Orbus Software Triples Performance Speed with Progress Sitefinity
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SitefinityChallenge
Ten years of custom building features for its open source solution left the Orbus website sluggish and over-dependent on the IT team for content updates.Solution
Orbus Software tapped the Sitefinity module builder for seamless customization.Result
Orbus Software improved performance by 300% and increased new business leads by 35%.Full Story
Challenge
Orbus Software is an independent software vendor that develops, markets and sells enterprise software to empower the digital transformation of blue-chip companies and governments worldwide. Founded in 2004, Orbus products provide customers with a strategic decision-making platform to address four key transformation-enabling disciplines. Those are: enterprise architecture, strategic portfolio management, business process analysis and governance, risk and compliance.
With a global customer base growing 25% annually, the time had come for Orbus Software to tackle the digital elephant in the room: its website. Built on the open source Umbraco platform, Orbus spent the last ten years custom building 90% of features it needed. But all that customization left the company with sluggish performance and absent agility.
“Nearly all content updates had to be done by our IT development team, and they follow two-week sprint cycles,” said Tim Burrell, Product Owner, Orbus Software. “Our head of marketing was rightly disappointed.” If Orbus was to fulfill its growth potential as a leader in digital transformation, it needed to re-platform and modernize its website infrastructure.
With a global customer base growing 25% annually, the time had come for Orbus Software to tackle the digital elephant in the room: its website. Built on the open source Umbraco platform, Orbus spent the last ten years custom building 90% of features it needed. But all that customization left the company with sluggish performance and absent agility.
“Nearly all content updates had to be done by our IT development team, and they follow two-week sprint cycles,” said Tim Burrell, Product Owner, Orbus Software. “Our head of marketing was rightly disappointed.” If Orbus was to fulfill its growth potential as a leader in digital transformation, it needed to re-platform and modernize its website infrastructure.
Solution
Burrell’s team did a thorough review of five content management systems, including Umbraco, Sitecore, HubSpot, and Progress® Sitefinity®. They chose to go with Sitefinity. “The low total cost of ownership, out of the box features, regional capabilities, and the user experience in the admin area were the main factors. Also, Sitefinity Insight.” said Burrell.
Orbus re-platformed on Sitefinity, using personalization for three persona groups, product authors, product contributors and IT decision makers, to deliver experiences that align with each persona’s needs and preferences. The Orbus site drives 90% of the organization’s leads, which Sitefinity then passes to Pardot and Salesforce.
The new experience also leverages single sign on, customers have a secure and seamless experience while accessing the knowledge base. Customers can access relevant learning materials via integration with its learning management system, Docebo, while prospects can get their questions answered in real-time via integration with its live chat tool, Visitlead.
Using the Sitefinity module builder, the Orbus development team was gently guided towards using best practices, saving them from having to custom build their own logic. And Sitefinity’s automated upgrade process made it easy to continue using the newest technology. “The upgrade path was challenging from Umbraco. We would have to do an extensive rebuild just to get it to the next version,” said Burrell. “It would have taken the same amount of time that it took us to do a brand new Sitefinity implementation.”
Orbus re-platformed on Sitefinity, using personalization for three persona groups, product authors, product contributors and IT decision makers, to deliver experiences that align with each persona’s needs and preferences. The Orbus site drives 90% of the organization’s leads, which Sitefinity then passes to Pardot and Salesforce.
The new experience also leverages single sign on, customers have a secure and seamless experience while accessing the knowledge base. Customers can access relevant learning materials via integration with its learning management system, Docebo, while prospects can get their questions answered in real-time via integration with its live chat tool, Visitlead.
Using the Sitefinity module builder, the Orbus development team was gently guided towards using best practices, saving them from having to custom build their own logic. And Sitefinity’s automated upgrade process made it easy to continue using the newest technology. “The upgrade path was challenging from Umbraco. We would have to do an extensive rebuild just to get it to the next version,” said Burrell. “It would have taken the same amount of time that it took us to do a brand new Sitefinity implementation.”
Result
Because website performance is directly tied to the number of leads Orbus gets, the site improvements made an immediate mark. “It was really quite amazing,” said Burrell. “In the first few months, leads were up 35-40 percent. The one thing that matters most to the business is leads and the fact that we had such a huge jump in leads, I was honestly stunned.
”The site performance radically improved by a factor of three. “In Europe, we had an average page load speed of three seconds; that now reduced to less than one second on Sitefinity,” said Burrell.
Beyond performance, business agility also experienced a renaissance. Instead of waiting weeks for content edits, the marketing team can complete edits on their own in minutes. “That has had a real impact on our ability to quickly respond,” said Burrell. “The marketing team is over the moon about it.”
The IT team is also being better utilized since the site launch. Instead of spending hours on content edits, they have redeployed to focus on Orbus’s more heavily customized applications, “Most of their time is now spent on our ecosystem which is a complicated application that ties into a lot of third-party systems and it’s quite difficult. The opportunity cost of freeing the development team do more valuable tasks is enormous.
”Looking ahead, the team is planning to dive deeper into Sitefinity Insight’s personalization, and also evaluate multisite capabilities. The team is also working to enhance the site design and user experience now that the performance issues have been addressed. Said Burrell, “I have a decade of experience with Sitefinity. That gave me the confidence to know that Sitefinity could cover all the shortcomings we were experiencing and provide us with a happy path to future improvements.”
About Orbus Software
Headquartered in London, and founded in 2004, Orbus Software is a leading independent software vendor that develops, markets and sells enterprise software for digital transformation. Serving the digitalization needs of blue-chip and government organizations worldwide, customers from every industry trust Orbus to help them realize their IT transformation goals. For more information, please visit: www.orbussoftware.com
”The site performance radically improved by a factor of three. “In Europe, we had an average page load speed of three seconds; that now reduced to less than one second on Sitefinity,” said Burrell.
Beyond performance, business agility also experienced a renaissance. Instead of waiting weeks for content edits, the marketing team can complete edits on their own in minutes. “That has had a real impact on our ability to quickly respond,” said Burrell. “The marketing team is over the moon about it.”
The IT team is also being better utilized since the site launch. Instead of spending hours on content edits, they have redeployed to focus on Orbus’s more heavily customized applications, “Most of their time is now spent on our ecosystem which is a complicated application that ties into a lot of third-party systems and it’s quite difficult. The opportunity cost of freeing the development team do more valuable tasks is enormous.
”Looking ahead, the team is planning to dive deeper into Sitefinity Insight’s personalization, and also evaluate multisite capabilities. The team is also working to enhance the site design and user experience now that the performance issues have been addressed. Said Burrell, “I have a decade of experience with Sitefinity. That gave me the confidence to know that Sitefinity could cover all the shortcomings we were experiencing and provide us with a happy path to future improvements.”
About Orbus Software
Headquartered in London, and founded in 2004, Orbus Software is a leading independent software vendor that develops, markets and sells enterprise software for digital transformation. Serving the digitalization needs of blue-chip and government organizations worldwide, customers from every industry trust Orbus to help them realize their IT transformation goals. For more information, please visit: www.orbussoftware.com