Simplifying without the Sacrifice
A multinational financial services company was tasked with modernizing and reducing the cost of their current website hosting architecture that spans globally with a large presence in Europe, the Americas, and Asia. The company currently runs a majority of their 100+ web properties on their self-hosted implementation of dotCMS — a well-known, java-based content management system.
Originally deployed over five years ago, marketing and business requirements have grown significantly over this time. Thus, hosting costs have increased in both infrastructure needed to run dotCMS as well as resources required to maintain an evolving, and now, more complex publishing architecture. While the company is generally satisfied with their dotCMS implementation, the ongoing costs to run such a system has snowballed into levels that infringe upon the overall return on investment.
Furthermore, in the scramble to meet these growing demands, the company finds their implementation has become somewhat of a self-inflicted, monolithic mudball — where technical debt and complexity threatens their ability to continue growing at the proper pace. With more “moving parts”, more break/fix issues arise. Trouble-shooting takes longer as the content management platform is pushed to its limits.
Seeing this unfold over the years, the company turned to Motiv Solutions (Motiv) to assist in modernizing and lowering the overhead of their dotCMS implementation in 2022. The company mandated the following:
- Reduce overhead and hosting costs.
- Develop a more efficient, scalable and fault-tolerant implementation.
- Establish more confidence in the current investment for future growth.
In turn, Motiv introduced its flagship solution, ImpulseSync™, to address these requirements. ImpulseSync™ is a content orchestration platform that is designed specifically for organizations that depend upon modern scalability and/or multiple content-driven applications to deliver their digital customer experience. This solution optimizes the technology framework that content management systems are deployed on. Thus, enabling more performant, flexible and scalable capabilities without replatforming.
With ImpulseSync™, the company was able to achieve the following objectives:
Reduced clustering headaches and downsized instances. ImpulseSync™ enabled unlimited horizontal scalability. This removes the need for clustering by moving to smaller, single instances running dotCMS in a simple configuration (share nothing). There is no sacrifice to uptime or redundancy as the company can sync across multiple smaller instances horizontally within a single environment. Additionally, there is also no limit to the company scaling horizontally on a global level as well (per region).
More reliable and flexible content promotion. Simply put, the growing complexities around modern content promotion and delivery requirements have exceeded what dotCMS’s push-publishing capabilities were designed for. ImpulseSync™ provides a more optimized approach through content orchestration and syncing across all environments within a publishing architecture. This allows for fault-tolerant delivery; diff reporting across all environments; bi-directional content promotion; real CI/CD development processes and ultimately, less time trouble-shooting with engineering resources.
This provided the company with the ability to run all web properties within a single, flexible and scalable publishing architecture — providing more confidence for future growth with a simplified and more cost-effective dotCMS architecture.
