Syde led a Fortune-500 pharmaceutical company in setting up a scalable WordPress-based infrastructure to replace a mix of CMS solutions that had been in use across domains in 50+ countries.
The challenge: Migrating a pharmaceutical giant onto a scalable WordPress-based infrastructure
Five years ago, a Fortune-500 pharmaceutical company approached Syde to create a proof-of-concept for a resilient application framework built with WordPress. The goal: an infrastructure scalable and flexible enough to power hundreds of websites with varying requirements across dozens of markets.
Coming from an enterprise CMS solution lacking in customizability, the client stood to benefit from the extensibility offered by WordPress. Aiming to significantly reduce development overhead and make room for synergy effects across the platform, our client set course for a large-scale migration, with Syde as their global technical service provider.
With an ambitious timeline to roll out the new CMS to websites for over 50 markets within three years, our client decided to invest heavily in parallel development to be done on a single architecture. Syde was tasked with building the foundation and key components, taking up responsibility for quality control, content migration and technical support.
The solution: 4 multisites with flexibility for corporate websites and personalized content for medical professionals
Syde built an infrastructure for scale, security and compliance through the flexibility offered by WordPress multisite and WP’s plugin-based architecture. The infrastructure encompasses 4 large domain-focused multisite networks, each with a specialized theme but sharing a common architecture.
Thanks to a tightly controlled CI/CD infrastructure built on WordPress VIP, we enabled parallel development from other software vendors alongside our own teams. This helped our client to maximize velocity and mitigate risks connected to a single-agency relationship while still maintaining quality. To ensure consistent quality and security across the platform, Syde vetted each vendor developing for the platform, performing code reviews and overseeing deployments.
For the client’s corporate websites, Syde delivered a block-based theme architecture flexible enough to meet the requirements of dozens of local editorial teams working on websites with different objectives. Leveraging a Composer-based solution for theme versioning to allow markets to adopt new features at their own pace.
Syde engineers also built a portal for medical professionals, integrating with Salesforce and an external training content API to allow doctors, nurses and other specialists across the world to easily authenticate and directly engage with tailored information based on their profession and interests.
The outcome: A highly adaptable framework with shared architecture, controlled deployments and dedicated support
The transition to WordPress has empowered the editorial teams with a more user-friendly editor and made marketing efforts more easily scalable. Compliance is ensured by a custom solution for localized legal approval workflows.
The large-scale roll-out of this new infrastructure to so many different teams spread across the world would not have been possible without Syde’s dedicated teams for content migration and technical support. Being able to offer first-line technical support across timezones was essential to the successful adoption of the new CMS by dozens of markets.
We have been able to continue to deliver value as we put new ways of working in place. Thank you for your expertise and dedication to helping us meet our business goals. We look forward to continuing to work together on the advancement of this project which is touching so many cancer patients along this difficult period in their lives.
V. C. Associate Director
The multisite networks and their ability to host hundreds of sites empowered the client to harmonize their websites and share functionalities, design elements, and content templates tailored to each country’s requirements. This collaborative approach enabled seamless cooperation with local agency partners for platform maintenance. Now, the client can effortlessly roll out new features to all global markets simultaneously, ensuring cost efficiency and consistency.
Alex Frison Syde CEO
Long-term partnership: Supporting the organization in transition to in-house engineering
Since completing the initial roll-out of the infrastructure, the partnership with our client has evolved to accommodate the long-term goals of the organization.
An important ambition of the client was to create an in-house development squad capable of handling the bulk of future development efforts required by the various markets. Syde has set up training and onboarding programs for newly hired internal engineers, and continues to provide code reviews and consultation to ensure quality and empower the squad, especially when it comes to the complexities of managing major updates of WordPress.
Another important aspect of this transition was to give the client full control over the critical infrastructure for development, testing and deployment. Syde has supported the client in migrating the entire codebase to a secure, private cloud platform and has worked to re-engineer CI/CD pipelines to ensure that the client’s engineering teams are able to take full responsibility for the delivery of new features and bugfixes.
Key results
For this partnership, Syde delivered the largest, most complex multisite infrastructure we have ever built.
Successful consolidation of 200+ sites onto WordPress A feat made possible by a robust architecture, controlled parallel development, content migration and technical support.
Transition to a flexible open-source platform Our client now benefits from having an extensible CMS without license fees, backed by a large ecosystem to draw upon for talent, enabling parallel development and preventing vendor lock-in.
Enhanced tools to achieve marketing goals Improved efficiency thanks to a customized editing experience and integrations for personalized content.
High support satisfaction rating Our dedicated team of support specialists received an average satisfaction rating of 4.7 / 5 and upwards.
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