Hello everyone. I think we're live now today we are going to present some interesting information to you about Kentico as product Xperience by Kentico and upgrades to experience by Kentico from previous versions of Kentico, specifically Kentico experience 13 that we believe many of you are familiar with. So we'll get started with the presentation and do introductions. So hello everyone. My name is Sean Wright. I'm lead product evangelist with Kentico. And joining me today is Lucasz. Lucasz, I'll let you introduce yourself. Thank you, Sean, Hey everyone. My name is Lucasz, Solution Architect at Konabos More or less 70 plus years of experience with the ASP space and Lucasz is a expert in experience by Kentico, and he's one of Kentico MVPs, and so he's here today to help me explain the idea of upgrades from Kentico, experience 13 to experience by Kentico, and tell you his experience using products from Kentico. Okay, so here's the agenda for today. We're going to cover ideas about the evolution of what Kentico is delivering with our past Products and today with experience by Kentico, the idea of SaaS, a new infrastructure management deployment feature with experience by Kentico, and also our support that we're providing to customers and our partners to perform those upgrades from Kentico experience 13 to experience by Kentico. So start out just again covering that evolution of products and how we got to where we are today with experience by Kentico. And really the goal of experience by Kentico as a product is to provide a single pane of glass to our customers, to digital marketing teams, so that they can really understand their multi channel content management and customer data and all the different channels that they manage in a single product that gives them consistent user experience means less training for marketing teams, and we also want them to realize the ROI of investing in a product like Xperience by Kentico, both from the product itself, so the cost of the product implementation, all that, but also their marketing investments. So marketers create content, they author experiences, they gain insights from customer data, and we want them to realize the ROI of the work they're doing in the platform over time. 

So here's a comparison of Kentico experience 13 on the left and experience by Kentico. On the right, you can see from this kind of dashboard layout of the administration interface that it's going to be familiar to marketers, and that's important to us. We don't want our customers to upgrade to experience by Kentico and land in completely unfamiliar territory. So we have this dashboard concept with these various applications used for experience management, content management, customer data management and configuration of the platform. One key difference is that experience by Kentico focuses on the concept of channels in Kentucky, experience 13, the product was really focused on website experiences. The whole thing was built around building a website and then kind of branching out from there. So it did have email marketing capabilities. It even had like a REST API that you could use to deliver content to other types of applications or services. But experience by Kentico takes those other channels and services them at the top level. So marketers will see the different website, email and headless channels that they have as part of their digital presence with their customers. They'll see that at the top level in experience by Kentico, let's dig into those differences a little bit more between the two products. So there's quite a few differences. There's some similarities as well, and these differences in the product have impact on different people that are using experience by Kentico or Kentico experience 13, so developer personas or marketer personas. And so really key from the highest level is that Kentucky go experience 13 was focused on traditional dxp digital experience platform feature set, again focused on websites and building off of websites, adding features on top of that, or surrounding it. It also is a was a traditional like yearly or every two year iterative major release product. So we'd have a major release and then customers would do an upgrade to that next major release experience by Kentico is evergreen. It's multi channel focused. And really the focus of the product is that ROI that marketers are going to get by their investments into the product, because with an evergreen product, there's no more major upgrades. Marketers just continue to evolve their content, offering to their customers, their marketing strategy, and so that we want that investment to pay off over the long term for them, we want to make it very apparent that it's paying off for them. Experience by Kentico has a SaaS option which previous versions of Kentico did not It could only be deployed on premises or private cloud. But experience by Kentico we have a Kentico managed infrastructure deployment in the cloud that customers can adopt along with the experience by Kentico solution, we have monthly refreshes and a public roadmap. 

