00:00:04 [Music] hi Welcome to our fireside chat today we're talking about the recently launched simic group websites on cycore XM cloud and cycore search this was the first XM Cloud migration in the A&Z region I'd like to introduce Nat Sana who's going to talk through what we learned and how we managed to build this site well ahead of schedule now let's start with the projects norstar can you give us an outline of why simic decided to undertake the project how we assisted with the business case and ultimately

00:00:32 how we got the green light to proceed yes uh we're going to be spending some time talking through all of them but uh to summarize it the main project drivers was to reduce infrastructure spend um to improve the way the content authors actually go about writing creating and Publishing content so to remove that friction and uh the UI to modernize the UI it was a 2017 Bill the other thing that came up was they wanted to modernize they they wanted to be in a dxp that will future proof them and enable them to not think about scale and

00:01:08 make their experience with the digital experience platform frictionless for close to five years thanks n it seems to me that there must have been an upgrade versus rebuild question or decision in all of this how did that play out absolutely correct so typically organizations they they upgrade either because they want to be on the latest version or because they are reaching towards the end of the support life cycle these upgrade costs can range anywhere from 30 4050 all the way to hundreds of thousands of dollars and

00:01:40 siming were coming to the point where they needed to upgrade and that cost towards the upgrade is usually a sunk cost in this case by not upgrading and instead using that budget towards a rebuild it only made the business case for the rebuild stronger and of course it removed all of the technical debt that that an upgrade would bring it's a good point to make actually right because they had a lot of technical debt for simic so that means anytime we had to go out and make an enhancement it led to something else breaking on some other

00:02:12 part of the website mainly because the the implementation was not done very well so it it was more of a a upgrade you take that money and use it for the rebuild get rid of the technical debt and start start with a clean slate vill fantastic fantastic I I imagine there was some infrastructure considerations around this as well by getting by taking away that infrastructure side and putting it on the SAS side which is psycho XM Cloud where psycho would actually manage and host it for us through the SAS environment there were

00:02:46 there was a there was a lot of savings had definitely in the six figur but I not I can I just can't tell you the exact number it's certainly contributed to the green lighting of the concept right I'm sure absolutely because the savings that we were getting on the infastructure side we could use that for something else from an enhancements perspective or from a mini project or we're looking at something more aspirational which will give us a better Roi um and this was the second reason why the business case looked pretty

00:03:13 strong okay that's awesome and you know one of the other considerations that we come across all of the time is quite simply time to value and that's how long it takes a a publishing team to get a bit of of content from from Soup To Nuts if you like one of the big um problems simic had with um psycho XP was the content authoring experience the the previous instance was just not built right so they depended on the content editor way more than they needed to took to create and publish content was was way greater

00:03:48 than an hour and many content authors were just disillusioned by The Experience they were getting just frustrated by the steps they had to undertake absolutely right they want to be able to just drag drop create the template put the components in and just publish they don't want to have to come to us as the agency and say can you do it for me thankfully in this case the we just did a good job building XM Cloud so um but at that point we couldn't say that because we haven't yet built it for them so we were just trying to compare

00:04:17 and say we will make that friction go away we will we will make you fall in love with with the content authoring side if you were to go down to a better content editor in this case it's called Pages let's pivot to side performance and security security I'm sure those were issues that were also raised as well yes so uh this came down to the question about headless or not headless now with with pyo XM Cloud you have no other option but to go headless uh because all SAS products uh from a CMS perspective are headless so we have to

00:04:51 basically um guide or inform educate simic in terms of how much more uh they are going to get from a performance and security perspective now if we have to talk about performance we have to say look it's not just speed but also SEO an example of it would be I think the way we put it to them was headless CMS platforms um they can deliver new content directly to your target audiences um instead of actually routing them through a server like it's done currently um the benefit of this we can accelerate the transfer and rendering

00:05:27 speeds better customer experience because of this for your end users and that means a positive SEO impact how because page load times is a direct contributor to the search engine ranking Factor you know this was just one of the things we went through a few others Security simix main goal for picking psycho initially was not personalization personalization was one of the top three but the top one was security they wanted a platform that would be at the top of the line when it comes to to the security side of things for their

