Sorry, Eurovision. The real music was at CMS Summit 25. Here’s what made it a hit

Two weeks ago, I could have easily made the hike from Germany to Switzerland for the opening of Eurovision 2025, the 69th edition of the annual continent-spanning singing competition. 

I was already in Frankfurt for the Boye & Company CMS Summit 25, and wie der vogel fliegt, Basel isn’t that far. One could drive the 327 km in three hours (faster if you’re channeling the Autobahn), and there are trains and buses if you’re looking for less würzig.

If you’re not familiar with the global phenomenon that is Eurovision, you might be living under a rock. Every year, each country from across Europe (and beyond) sends a song to represent it, which is performed by a designated singer and voted on by viewers and juries. It's a friendly, spirited competition that unifies diverse talents and backgrounds on a shared stage. 

Along with the standard pop fare, audiences are treated to some edgy, experimental performances that fall into the “fever dream” category – like last year’s Windows95 man, Teemu Keisteri of Finland. 

2025’s Eurovision bestowed “JJ” (Johannes Pietsch of Austria) with its iconic glass microphone trophy. And while his countertenor voice was high, the event itself had some controversial lows. 

Still, the songs of Eurovision bring people together. And in a world that feels less safe and stable, music is one of the few things that might light our way through the darkness.

CMS is also going through a radical transformation, and the ground can feel a little shaky at times. The realities of AI are weighing heavily on our roadmaps, and we’re all looking for guidance on this journey. That’s why an event like CMS Summit is such a relief amid the sonic waves of chaos. 

Maybe we don’t have 160 million viewers like Eurovision. But the three days I spent with CMS vendors, practitioners, agencies, and customers from the global content management community were a bit like a concert – and the music was beautiful.    

What is CMS Summit?

It’s the latest European variant of Boye & Company’s popular live conference series focused on content management. And by all accounts, it was a chart topper. 

Following the successful launch of the CMS Kickoff in 2023 – held each January in St. Petersburg, Florida – the new CMS Summit joins the CMS Connect conference in Montreal, Canada, which happens in early August. 

CMS Summit amassed a small stadium of rockstars, from Gartner-validated market leaders like Adobe to niche industry disruptors like Griddo, all hungry to participate in a community of like-minded practitioners. 

Orchestrator-in-chief Janus Boye has cultivated a vendor-neutral garden for ideas to flourish. Since these larger-format regional events began, I’ve collaborated with Janus to facilitate a human experience that helps us better understand our increasingly digital world – and where CMS fits in. 

To deliver that, we’ve hosted world-class speakers and thought leaders who are in the trenches, dealing with the day-to-day rigors of CMS – from product management to ops, system integration to marketing. Over the last few years, the format has evolved, but it still relies on bringing everyone together in a vendor-neutral setting to take off our sales hats, find harmony, and learn from one another. 

In many ways, it’s the same unifying spirit as Eurovision. Minus the singing, of course. 

Unless you count Lasse Fredslund treating us to a tune at our 2024 Kickoff. You can watch the video here, but fair warning: You’ll be humming the “Boye Boys & Co” lyrics in the shower for days.

Lasse Fredslund. Source: CMS Critic

With two days of lightning talks, panels, emerging tech demos, and hands-on workshops, there’s simply too much to fully recap. So I’m bringing you the six big hits from our own little concert – and here’s what still has my toes tapping. 

1. The speakers and sessions rocked das haus 

One of the hardest parts of composing a live event is offering substantive content from the stage. Plenty of conferences take “Death by PowerPoint” to extremes, and audiences end up fatigued and uninspired.

That wasn’t the case at CMS Summit, which primarily focused on bite-sized segments delivered through a series of 15-minute lightning talks. These short, succinct presentations focused on bedrock concepts and, in almost every case, left attendees with real-world insights and actionable takeaways. 

Along with the structured sessions, CMS Summit also offered its second day as a more organic greenfield of group collaboration. Thought leaders assembled small groups to tackle a wide range of subjects, and we gathered to discuss the findings.