We want to make sure that customers are continuing to see value in experience by Kentico every single month, and we have a large number of features and capabilities that we release with each refresh. And that public roadmap gives customers and our partner network the ability to see, kind of into the future, and see what we're working on at a monthly cadence, and also longer term, what's the product vision that's something that's new to experience by Kentico. We also have channel independent content in the Content Hub and for marketing teams that or partners or developers that are familiar with headless CMSs, this has become a very common way of working with content that's independent of a channel. And experience by Kentico is really centered on our content hub for managing all of that content that could be distributed across multiple channels. We also, again, surface those channels as kind of first class entities within the product, allowing marketers to focus on them and think about the different experiences in those channels. So email is not just something that you send to customers, it's a channel that you deliver messages to your customers through and get engagement with them from there's a bunch of other aspects of these products that are impacted by these changes in how we approach the product. So making it evergreen, rebuilding Kentico from the ground up and experience by Kentico means we're based on modern technology. We're composable with headless channels integrations in Kentucky, experience 13, we built a large number of integrations for the product with experience by Kentico, we have many new integrations that continue to get those updates with the Evergreen monthly refreshes that we release commerce, core part of Kentucky, experience 13, and something that many of our customers use with experience by Kentico, we have commerce integrations today. Shopify is a key integration that we have a first party supported integration. But also native commerce is on our roadmap, and it will be coming out in preview this month. And also AI is something that, of course, everyone's talking about today, and we had aI capabilities in Kentucky experience 13, but they were added as kind of customizations or enhancements on top of specific features in the product. In experience by Kentico, we have this new concept we call IRA, which is our AI intelligence and recommendations capability. And this is a core feature of the product, so it allows us to, yes, surface AI in different areas, but by being a core feature, it's much easier for us to be agile in our product development and incorporate AI into capabilities where it makes sense and where we see it having the biggest impact on marketers. So one of the first ways that you can see from a kind of architectural standpoint, whether you're a developer or you're a marketer, used to working with Kentico experience 13, you can see the differences with experience by Kentico in simplification, and we want that simplification really where it counts. And I think Lucasz has some experience in this, the value of this simplification. Lucasz, do you want to share something about? Yeah, sure. Thank you. Sean, yeah. So, as you can see here, right, the first thing that you probably noticed is the difference when it comes to. Number of the applications. So now experience 13. You had two right now you have just one, and it is on top NET Core, which is great. So it makes your life easier if you're a developer, for sure, if you're a DevOps engineer, it helps you to write because you just need to deploy one application instead of two. It also simplifies the process of upgrades, because you have just one application to upgrade instead of two different applications on different technology stack. So it's super easy. Right now, with all those changes, what also should be added is probably the fact that right now, thanks to the dotnet core and the dynamic packages that are used to install the application itself, you have a very well designed separation of the code between canticle or experienced by canticle and your custom changes, so all of that no longer mixed together. You have that separated, and you basically maintain your own code on top of the platform, which actually is supposed to be done like that. But yeah, finally we got it, so it's great. Yeah. What else does it change? So it has also some impact on the budgets, because, you know when, when you simplify the work which is around the setup, the work which is around maintaining the different application, you can use the remaining budget or something else, something else which is more important, like, yeah, digital transformation for sure, right? So something that customers tend to forget that the first step is always prepare or build the application, and then you have to utilize the features that you got with the product. So it opens a great chance to use the budgets wiser and just move forward with the new technology. We'll move forward with experience back and, yeah, those are great points. And I think a lot of the value that you see with all those improvements comes from that simplification, and that simplification was made possible by some changes in technology. So actually, I'll go here. We have designed experience by Kentico to truly be a future proof tech stack, like the foundation of the product is future proof, and kind of explain the impact that this has on customers and why we were able to do this. 

So like many technology products out there, their ability to evolve and the way that they deliver experiences to customers, like the marketers that are using experience by Kentico is based on those technology foundations. And for experience by Kentico, and for previous versions of Kentico, we've been based on Microsoft's technology stack, specifically their asp.net web technology stack. And we can see here that Microsoft's technology has evolved over time, going all the way back to the early 2000s and then Kentico was founded just over 20 years ago on asp.net web forms. But then not too long after Microsoft, sensing the shifts in technology in the industry overall, introduced Inc and then web API for web service based applications, and then in 2016 introduced.net Core. Now, when it was first introduced, it wasn't quite that mature, but it was a significant change in Microsoft's approach with the.net and C Sharp technology to address a problem that they were seeing in the market, and that was adoption of cloud and previous versions of.net and asp.net were designed for Windows servers and on premises deployments. They wanted to enable their customers to easily be able to deploy their applications to the cloud and to be cloud native, and to adopt rapid scaling and rapid development and modern development practices. And so in previous versions of Kentico, we supported both the older versions of asp.net and.net Core new versions of Microsoft's technology, and with experience by Kentico, we were able to completely remove any dependency on that legacy technology. And because of that, we can now move at the same cadence that Microsoft moves with the latest versions of.net and we started out with.net five, and today we're on.net eight and.net nine. And each time Microsoft releases a new version of.net every year, we are able to stay up to date and update experience by Kentico on that new version of.net and that allows us to have that kind of versionless, Evergreen approach to experience by Kentucky. Which means no more major version upgrades for customers that are on experience by Kentico. So we have made that technology transition completely, and we're kind of ahead of the industry, or many in the industry, on this transition to modern.net but it definitely gives us the agility in the product, in the platform. Yeah, all of that is true. I can only add some points from my perspective of developer, social architect, or partner of cantico. So I would add to that just simple, something such simple as just a pleasure of working with those tools. Because, you know, it's, it's so easy to start, start the new environment, to install experience mechanical that, you know, it takes just a few minutes, really, and in comparison to the other platforms, is a huge difference, really, huge difference. Everyone should, should really try it. Yeah, and going back to the to the dotnet core itself, and the fact that experience of Kentico, experience of space by Kentico is fully rewritten on.net core from scratch, it's shows only how the product is ahead of other products on the market, because other vendors thinking about doing that already or are in progress of doing that when experience like Kentico is already on top. And it also changes the perspective, because Kentico right now that product can focus on delivering new features, on expanding existing ones instead of doing the immigration right? So we are getting the assist, as you said, a greenfield project, or always green project that will be only extended will be only better month by month by month, right? So that's, that's something which is great here. Yeah, I wanted also mentioned that, thanks to dotnet core platform, there is something that may be a bit different from the other platforms, on the on the dotted framework that you can easily set up that environment for everyone. Also Docker. So thanks to docket core, it's, it will work on Windows, links, containers. So it's, it can be used on every single server, every single even desktop device. So it's, it's, it's cool. Yeah, I think that's it from my end on that slide, yeah, that's a great point. We're hearing feedback from customers that are on experience by Kentico today, that have their own development teams that, in the past, have kind of been incentivized to work in Windows, but they have development teams today that use Mac, that use Linux and with experience mechanical, because it's on those modern technology foundations, we allow developers to use any platform they want. 

