Article

Michael Nutley
Michael Nutley 6 June 2019

Cost Savings, Ease of Use and Flexibility; Users Rate Kentico in Azure

Companies are increasingly asking their marketing directors to build the business case for investment in digital marketing and CX technology. This isn’t as easy as it might sound, as the lack of understanding of martech and its potential among stakeholders is still a significant barrier. To better understand the benefits, London Research was commissioned to examine the experience of clients and agencies using Kentico hosted in Microsoft Azure.

For modern marketers, the biggest challenge around technology often isn’t understanding it, but persuading key internal stakeholders of the technology’s importance, and of the need to invest.

In many companies, the problem is further compounded by the difference between the way marketing is measured, and the metrics used for the business as a whole. Outsiders traditionally regard marketing as the ‘coloring-in department’, measuring its success using the sort of soft metrics – likes, shares, clicks, etc. – that would be unacceptable from other departments that are focused on the bottom line.

In order to help address these problems, Kentico Software, the leading provider of digital experience and content management solutions, approached London Research to carry out a series of interviews to establish what financial and operational benefits its clients had experienced as a result of using its web content management system and digital experience platform hosted in Microsoft’s Azure environment. The interviews covered three client companies – two manufacturers selling through distributors and one retailer of electronic entertainment – and three digital agencies. London Research then broke the reported benefits down into four categories: implementation, updating, other operational aspects, and future-proofing.

Implementation

The key finding in this category was that implementation was much quicker and easier using Kentico in Azure than the interviewees’ other experiences had been. One agency reported that a process that would have taken them 80 hours with their old CMS and hosting setup instead took eight. They also noted the implementation was achieved without having to take the site offline, a point that was echoed by the retailer.

Updating

Interviewees also reported significant improvements in the ease of updating sites when using Kentico in Azure. One company found it was able to move responsibility for updates from IT to the marketing team, saving a quarter of an IT salary.

Another company noted that the time taken to update the site as part of the launch of a new range of products had gone down from between five and seven days to three hours. A third business said it had seen the time taken to carry up site updates fall by 40%.

Operations

The operational benefits reported were also significant. These include cost savings in both hosting and management, plus improved reliability, uptime, security, and scalability. One of the agencies interviewed reported a saving of some $12,000 a month on hosting alone. In addition, all the agencies noted that Kentico in Azure was easy to use, making developments quicker and allowing them to be more agile.

Future-Proofing

The final factor identified by the research was the quality of support provided by Kentico and Microsoft. This was evident in the implementation phase, but also during operations. Clients and agencies alike noted Microsoft’s work in the background to ‘keep the lights on’ by handling and maintaining integrations with other products and platforms. This also contributed to the feeling that, by choosing Kentico in Azure, they were future-proofing their business.

Strong and Stable

The qualitative nature of the research makes it hard to assess the financial benefits a company might realize by using Kentico in Azure. The results will be influenced by the sector the business operates in, whether it’s B2B or B2C, its size and its digital maturity, among other factors. But all the companies interviewed reported reduced hosting costs and increased performance, reliability, and security compared to their previous solutions.

They also found that their operating costs were reduced, partly because Kentico in Azure is easier to use than the technologies they were using before, and partly because, being cloud-based, it offers more flexibility in capacity management.

Finally, all the companies interviewed felt that Kentico in Azure provided them with a stable platform for the future, whether that was in terms of increased scale and reach of their operations, or of moving into new business areas such as e-commerce.

To learn more, download the full Business Case for Kentico in Microsoft Azure report.

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