Source: Marta Cukierman

Having participated in multiple Boye & Company events, I think the lightning talk format provides a more well-rounded perspective on a range of problems, issues, and opportunities – without overwhelming attendees. The minified approach kept things fresh, light, and memorable, which made for easier recall and follow-up discussions.

A ‘composable’ keynote

One of the brightest gems for me was the opening salvo with the incomparable Jasmin Guthmann, VP of Composable Consulting at global powerhouse Accenture Song. Jasmin’s heritage with CMS is buoyed by her marketing prowess, which shone brightly during her tenure at Contentstack – a leading composable DXP with headless DNA. 

Jasmin Guthmann and Matt Garrepy. Source: Marta Cukierman

Over the last few years, Jasmin has helped shape the foundation and trajectory of the MACH Alliance, where she continues to serve as a board member. During our keynote interview, we talked about the evolving role of composable and the challenges and opportunities facing the market from a future-proofing perspective – particularly as organizations race to embrace new tech like AI. 

As a restless content explorer, Jasmin is also expanding her skills as an author. We touched on her new book, If There Is A Will, There Is A Way, and how her mindset has enabled her to achieve incredible professional and personal goals. It really set the tone for the day.

Charting the course of CMS

While each of these carefully curated lighting talks offered tangible takeaways, a few creative and thought-provoking angles have stuck with me around the CMS roadmap. 

Angelika Gust and Maximilian Steudel. Source: Marta Cukierman

Angelika Gust of European transit brand DB Regio gave us pointers for navigating the “CMS Bermuda Triangle” beyond a one-size-fits-all solution. This was complemented by Maximilian Steudel of food giant Dr. Oetker, whose inspired presentation on “Why Your CMS is Cooler Than You Think” offered some perspective on the challenges of choosing the right tool in a sea of choices.

Bolette Kern. Source: Marta Cukierman

I also felt the pulse of Bolette Kern’s inspired talk on what she called the “CMS Market Dilemma.” As the product manager at Umbraco, an open source DXP, she’s close to the very real challenges surrounding platform features and the race to stay in competitive parity. As she elegantly noted in her presentation, most CMSes cover 80% of the same things – and she challenged attendees to focus on the 20% that truly sets them apart. A compelling message at a time when commoditization is a very real threat to prosperity.  

From change leadership to governance

There was also some digital “spelunking” into the caverns of transformation and collaboration. Søren Schaffstein of dkd – a digital agency based in Frankfurt – spoke about the benefits of leveraging CMS as a foundation to create greater value with customers, while Julian Mills gave an inspired talk about leading change through challenge, and how “everybody’s good when it’s easy.” Both resonated with me, given the frequency of transformation we’re seeing and the recent shakeups occurring from all sides of the market. 

Søren Schaffstein and Julian Mills. Source: Marta Cukierman

Governance is always in vogue, and we were treated to a thorough refresher through a legal lens courtesy of Michelle Albanese, Senior Product Manager at the aptly named CMS, a law firm based in Germany. As Michelle pointed out, foundational concepts like permissions don’t always get the attention they deserve, and her presentation reinforced some of the fundamentals surrounding security, compliance, and more.

Michelle Albanese and Debbie Tucek. Source: Marta Cukierman

The first day’s lightning talks wrapped at the crossroads of CMS, leaving attendees with a menu of the day’s existential challenges courtesy of Debbie Tucek, VP of Product at Kentico. While Debbie touched on many of the topical debates around headless versus hybrid versus monolith, she keyed in on the idea that CMS isn’t just about managing content, but managing context. She also suggested how the rise of adaptive experiences will force a reframing of how vendors, agencies, and customers evolve in the marketplace. It was cautionary – but also enlightening.

2. AI stole the spotlight (for better or worse)

We’re all struggling with “AI fatigue,” but this particular song was unavoidable. As innovative new applications continue to roil our CMS roadmaps, almost every presentation mentioned AI, while several dove head-first into the murky waters to unearth some clarity.