They're using the latest technology, the stuff that there's training, materials for documentation on the things that they're used to working in if they've been at other employers in the past, they're used to these modern technology, and they can use it with experience by Kentico. And you can see that on the Kentico experience 13 side, we did use this modern.net technology, but it was one part of the overall solution. So developers were kind of responsible for knowing lots of different versions of.net and that technology. But today, they can take that familiarity they've gained with asp.net, core.net, core, and bring it to experience by Kentico. And much of what they gained knowledge with Kentico, experience 13 will be very familiar to them, experience by Kentico. And what they basically get to do is remove their dependency and need to understand that older, legacy technology and just focus on the modern platform. Yeah, maybe one more. One more additional point to just be sure that everyone's on the same page, right? So we on the right, we see those two purple bubbles top net and react, and that react one is not mandatory, right? So you still can. Can use Inc there if you want, if you want to build a fully headless solution. Still, you can do that with API provided mechanical right? So it, it goes into in a modern direction, but you can simply utilize also the other. With other doesn't mean bad architecture. And we see, right? It's just different. And if your teams feel much more familiar with the Inc, it's going to work as a charm. So it's, it's open for your choice. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Great points. So just to reinforce some of those, those points, you know, upgrading to experience by Kentico is going to be the last upgrade. The way I see it is that anyone on experience by Kentico today will there are no upgrades between today and 10 years from now. It's just continuous, iterative improvements, small, digestible, monthly updates in experience by Kentico to, you know, evolve the product to make sure that we are taking advantage of the latest technology, that we expose capabilities that are native to the web platform or email marketing, or, you know, through headless, any sort of technology solution that you are delivering content and experiences to that could be, it could be mobile applications. It could be digital billboards or kiosks. We want to make sure that we are able to be agile enough to iteratively improve experience by Kentico and, you know, adopt where the market and the technology is and so there's, there's no more upgrades. It's just those monthly updates that are easy for developers to adopt using the modern technology that they're familiar with. So basically, we remove the disruption from the equation and allow, you know, the business to just proceed with delivering value to the marketing team so that they can generate revenue. From my perspective, I was thinking how to describe that in a way that, yeah, in a way that we all will be on the same page again. So I was just thinking that right the way everything changes due to those monthly releases. Monthly upgrades is actually similar to, or can be described as a change in your release cycle. So the all of those releases that Kentico does should be part of your release cycle, so you no longer think about the upgrades. Ask about the upgrades. You really think about adding more features, but those features are dangerous, right? So you're getting security fixes. You're getting standard fixes as well, right? And new features every single month. There might be less complex, more complex. It all depends on the roadmap, but if you add those to your release cycle, you actually will stop doing upgrades. They will be just releases of new things added to the platform that you as a developer or your team as digital marketer can use from the day one when it is available. Right from the perspective of people managing IT departments. So all of those releases, if you keep your environment up to date, and it will increase your security, it will increase your performance, because everything will be done by Kentico, and what you have to do is actually only care for your part, right? So the extensions or customizations that you're writing, that's the only thing that you need to be worried about. Yeah, to summarize that, I think that it's worth to remember that all of these features that are in the robot that's publicly available, or majority of them, or maybe not majority, but a lot of them are oriented around IRA, so AI capabilities, commerce and general digital transformation. So there is a really strong focus on giving more and more for the business users to get real value from experience mechanical, yeah, we want to keep those updates as small as possible, so that they're as easy to adopt for customers as is possible. The last thing we want is for a customer to be stuck on a refresh from six months ago because of some change that we made in the product, we're trying to make it so that customers are on the latest, or maybe one or two refreshes behind, and there's no impediment to them staying up to date on capabilities or security improvements in the product. 

