The Challenge

With the advent of cloud computing, the IT industry was forever transformed.  Companies which sold IT equipment such as routers and other networking equipment as well as managed service providers who installed and managed on-site IT infrastructure needed to adapt or die.  Insight, an early innovator in the IT e-commerce arena, needed a new platform to combine content and commerce as a seamless user experience to support their pivot toward services while continuing to serve their traditional client base. Furthermore, as with many of our clients, Marketing was bogged down with a CMS implementation which severely limited their ability to make simple changes to the site without bringing in developers and working through a full six week development cycle and so they lacked the agility which is prerequisite to marketing success.  Finally, Insight had a number of companies over the years and they were looking at a number of acquisitions in the future, so it was critical that the site implementation and design support their long term growth and evolution. 

The Solution

Over the past number of years, there is an important movement in the e-commerce world we like to call content + commerce.  Traditionally, companies engaging in e-commerce have used separate web sites for their main web presence and their e-commerce tools.  Without substantial integration effort, the result is a clunky user experience as the login information (“My Account”), cart and other key parts of the user experience exist only in the commerce site.  Furthermore, there is a huge amount of lost opportunity to thread commerce links and highlights into your content. The “Content + Commerce” concept implements both into one platform resulting in one seamless user experience throughout the site across content and commerce pages and components.

For Insight, we leveraged this approach in addition to a “headless” commerce implementation to deliver a drastically improved mobile-friendly user experience.  Insight came to the table with Adobe Experience Manager, as they have a close reseller relationship with that company, so we dusted off our Java skills and set to work.  Using this platform, we leveraged the designs provided by 29th Drive to develop a library of configurable components enabling the Insight marketing team to create the entire site including product search pages, articles and and key site pages.  These components and the site were integrated with numerous systems including Insight’s proprietary e-commerce engine, Marketo and other systems.    

Here are a few key elements to our solution:

• Component based architecture which enabled the marketing team to build the site.
• Adobe Experience Manager
• Integration with a proprietary commerce system
• Headless commerce web application 

The Results

Naturally, there are a lot of moving parts to a complete corporate strategy and we only played a part in these efforts.  With 11,000 dedicated employees many of whom have been with the company for over a decade, we can only take so much credit.  That said, in the 4 years since this rebuild, Insight’s top line has grown from $5B - $7B and their profitability has continuously improved.  They have completed many acquisitions within their industry and have expanded their services arm leveraging this site to absorb those businesses.  Their marketing team has continued to expand the site with minimal developer intervention and their talented development team has been able to build on our work as marketing’s need for new features grew.  So, with the conclusion of this project, we left behind a site which continues to expand and support the client as they have grown substantially and continued to evolve.  There’s nothing more we can hope for in a project.