah, for sure. And I’ve spent a lot of time in the legacy TV industry, so I know exactly what you’re talking about. But what we hear from customers is a lot of them are going from legacy CMS systems, where, really, your single format, single channel web delivery systems, digital experience platform is multi-channel. So we’re looking to bring together stories across multiple formats that have a highly productive workflow that results in a great experience on the web for our customers’ readers.

Steph: One of the things I want to ask you about is the birthplace of Arc XP because it involves a legacy company that probably everyone listening to this is going to know. Tell me about that.

Joe: For sure. The journey of Arc XP from its origins to today is really exciting and explains why it is the platform it’s become. We started by meeting the Washington Post internal needs to enable their journalists to tell great stories at scale around the globe. So allowing thousands of journalists to come together and deliver on the 24/7 news cycle is a really hard technical challenge, as well as a challenge for an organization going into the digital media space. So we built the platform for Washington Post needs. And we quickly heard from other media publishers, they wanted to get in on the action. They wanted to use our platform because we had the latest technology, it was cloud-based, it was SaaS-native, and use it to meet their digital transformation efforts.

Steph: Arc XP brands itself as being a true software as a service, what does that mean?

Joe: That’s a great question and particularly relevant at AWS re:Invent. There’s many solutions out there that claim to be SaaS solutions, but the truth is they aren’t doing all the services that Arc XP provides. When we think about a SaaS solution, we want to make sure our customers can focus on great storytelling while we make sure the systems are up, the security, it’s scalable, the CDN network has been optimized so their readers see the high performance they expect.

Steph: You’re newer to the company. What are the challenges that you see ahead of you, and what are the things that get you very excited to be a part of this company?

Joe: I joined Arc just over a month ago, and one of the reasons I joined was how forward-thinking Arc is with their technology, the fact that it is cloud-native, the fact that it’s a true SaaS platform, and most importantly, they understand how important the experience of a website is. And so, our customers are not only looking to have great efficiency internally with pulling their stories together, but also making sure those stories are presented in an excellent fashion, whether it’s on a desktop device, a mobile device, on social media. And Arc really is centered at that challenge, which goes across many industries.

Steph: Why is it important for Arc XP to be here at AWS re:Invent?

Joe: Sure. So AWS, first, it’s been a very exciting show. The energy with everyone coming together, business leaders, developers, technologists, has been wonderful. And as our booth, we’ve seen a lot of people come by and talk about their challenges of moving from a legacy CMS to a digital experience platform. But I also have a lot of my team members that are here connecting with vendors, connecting with AWS experts to make sure we have the cutting edge technology in Arc XP’s platform itself.

Steph: What’s ahead for your company in the years to come?

Joe: That’s a great question. Predicting the future is always a dangerous thing. One of my favorite quotes, though, “Is the best way to predict the future is to invent it.” So that’s what we have a great team of engineers doing right now. We have two or 300 engineers working tirelessly every day to build out Arc XP, to take it from solving those journalist scenarios into B2C commerce, into enterprise, and really partner with our customers so they can get their message out at global scale.

Steph: What am I not asking you?

Joe: One of the things that we see at AWS re:Invent is the focus on observability and understanding the performance of SaaS solutions, and that’s something our customers need as well. They want to know how resilient is it, how is the security layer on it? And so that’s been a big focus for us is not only running the SaaS platform, but bringing the insights of how people are using these web experiences to our clients so they can understand how to customize it and how to really deliver a great storytelling experience through their sites.

Steph: Joe Croney with Arc XP, thank you so much for making the time. I really appreciate it.

Joe: Absolutely. I appreciate your time today.

Steph: I’m Steph Stricklen with GeekWire Studios.