The longer that you have between release cycles with any product, the bigger the number of changes that will be introduced, and the harder it will be to adopt those changes. And so by us staying with like a one month release cycle on these refreshes, there's only so much that we can introduce to the product at a time, and that makes it easy for marketing teams to adopt the new capabilities, and it makes it easy for developers to apply those updates and security improvements to the product. Yeah, last example. So based on our experience, those upgrades sometimes takes take like, five minutes, really, they are so simple for a. Of like larger ones, it can take a few hours, let's say maximum. So it's really, really quick, right in comparison to the to the other platforms. And if you add to the to that, also usage of the OSS environments or SAS from 20 code, and it's even easier. Yeah, that's been my experience too. It's very easy to apply these updates. So another way that experience by Kentico is different from previous versions of Kentico is the multi channel management. And, you know, I think the best way to kind of show the reason that we've designed experience by Kentico to focus on multi channel is this is the challenge that we see marketers having today. They have multiple digital properties or channels that they're delivering experiences through to their customers, because customers they want to have those experiences and all the different mediums that they're that are available to them. So there might be mobile apps, emails, of course, all these things are familiar to marketers today. And you might say, well, you know, I only have one website, but the based on the research that we've done, is that marketing teams actually have multiple websites. They have that one that's on their core platform. You know, that could be Kentico experience 13 today. And then they also have micro sites. They have sites that were launched quickly by the marketing team because they just need to get something up and running. And maybe that's on some other open source product, and it's sitting off somewhere at who's managing it. I'm not sure. Is it knowledgeable that there's this other platform security updates for that other product is the branding, the messaging, the experience, consistent between all these different channels in all these various products, is a marketing team able to manage all these things? What we've seen is that this is a challenge for marketing teams, and so experience by Kentico is really designed to solve this problem and to simplify that challenge by consolidating digital channel management into a single product, Lucasz, what's been your experience? What have you seen in the market in terms of this distributed channel approach? Because I imagine for some customers, it's something intentional, but maybe for others it's something that's kind of happened to them, and that hasn't been their intention. Yeah, we, for last couple of years, we've seen a trend, or going to the into composability, Composable World, right? So all of the parts detached there with a need to integrate all of that by the IT departments, which adds complexity, we see that that trend changes, or simply, it's not for everyone, right? And we've experienced by Kentico, it is all integrated already, which is simple to adapt, simple to use. You don't have to focus really on, on connecting all of those dots from that chart, because everything is integrated out of the box, right? So you can just install it, start using it. What makes your life easier from the point of view of marketers? From the point of view, IT teams, right? So it is a good direction, I think, for really large group of customers, because they don't need, like, multiple different partners delivering similar services when they have everything in house and just focus, really, focus on using what they've got, right, so in general, to the point that you previously mentioned, right, omnichannel, or having multiple channels is complex enough. 

There is no need to, like, make it even harder by having multiple services when you can manage the omnichannel communication within one tool Xperience by Kentico, to not struggle with the platform, but focus on delivering really value. So yeah, that's, that's pretty much my experience, right? So it's better to have, very often, it's better to have one tool that you can use, really use, and instead of multiple tools that are somewhere there, and no one really knows how to, how to generate a value from those, yeah, and I think we like to look at it as a simplification of responsibility. So you might see the word simplify and say, well, you're simplifying. That means I can't do as much. We want to increase the capabilities, but simplify the responsibility. We want to simplify where it counts, so the marketing team can really. Focus on the value that they can deliver to an organization. So by consolidating these channels into a single product, it's less for the marketing team to learn, it's less for it to maintain security for it's less for developers to have to learn and integrate and manage. They get to focus on one platform, one solution, but still engage with customers across all these different channels. Yeah, as you, as you also mentioned integration, right? We have to remember that. In fact, we talk about the data that flows between all of those features. If we have separated data, then that's a real, real challenge to have that data updated and available for all of the features, or in case of the other vendors, for instance, to make sure that the data is up to date. Here, the data is always up to date, is always available, so just make use of it. Do so another area where we're really focusing on inXperience by Kentico said, we want the marketers to be able to do more themselves and also know more about the customers, the engagement on these or through these channels. So we want to put marketers in control. And in Kentucky, experience 13, we have a page builder that we know marketers love. Well, we don't want to fix something that isn't broken, so we brought the Page Builder to experience by Kentico. It's going to be the same experience that marketers have had in Kentucky. Experience 13 and Kentico, 12 and VC. We don't want to change the things that are working well. But the REST API that's in Kentico experience 13, it doesn't put marketers in control. It puts developers in control, and sometimes developers need that control to be able to build the types of technology solutions that they're creating for