During her refreshing talk, Daria Sazanovich, Product Designer at CoreMedia – a German-based DXP – gave us a recent history lesson on how her roles have evolved in the AI age, and how certain jobs on her resume (like multimedia artist and illustrator) are withering on the vine. But she’s evolving, too, and shared how her accumulated usability expertise is helping her build trust through CoreMedia’s CMS, and where AI assistants are coming into play.

Daria Sazanovich. Source: Marta Cukierman

I really loved how Adobe’s Lars Trieloff focused on the intersection of AI and performance. While his presentation offered hard-learned insights about launching hundreds of sites on Adobe’s new breed of CMS, he shared his exploits when trying to divine guidance from ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity – only to end up with bad direction. As he said, “AI got it wrong,” which led to a more expansive model journey that reinforced the importance of CDNs and the need to use simplicity as your magic wand. The entire presentation was light-hearted and animated.

Lars Trieloff. Source: Marta Cukierman

Once again, Tom Cranstoun, aka “The AEM Guy,” delivered a riveting talk. An avid AI researcher and digital experience provocateur, Tom asked a simple question of the audience: What are we missing from AI? As you can imagine, the answer is far from simple, due in large part to AI’s black box nature. The accelerated pace of change compounds this lack of transparency, but Tom explained how education is key for enterprises as they look to invest in more AI – and avoid disaster along the way. 

Tom Cranstoun. Source: Marta Cukierman

Tom also provided some technical foundation around the importance of structured data for AI to build bridges between content and understanding. It was a fantastic presentation with a wealth of relevant insights.

As Tom noted in his overview of the CMS Summit, the second day’s collaborative workshops wove AI into multiple conversations. Tom shared an “aha” moment from his workshop group about his own assumptions regarding AI in multilingual content management.

AI will continue to be in the spotlight, for better or worse, particularly as agents become a more central part of the strategy. The growing role of agentic AI and agentic commerce was also channeled through a number of talks and sidebar discussions as it becomes a critical objective at every layer of the ecosystem.

3. Selecting a CMS is a hard note to hit

And getting harder. There’s so much choice in the market – hundreds of platforms, according to Scott Brinker, and content management is just a tiny subset of the 15,384 tools in his 2025 Martech Supergraphic. So how do you pick the right one?

Throughout the day, several presenters touched on the very real challenges of selecting a CMS. The rigors of this journey were crystallized during the event’s only long-form panel discussion on the subject, where we tackled the big questions head-on.

I moderated this engaging conversation with some of the leading analysts in the content management field, including Bastian Sirvend of the SUTSCHE agency, Debbie Tucek of Kentico, Mark Demeny of the MACH Alliance, and Simon Jones of the Studio 24 agency. We covered technical and business topics, including core selection criteria and architectural and infrastructure considerations. 

Bastian Sirvend, Mark Demeny, Debbie Tucek, and Simon Jones. Source: Marta Cukierman

What I observed about this panel was the bevy of diverse perspectives underscored by general alignment. While the group was composed of vendors, agencies, and analysts, there was a lot of consensus around what matters in 2025 and beyond. We discussed the drive to unlock TOC, understanding a product’s roadmap, and what metrics and indicators are important when evaluating tools. We also discussed the critical role of security resilience.

I found Debbie Tucek’s comments about the uptick in proof-of-concepts and the growth of “procurement paralysis” to be incredibly relevant. As organizations adapt to the current economic pressures, vendors are feeling the squeeze to validate their solutions. 

I also found Mark Demeny’s insights surrounding usability to be incredibly poignant, exploring how we can detect the right signals from a CMS vendor that underscore their ongoing commitment to things like UX enhancement. Mark also brought a composable spin to the conversation, discussing the challenges of a vendor ecosystem where every platform has a headless CMS – and how buyers can rise above the confusion. 

As the resident WordPress expert on our panel, Simon Jones emphasized the vital role of accessibility and how it’s not just about the frontend experience. He shared some advice about what to look for in a CMS and how accessibility was a deciding factor in his last two platform selections. The entire panel echoed the importance of this topic and how the evolving and disparate regulatory landscape is exerting more influence on the priorities.

