Vertis is a billion-dollar advertising company that provides marketing services from conception through design, production, and distribution. Vertis’ services include market research, media planning, advertising production, direct mail and marketing services consulting.
Challenge
Vertis was struggling in its core print advertising and services business due to an overall decline in the print advertising industry. Its strategy was to offset these declines with new multi-channel and digital marketing services. A key technical challenge was that Vertis’s aging print-oriented service delivery technologies and applications were not a good fit for delivering competitive multi-channel and digital marketing services. In addition, its existing technology development processes were dated and frequently resulted in low-quality systems. A new digital services marketing technology platform was needed, as were best-practice agile development and QA processes. Vertis turned to Perficient to help modernize its enterprise marketing services delivery platform, establish development and QA best practices, improve and automate operational processes and generally facilitate Vertis’ technology transition from a print-based marketing services provider to a multi-channel, digital marketing services provider.
Solution Deployed
Perficient responsibilities ranged from strategic technology consulting to development to development process transformation. Perficient created a multi-quarter solution architecture and roadmap to modernize legacy systems and bring in new systems and packages needed to offer competitive and cost-effective multi-channel campaign management services.
Key solution components included IBM’s enterprise marketing management solution Unica, Equilibrium MediaRich server for digital asset processing, StrongMail 6 DB Loader for email data management and reporting, Microsoft Dynamics CRM for helpdesk and K2 for business process management. Additionally, Perficient led the development of a major release of Vertis’ enterprise campaign management tool, including coaching and training on QA and agile development best practices. Another Perficient team cleaned up and modernized several legacy applications including migration from a Sybase platform to SQL server 2008 R2.
Business Value Delivered
- This campaign management portal release was key to landing several new enterprise clients and was delivered on time and had much higher quality than previous releases
- Establishment of and training around development and QA best practices resulted in much higher quality systems and on-time deliveries across the Vertis technology organization
- The modernization of key legacy applications allowed Vertis to significantly lower client on-boarding and operational costs
- Perficient’s enterprise architecture and roadmap recommendations were key to establishing the direction of Vertis’s strategic marketing services platform and a key input into Vertis annual IT budget
- Perficient leveraged a heavy offshore team to deliver quality development and QA services at a low price point