marketing teams. But headless channels in experience by Kentico put marketers in the driver's seat. So marketers get to manage and control the content that is being delivered through that API. So it's a it's a theme throughout experience by Kentico that marketers are in control, and they also they don't need to learn technology and code. They get to focus on the things that are important to them, basically making sure that the customer experience is good and delivering value to the organization by generating revenue. We want to increase that marketer efficiency through AI, through campaign performance. We want to give them insights, allow them to do the things that they're responsible for by themselves. So creating forms, creating automations, personalizing digital experiences in websites for customers, and tying all these things together through what we call customer journeys, a new feature and experience by Kentico, this is something that we are really focusing on. So in past versions of our products, there were lots of marketing features, but often technology code, these types of things, bubbled up through the surface. And when marketers would encounter them, it kind of stopped them in their tracks. They would say, Well, I'm not comfortable with having to know all this technology stuff. And so then developers have to step in and unblock the marketing team. We want to make sure an experience by kind to go, that the marketing team can kind of work independently. And here's an example of this, a screenshot of customer journeys and experience by Kentico. And this is meant to solve a problem that marketers have today, and that's really identifying where customers are not able to convert they're not able to complete a goal. So we introduce customer journeys as a way for marketers to first propose a goal. They want more downloads of a white paper, they want customers to fill out a form and then work backwards from that goal and say, How will customers achieve that goal? How? What is their journey through our digital experiences and customer journeys apply across all channels. So if you have a mobile app and marketing emails and a website and a micro site, they can all work together to define this customer journey, and you can identify where customers are struggling and optimize that specific portion of that journey. 

Marketers can also use this from kind of an exploration perspective. They can say, are customers achieving this goal, we're seeing them achieve it. How are they getting there? And they can create multiple customer journeys that model those different ways that customers could be achieving the goal. And through that exploration, say we've identified the one that's working the best. Let's optimize that one. And so by having channels and customer data. Management consolidated in a single product, we can give this overview of all those different channels that are being managed and Xperience by Kentico and I mentioned we want the marketer to be able to work independently of developer. We also want them to be able to work more efficiently. That means using AI that's everyone's talking about today. But we want marketers to be able to use AI intelligently and effectively. We don't want to just throw AI into the product as a way of having, you know, a checkbox on the sales sheet. It really needs to make the marketer more efficient, so that they can either do other work that is more valuable, or they can do the work that is valuable more quickly. And so we're we've introduced this concept of IRA, our representation of AI in experience by get to go, and marketers can expect to see it in the future, being incorporated in lots of different ways, and also see it in the product today, in very impactful features. So in the future, we are planning to surface IRA in the products that they're using to author content. So like office 365 be able to author manage content, get insights about their experience. Back Indigo solution through their mobile device, communicate with Ira, ask Ira questions. These things are either in preview today, in experience by Kentico, or on our roadmap. Additionally, we are going to be incorporating IRA into customer journeys so that marketers can gain even more insights about that customer engagement and where there are challenges with that journey, and today, we have Ira incorporated into the content authoring experience. So for example, if a marketer uploads an image asset to our content hub to be distributed across multiple channels, IRA can automatically detect the focal point of that image. It can define the description that could be used for alt text, it can assign taxonomies and tags automatically that could be used for customer experience or could be used for the marketing team to be able to find and organize that content. So in addition to helping marketers work more efficiently and Xperience by Kentico. We also want developers to be able to work more efficiently, and we kind of touched on this earlier with the modern technology foundations, but we want to make sure that customers are aware that we are only based on modern technology. We do not have any legacy technology requirements. Lucasz, I'm sure this is very meaningful to you as a solutions architect working for one of our technology partners, our digital agency partners. Konabos, oh yes, this is something that really speaks to you, I'm sure. Oh yeah. I mean, I can only repeat myself from the previous slides, because it's the work with the modern technologies is really a pleasure. It no more, no more struggles with setting up all old software, all technologies, right? So it's a completely different experience. Yeah, we have to mention at this point again, that the setup of experience by canticle is very easy thanks to this is very light, so it doesn't take so much time as other platforms. Yeah. The last point here is about the plugins, right, or extensions, tools or tools extensions that are available, we've got mentioned migration to other integrations like research or anything else. There are multiple of those that I believe like provide everything that developers or partners our customers may expect from the dxp platform. So all of that is there, available for everyone. It is public. Those extensions, especially they are very often publicly available. So you can just fork those, do your own changes if you think, if you like, to share that with the rest of the with Kentico and the rest of the of the committee, you can also prepare PR changes, send that to Kentico and work together, right?