Bastian Sirvend, who also gave a fantastic talk on looking beyond the tool for success, also shared some great points about the misalignment around SaaS preference and customer goals for single-tenant cloud hosting. He also drilled into the difficulties regarding ROI calculations relative to SaaS migrations and how to approach cost-benefit analysis when a CMS isn’t tied to a complete rebuild or relaunch.

Panels can often be a sore spot for events. Participants struggle to establish their voice, and it can be challenging to follow along. But these heavy-hitters brought their A-game, and the dialogue was sharp, clear, and incredibly relevant. 

4. Open source is writing new lyrics

At last year’s CMS Connect conference in Montreal, I had the pleasure of delivering the keynote interview with Dries Buytaert, founder of the Drupal project and Acquia, an industry-leading DXP. It was an important conversation for several reasons. 

First, despite their significance and broad market adoption, open source platforms are often overlooked in analyst reports and grids that might substantiate their value and impact. And given the evolving policy landscape in the EU – which spurred the creation of the Open Web Alliance earlier in 2024 – platforms like Drupal, Joomla, TYPO3, and WordPress are under significant regulatory pressure. 

To that end, CMS Summit built on its commitment to ensure open source as an equitable part of the conversation. That began with Simon Jones providing an update on the evolving WordPress saga with Matt Mullenweg and the ensuing legal action. Simon outlined the tenets of good open source and how better governance or even a “slow death” are possible directions amid the chaos.

Simon Jones and Baddy Breidert. Source: Marta Cukierman

Baddy Sonja Breidert, CEO and Co-founder at Frankfurt-based 1xINTERNET, gave us an inspired presentation about balancing market needs with the future of CMS, and how the roadmap for open source innovation is changing.

A committed Drupal practitioner and agency leader, Baddy has supported and chaired the Drupal Association for the past seven years, helping to shape its course in a world where the biggest open source projects – powering nearly half of all websites on the planet – face an uncertain future.

But all is not lost. On the positive side, the leading open source platforms have large, well-established communities, and they can be part of the solution. As WordPress mulls its Mullenweg posturing, new governance models and possible forks are being pondered. Drupal is also continuing to innovate, firing its new Starshot package in an effort to better serve users. 

Where is open source headed? It’s a big question – and making space to talk about it at CMS Summit was cathartic. We all rely on open source technologies up and down our stacks, from Linux to Kubernetes, so the value and contribution can’t be overstated. 

At the same time, several open source agencies and practitioners expressed deep concern to me about the challenges ahead, and navigating the EU’s policy landscape with their customers will shift the dynamics in the years ahead. 

5. We need to ‘pump up the volume’ on sustainability

As an American CMS analyst in Europe, I was reminded how much more progressive this continent is regarding climate. Globally, our insatiable thirst for energy is taxing our natural resources, but the EU has taken profound measures to tackle the issue via comprehensive regulation. 

Still, our “World Wide Waste” is growing. Sites, pages, and apps continue to scale, and generally “useless" content and data – 90% of which never gets used or accessed – is reaching epic proportions. And AI is exacerbating everything.

Thorsten Jonas. Source: Marta Cukierman

According to Thorsten Jonas, founder of the Sustainable UX Network, AI isn’t part of the solution right now, and its unquenchable thirst for water is simply terrifying (you can read more about its pernicious metrics here). But there are tools we can use to reduce our carbon impact in other places. And while many of the strategies look simple, we’re simply not taking enough action.

In the pantheon of topics at the CMS Summit, Thorsten’s compelling data and urgent platform of digital sustainability were a welcome respite. As vendors and participants in this ecosystem, we have an opportunity to lead change at an elemental level. That means rethinking our internal strategies – even taking sustainable thinking back to the design phase for our products.

6. CMS Idol stretched the vocal cords (and demo chops)

Our world-renowned “CMS Idol” competition is an institution at our large-scale events, pitting platform against platform for a six-minute trial by fire – and the audience picks the winner.