00:06:01 internal it team and headless SAS but mainly headless gives you even better security than on Prem how so because the the decoupled nature of the Headless CMS it it makes it less vulnerable to attacks targeting the the front end presentation layer so even if you have a bad actor that that that would compromise the content database they would not be able to access the content publishing platform and they would find it a heck of a lot more difficult to take the website or the app or whatever it is offline and

00:06:36 that was one of the primary factors as well that we use to say this is the business case to move to a headless and headless S one of the last things I want to talk to you about before we really talk about why they chose sore is that Brands like simic have a ton of websites and a ton of sub Brands so they have a real need to spin up new websites to spin up new components how how was that impacted by the the move to XM Cloud well before the rebuild anytime we needed to say build a new functionality we needed to give we

00:07:10 needed to use the code base that the websites were currently built on and when it's built poorly any new improvements would impact a part of the website that you never thought would get impacted so U this is common in any CMS if it's built poorly it's not just uh an Enterprise great CMS any CMS that's been built poor you'll have issues when you're trying to to build new functionality so that means you you spend a heck of a lot more time and money fixing bugs with simic we knew that they will they will need a heck of

00:07:38 a lot more websites in the future it's 13 as part of this project and they will have more websites coming could be 5 10 15 whatever it is over the next one year two years um in this case we wanted to spend as little time and money building them because we would have already built a design system and a component library that this this Segways into UI and Design Systems so let's look at that for a moment I I imagine the implementation of a reasonable design system and and an updated UI meant that a lot of that um

00:08:12 look and feel might be themable and reusable as well cor teaming um was one of the main drivers for a rebuild perspective to say hey uh I would I have a bunch of companies operating companies under simic they would need to look different from a brand guidelines perspective but we still need to have the same shared component library now in a in six months time if you feel that you know I'm I'm I want to change this component I I don't want it to be right side I want it to be on the left or I want it to be Central I need to have

00:08:48 that ability without having to come to you as the developer and that's what we did in terms of the component Library so we built the component Library created zero to six variants some components had one some components had six comp some components had no variant and with this we are trying to reduce the amount of dependency they have on us so that means the full front end needed to be built from scratch uh we wanted to create the design system like I said with multiple variants so that you know the internal

00:09:18 team can do more so we actually put that in the business case as well to say you would be you would your your dependency on your partner would reduce that means you'll save more time and money that's fantastic so let's let's finish part one with you know why it is that pyo got the green light um within simic and then um just to let everybody know we'll have a part two to this video where where we talk very heavily on the outcomes basically why pyo awesome so um the decision to pick pycho was not an easy decision like I'm

00:09:46 going to be flat honest on that one the reasons for that is because psycho X and Cloud the SAS side it was uh the first Enterprise great SAS CMS in the region because this is a big project for simic and the during it after 5 years they would have vetted Cy against uh good Technologies out there like Adobe Kento optimiz lead Drupal Aquia Etc everybody was in the ring absolutely correct code house watched for the build quality in sore we basically guaranteed that everything cyos promised as a CMS as an

00:10:20 experienced platform we will guarantee it as your partner and that basically won it for them uh the the fact that we would guarantee a good project a good bill we would guarantee an on budget on Time Project we really put our skin in the game there and and we might just finish this on on that uh on time on budget thing I think there was some tremendous news about you know the delivery of of the project yes the the the the project went live on budget way ahead of schedule 6 months and that prompted us wait wait wait wait did you

00:10:55 say six months ahead of schedule yes so initially in the plan we we assumed that we would we would want to go live at a particular date in 2024 uh but the the we we then saw that you know we can I'm coming into things that are more on the outcomes from part two but yes it it it went it went six months ahead of schedule uh and it it was so successful we are contemplating actually putting this up for the the cite code awards that are coming up in in the next couple of months I think announcements uh will be made for hey if

00:11:28 you want to actually go out and nominate your customer and a particular project please do so we will be going through simic very soon asking them if he can nominate them for this award for a cycore experience award for 2024 that's right that's exactly right awesome hey that's a great way to end part one Nat thank you so much and um anybody's interested in seeing how this all played out and and I guess over the longterm how it played out for the experience award please look at um Parts two and three of this video series thank you

00:11:58 very much everybody talk soon