Because the Kentico itself is very supportive. So whenever you have any questions, any problems, you can always reach out to Kentico social architects from Kentico, and for sure, they're going to help you, if they're busy, there is also quite large Kentucky Community that also, not only support people that are starting their adventure with experience by Kentico, but they also develop some you. Extensions that you may find useful, right? So it's yeah, the work of experience by Kentico can be really efficient, yeah, a key point about those integrations is that they are first party, so that means that we support them. They go through our security reviews, they meet our quality standards. And also, as Xperience by Kentico, continues to evolve each month, and we introduce new capabilities, we look for opportunities for those integrations to also take advantage of those new capabilities, and that's only possible because we are the ones that are managing those integrations. But that doesn't mean that they are siloed off from customers and partners, as Lucasz mentioned, developers can look at the code of those integrations. They are open source. They can use them as education examples. They can even download them and customize them themselves. If there's something that's unique to their project that makes sense just for them, they can customize that integration. And additionally, if there's a bug or there is a feature enhancement that they'd like to see, they can contribute back, and we can incorporate that update into the integration, again, making sure that it meets our quality standards and security requirements. So another thing that's different with experience by Kentico is the ability to deploy to experience by Kentico SaaS. A key idea with experience by Kentico SaaS is that it's built on Microsoft Azure as cloud. So this is something that many of our partners and customers are already familiar with. They might be deploying their Kentico experience 13 solutions to Azure. The key difference with experience by Kentico SaaS is that we take over the responsibility of infrastructure, security, management and the deployment automation. Why would a customer or partner be interested in this? Well, it allows them to focus more on the key value point of dxp, and that's building a digital experience management for marketers to create customer experiences that generate revenue and convert and so by taking over the responsibility that we see becoming more and more commoditized over time, and That's infrastructure management and deployment automation, we allow the customer or the partner to focus on the key value areas. Lucasz, has this been something that you have seen with your clients, or something that provides some value to you as a partner? I Sorry, I was muted. You mean SaaS in general? Or the Yeah, SAS, SAS in general. Like, do you have you seen a value here? Some of the like, security benefits or being able to focus more on the digital experience platform, as opposed to all the infrastructure management and orchestration. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, everyone who ever had to manage their service on their own know how painful task it is, right? Those windows updates of that security, it's it can be really painful, and very often ends in a way that no one will care for it, and you just use all system which is not updated, not secured, to the time someone, someone hack it with self, if you are secured, right, Someone else is that is always there, thinking about keeping your environment up to date and secure so absolutely that this is something that we like we expect to see, and we see more and more often, and we provide compliance guarantees that can be reviewed by customers or partners@trust.kentico.com so and that covers all of our security and compliance for our SaaS offering. 

Additionally, we can optimize the infrastructure and the hosting and deployments because we know everything about the product. And also, we can provide data residency guarantees for customers, and I'll actually feature that in one of the next slides. So here's an overview of what experience by Kentico SaaS is. So you can see on the left that we have these internal SaaS services, and we have this Kentico experience portal. So this is a multi tenant application where partners or customers can go and get insights into observability metrics, manage deployments, basically sign off on those deployments of the different environments, and also configure digital channels. So they want to configure a new channel, they can register a domain and have it assigned to the channel. This. Gives them a portal to manage all that infrastructure, but only the key parts, only the parts that make sense for customers or partners to manage. We manage all the rest. And you can see on the right is the actual infrastructure, and this is single tenant. So we can make those guarantees about security and data residency, but we can give customers access on the left side to basically gain access to backups or any of that other stuff that they will need access to. And so yeah, here's some of the those key value points about SaaS. You know, why would it be something that a customer would be interested in Kentico manages the first infrastructure so you don't have to if you need completely custom management of infrastructure and deployments. Well, we still offer experience by Kentico with private cloud deployments, license only, where you manage everything yourselves. But if it makes sense for you to focus more on the digital experience portion of the solution, then we can do that for you. You still get to manage the deployments yourselves. So you get to sign off on when you want a deployment to roll out to QA environment or to a production environment, but we manage the actual deployment process. Yeah, yeah. Maybe I'll just add a few points here, right? Because we were lucky enough to work with experience by Kent on SAS and again, it was super easy. What? What else can I say? Right? So we didn't have to worry about infrastructure at all it was there, we were able to deploy that the changes or our custom implementation with just one script, right one liner, basically, and it was going through the pipeline. So it was really great. But deployment is one part, or we actually mentioned about Blue Green department as well, because it is implemented by Kent co there, and so we don't need to worry about it anymore. So that that's kind of really, really complex process, if we try to compare that with the other platforms, or even doing that by your own, with SAS, it is baked in, into the product itself, and you don't need to worry about it so it, yeah, no, data loss. Everything is there so that that's cool. But comments, one topic, the other thing is, what you get with SAS because, yeah, infrastructure is managed, mechanical, but you still have access to the docs. You can review if something happened. You've got like listed events, right? So you can very easily find all the information you need to keep your environment, not maybe environment, but application, in a good shape. All of the errors can be very easily identified, right? So that's cute, because you don't need to, like, search for the logs. 