I emceed this crowd-pleaser, showcasing live product demos from six vendor contestants: Hygraph, Webiny, Kentico, Plate, React Bricks, and Sulu. Just for reference, Kontent.ai took home the trophy in January after an epic battle royale.

From top left: Michael Lukaszczyk of Hygraph, Sven Al Hamad of Webiny, David Komárek of Kentico, Pieter Versloot of Plate, Matteo Frana of React Bricks, and Thomas Schedler of Sulu. Source: Marta Cukierman

To describe the scene as anything less than a “pressure cooker” would be selling it short. Each vendor’s ambassador (er, victim?) not only compressed their typical demo into a microcosmic version, but they had to endure feedback from our esteemed and often “salty” panel of judges, including Baddy Sonja Breidert, Jeffrey "Jam" McGuire of Open Strategy Partners, and our own Boye & Company peer group leader, Matt McQueeny.

I love these friendly fights because they give vendors – sometimes the platform founders themselves – an opportunity to boast about their innovation in front of a captive audience, all while receiving laser coaching from industry experts. 

Despite the hiccups and hijinks (with live demos, things sometimes go sideways), it’s a fun break from the session content – and everyone walks away happy. More or less…

Back row: CMS Idol contestants. Front row: Matt Garrepy, judges Matt McQueeny, Baddy Breidert, and Jam McGuire. Source: Marta Cukierman

At CMS Summit 25, Matteo Frana of ReactBricks scored the win. His tight delivery and clear focus made it easy to understand the value – and trophy-worthy. A big congrats on a well-deserved victory. 

The wrap: ‘Community’ was the winning act 

Eurovision might have epic viewership metrics, but nearly 70% of all websites rely on a CMS. That translates into 1.2 billion websites globally. When you consider all the humans using those tools, from Agility to WordPress, even Taylor Swift is playing a distant second fiddle to this audience.

At CMS Summit, we had the rare opportunity to bring practitioners, agencies, and customers under one roof, representing those communities from different angles. To have everyone sharing openly about our challenges and issues was something to marvel at, but it’s right at home with what Janus Boye has been curating over the years.  

Like at all the Boye & Company events, there was also a strong social atmosphere that made this more than just slideshows and knowledge transfer. Competitors sat close, breaking bread at some fine “Franfurtian” establishments and drinking local beer in the best of German traditions. 

Old friends embraced. New ones, too. It was a beautiful thing to behold. 

The music was a little different this time around. Instead of being serenaded by a ukulele, the multi-talented Jam McGuire treated us to a little French Horn and Swiss Alphorn medley to kick off the evening’s social festivities. 

Jam McGuire. Source: Marta Cukierman

As I wrote in my analysis of CMS Kickoff 25 in January, the bedrock of this community offers us a chance to pump the brakes and listen. We’re moving so fast, particularly around AI, that we’re not stopping long enough to ask all the right questions or gain the necessary perspective. At this pace, what could go wrong?

In a sense, these events are like a “love letter” to slow down and connect. Not for awkward sales pitches, but for genuine conversation that weaves together our personal and professional passions, and reminds us why we do this in the first place.

These photos are just a taste of what I experienced at CMS Summit, but they say a lot about the curiosity, character, and compassion everyone brings to these gatherings, from intimate sidebars to group runs:

Source: Marta Cukierman, Matt McQueeny

CMS helps us tell our stories. And within this chorus of a community, we’re harmonizing around the big hits that will evolve our industry. AI is powering a lot of the change, but there’s plenty of innovation happening across the stack.

There’s still work to do, and not just on the tech side. We need more diversity in our community. Less complexity. Fewer barriers. We need to prioritize sustainable solutions and lead the change we want to see in the world.

As Jasmin Guthmann said, “We’re better together.” 

So bravo, Eurovision. Keep singing. 

But if you’re looking for the tracks that will drive the future of CMS, this is where you’ll hear them.     

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