The Challenge
Uoma is a Finnish company awarded with a Deloitte Technology Fast 50 award for being the fourth fastest growing company in 2010. The company is part of Avaus Consulting Oy and offers a wide range of solutions and services ranging from web application development of Internet portals, Intranets, Extranets, Ecommerce solutions to a variety of reporting and data management applications.
With the growth of its online business, Uoma wanted to increase agility in enterprise CMS deployment. Its goals included achieving faster turn-around for marketing campaigns and for web content publishing as well as allowing IT to focus on their own strategic projects. Key challenges in the process of developing the new website were a lack of dedicated resources and a limited time-frame for launching the project.
With the new website Uoma also wanted to:
- Empower business users to take control of the web content management process - providing better agility and faster time-to-market for web content;
- Reduce costs through faster and more flexible web content management application development and deployment;
- Develop a scalable architecture that could easily grow - for both computing power and storage needs as website traffic increased.
The Solution
To meet the requirements for an easily scalable solution, Uoma chose the Windows Azure platform. Sitefinity was the natural choice for the website at it offered all the core features out of the box. The intuitive UI ensured that the website was simple to update and marketers and content authors could take full control of the web content management process. Sitefinity’s publishing system also allowed them to publish content to social media channels and external blogs, without any help from the IT department.
Also by using the powerful page layout editor, content authors were able to develop effective pages and experiment with different layouts by dragging and dropping elements on the page. ”We have worked with other content management systems before, but none of them comes close to the flexibility and extensibility that Sitefinity offers.” says Mikko Heilimo, R&D Director at Uoma.
Driving traffic to the new website was key in the overall strategy. Sitefinity offered valuable search engine optimization tools out-of-the-box. Marketers had full control over the page URLs and could edit page names, titles, descriptions and keywords .
Uoma were able to easily customize widgets and layouts in order to create flexible content elements like a showcase library and an image rotator. “Sitefinity enabled us to see our vision of the final result at a very early state. That helped us to steer the development and design very easily” says Mikko Heilimo.
The Results
As a result of developing the new website on Sitefinity and Windows Azure, Uoma can benefit from the scalability of the cloud solution. The new website has the capacity to handle traffic peaks and an increased number of site visitors. It also offers an enhanced customer experience by improving the performance.
The benefits of launching the new website:
- Scalable cloud solution;
- Approximately 60% more visitor capacity at the same cost level;
- SLA increased from 98% to 99.5%, with no additional cost;
- Reduced overall development time (cut by 40% to 1.5 weeks);
- More flexible data models and structures compared to traditional CMS systems;
- Greater efficiency thanks to Windows Azure unified environment for private cloud;
- Visual Studio tools simplify solution debugging and publishing in Azure environment.