All of them are great, a great aggregated inside the SAS portal. And yeah, I was going to mention one more thing, I think, oh, yeah, backups. That's something that many companies know that it should be there. It should be like set up in the right way with SaaS, it is there already from the day one. So you COVID backups are running. Can remember right now, I think that at least once a day, right? Sean backups are there, so you can always download those. If you want to, like, feel safe. You can also check it, but it is there, available for you, and you can also use those backups for local development proposals. For instance, if you want to verify if some kind of errors that you found out on your application, you can just download those backups and use them for proper development proposals as well. So everything's there, yeah, and they can be used by technical members of a customer team or partner team to do a point in time restore. So if something happened, deployment happened, and maybe an application customization caused some data loss, you can revert to a previous version specific backup. Another point about the experience portal that you get with experience by Kentico SaaS is that it gives both the customer, IT security teams and the partner team access to the same backups or deployment. So this is something that in the past, if a partner wanted to give their client access to the infrastructure, usually had to do something at a very low level. Well, this gives both parties access to the stuff that they would need at a. Much higher level, and also with role based access security controls that either party can manage. And here's a quick overview of the different regions that we support. As of March 2025 we're constantly adding new regions in Azure that we support, as soon as we can have guarantees about the speed and performance of those regions, and they have the full feature set that we need for experience by Kentico SaaS. So there's probably a region today that we support, that you could use if you have those data residency requirements. So finally, to kind of close this whole idea of upgrades, to close it out, we're going to talk about the actual upgrade process and the upgrade support that we provide for partners and for customers. So product life cycle is the first thing we wanna look at when we talk about upgrades experience by Kentico, the upgrade window that we see for customers really began at the beginning of this year. We did have customers upgrading last year in 2024 we even had a few upgrading in 2023 upgrading in 2023 but we're seeing the most traction with upgrades right now. There's lots of partners and customers that are in the process of their upgrade from Kentico experience 13 to experience by Kentico. And really though the window for that extends to the end of 2026 when a support will end for experience Kentico experience 13 support for experience by kendigo just continues on forever into the future because of that evergreen design of the product. So we want to be able to get all of our customers upgraded to experience by Kentico within this time frame. How are we doing that? Well, we have this experience by Kentico migration toolkit. This migration toolkit is a product feature. It's not something else that just kind of sits on the side that maybe helps out customers and partners. No, it's a product feature. And this means that when we update experience by Kentico and add new capabilities, the migration toolkit is also updated to take advantage of those new capabilities. And the migration toolkit is a set of tools. So we have tools that are dedicated for migrating from other competitor products to experience by Kentico. We have a universal migration tool that can manage data from really any data source and bring it into experience by Kentico. Then we have a dedicated tool that is the Kentico migration tool, and that's meant to do data migration from Kentico experience 13 and even older versions of Kentico into experience by Kentico and Lucasz. Have you had some experience with this? Have you looked at this migration toolkit? Yes, yes, and I have some experience to share, or maybe some a few things to consider when, when you planning to migrate or use those tools. So, yeah, from our experience, I think that it is definitely a good tool to use when you have hundreds or 1000s of data items still doing great, right? So the setup of it may take some may take some time to map fields from the one system to another, but it's totally worth, worth it, and if you want to be great hundreds of 1000s of items, that's for sure. Sometimes we saw that it is better to just do a manual integration with smaller data sets. But that's not so often, not so often visible case, right? 

So it happens, but migration tool does the job as well. And, yeah, there is also one important thing to mention, that if you are planning to use migration tool, or in general, you're planning to migrate, it's good to think about the architecture of the data. So it's like, like universal tool, right? Try to remember about data architecture, company architecture in your systems. If you have a well designed architecture, then tools like migration tool will only work better, will work faster, will be more useful for us, for your team and yourself. Yeah, there's a lot of variables that come into play with upgrades from any version of Kentico to the next, and that is also true with upgrading from Kentico experience 13 to experience by Kentico. The larger the project, the more data there is the more benefit there will be from using the Kentico migration tool. And yeah, if you have probably unrealistic for many customers, but if you had a Kentico experience 13 solution with one website and 10 web pages, it's probably easier just to manually migrate that data over to a brand new experience. By Kentico solution. But if you have 1000s of web pages, the migration tool is going to allow your development team to automate that data migration process and also perform it multiple times over the life of that upgrade project. So you'll want to try it once at the very beginning, get a lot of that data migrated so that the development team can start incorporating it into the upgraded digital experiences for customers and websites and emails and maybe even headless. But then you can continue to run it over the life of that project, and then run it, you know, one last time before you go live, so that you incorporate all the data that's been created, whether that's content or customer data in that Kentico experience 13 solution, you can make sure you capture it all and bring it over to experience by Kent. This migration tool is completely open source. It's one of those integrations along with the other ones that we maintain and manage. And if you have requirements for your upgrade that the migration tool doesn't account for. Today, have your development team give us feedback. They can open up issues in our GitHub with that tool, and we can make sure that we incorporate it, and we're constantly iterating on that migration tool and improving it based on the scenarios that we hear from customers that need to be incorporated. And again, as I mentioned, as we add new capabilities to experience by Kentico, we improve the integrations, and that also applies to the Kentico migration tool. So as we add commerce over the next several refreshes to experience by Kentico, we will update the Kentico migration tool to account for the target in experience by Kentico that we have for commerce now, and we can take the Commerce Data and capabilities in Kentucky experience 13 and migrate that over, along with content and a website, and migrate content to the content hub. And, you know, do all sorts of transformations that will make sense when you're doing that upgrade process. So that is the end of the presentation. We can now take questions, if there are any looking at the comments right now, but I don't see any questions for you. Okay, yeah, so we don't have any questions. 

Well, if you do have any questions in the future, you could reach out to myself or Lucasz. He is again one of our Kentico MVPs, so he has a lot of knowledge about experience by Kentico and is able to answer questions or support you if you are interested in doing an upgrade from Kentico experience 13. Also check out our documentation, docs.kentico.com we have an entire section in the documentation dedicated to upgrades from Kentico experience 13. We walk you through the concepts that you need to understand and experience by Kentico. Additionally, we have a step by step walkthrough of taking our dancing goat sample application that we've had for years from Kentico experience 13, and taking that dancing goat content and upgrading it to a brand new dancing goat experience by Kentico solution. And that uses the Kent migration tool, and it explains to developers all the concepts they need to understand in terms of updating their code and their projects and running that migration tool. Oh, question, yeah, I see a question from Joel with SAS, can you have multiple environments? So make sure I understand this question correctly. I'll answer it both ways, in terms of like a QA or UAT staging environment and production environment. Yes, we have different levels, cloud levels of SaaS, and those include a different number of environments. But no matter which level you use, you absolutely get a QA environment and a production environment. And so you can test out your changes deployed to the SaaS QA environment before those changes get promoted to the production environment. Additionally, we are going to be releasing a content sync capability. It's on our roadmap, and the SaaS solution will be able to use the content sync so that you can promote changes in QA or UAT if you have a UAT up to production. The other environment. Question could be about channels. So SAS supports multiple digital channels, just like a private cloud deployment would support. So if you have multiple websites and multiple email channels, SAS definitely supports that as well. How. Long, typical answer, right? Because it depends. If you James, send us more details, we are happy to take a look at it, let you know what you think, what we think, right? But without getting more details, I don't think anyone can really answer that question. Yeah, I see we have Danny Paul in the chat as well. He's one of our kind to go community leaders. He also is an expert about experience by Kentico, and he'll be able to help out answering a lot of those questions too. I completely agree with Lucasz. It depends, and that's the answer that technical people love to give, and business people hate to hear. But really, how big is the project? How familiar is the team with Kentico? Experience 13 and Xperience by Kentico. What's part of that upgrade? Are you doing a digital transformation? Are you doing a rebrand, a redesign? Are you incorporating new channels, or is it just kind of a lift and shift? A lot depends, but we know from experience of our customers and partners that using that Kent co migration tool does reduce the amount of time and the cost of that upgrade, sometimes significantly. Any other questions, right? The time's up. We should wrap and wrap this for now. All right. Well, I guess it looks like we hit the hour on the nose. Yes. All right. Well, yeah, thanks, everyone and again, if you do have any questions, reach out to one of our MVPs Lucasz, or one of our community leaders like Danny Paul, or you could reach out to myself, or you could just contact your Kentucky salesperson or ask a question in the community portal, where we have anyone that can answer that question for you. Thank you, everyone for joining you.