Progress Sitefinity Partners Explain Value of Platform

By Gabriella Pirrone

August 22, 2018

Bayshore Solutions, CMS, Content Management System, Element Solutions, Headless CMS, Nisum Technologies, Oracle, PaaS, partnership, Progress, Progress Sitefinity, ProgressNEXT2018, sitefinity, Software

For my last and final installment on our exclusive video interviews from the ProgressNEXT 2018 event in Boston, I wanted to gain some insight directly from partners themselves on why they choose Progress Sitefinity for their customers and what they find most valuable about the platform.
 
First off, I sat down with VP of Client Services, Chris Rogers from Element Solutions to discuss their new partnership with Progress Sitefinity, his current thoughts on a Headless CMS model and what Element Solutions has been most recognized for.

Follow along below to view the CMS-Connected exclusive interviews.

Element Solutions New Partnership with Progress Sitefinity

Founded in 2003 and headquartered in Chicago, IL, Element Solutions provides a complete range of digital customer experiences, data-driven marketing and cloud services to a wide variety of customers. By offering a comprehensive list of digital services, Element Solutions helps enterprises create simple, frictionless experiences that solve complex problems which in turn can generate more revenue and reduce operational costs.

Chris Rogers, VP at Element Solutions began our interview with explaining their new partnership with Progress which just happened to blossom a week before the event. Being in the web content management system space for many years, Element Solutions felt the need to gain a new partnership that was with a “leading edge technology that had not only CMS capabilities but other pieces that you could connect to other applications and also a roadmap that fit very well with where we think the industry is going and that’s headless and we think Progress has that path.”

Chris believes that a headless CMS is in fact the direction of where the CMS market is going “you want to separate the delivery of CMS from the authoring or the management of the CMS and that is a perfect fit I think for the Sitefinity product and where we want to take our client.”

In 2016, Element Solutions was recognized for using Oracle PaaS to launch their MarketingHub, and innovative marketing cloud solution that gives customers a more powerful and effective way to manage digital assets, campaigns and analytics all in a single location. Since I was so curious to hear more, I asked Chris what made that particular initiative unique and what the need behind it was. Chris said the need came from their clients who really struggled with managing their marketing assets “whether it was different document collateral, whether it was templates, whether it was campaign material whatever it might be, they have trouble managing it and then they also had real trouble with the versioning of it.”  So, Element Solutions built a product for their clients which at the time was called “Digital Hub” which was very successful so they rolled it out as a product for the rest of their clients and was then renamed “MarketingHub”.

Nisum Enables Facilitation of Integration Through Sitefinity

Nisum Technologies is a global technology consulting firm headquartered in Brea, CA and founded in 2000. With their customer-centric motto of “Building Success Together” Nisum has grown to over 14,000 consultants worldwide, including a few hundred in North America and about 400 in Chile (South America) as well as a few hundred developers in Pakistan.

Nisum provides end to end consulting services from strategy to planning, implementation as well as maintenance. I was fortunate to sit down with Kyu Hyong Cho, VP of Consultant Services at Nisum Technologies to discuss their relationship with Progress Sitefinity and where it all began. Kyu said it started with their Latin American team “but we noticed there was a great potential for us to build a new service line for Progress Software here in North America so that’s actually when we decided to expand our partnership with Progress beyond Sitefinity so we are looking into providing an open edge platform development services for our clients and even Kendo UI as well as expanded Sitefinity services here in North America.”

I was curious to hear Kyu’s point of view on what the current trends or challenges that he is seeing in the industry since the majority of his clients are in the retail and ecommerce industry. The biggest question these days is “how to integrate from the offline as well as the online operations as a unified front in attracting new customers and the purchase of product.” Nisum wants to leverage the open edge platform as well as the Kendo UI and Sitefinity to enable the facilitation of that integration.

Bayshore Solutions Utilizes Sitefinity for their SMB Space

Even though everyone was deeply immersed in the event, Kevin Hourigan, President and CEO of Bayshore Solutions was kind enough to sit down with me to discuss their relationship with Sitefinity and what customers he would recommend for using the platform.

Bayshore Solutions is a full service design, web development and digital marketing agency that’s been around for 22 years and headquartered in Tampa, FL. Having been a Sitefinity partner for the last 6 years I asked Kevin what the ideal customer would be “The ideal customer we find in a Sitefinity platform typically may fall under the small to midsize business enterprise” he added “we have enterprise clients and we then have some smaller than the SMB space but I think what we find is the SMB space from a sizing organization is typically a great Sitefinity end user.”

Kevin also highlighted a strong point by describing where Sitefinity's platform really excels by adding“companies whose content administrators really want a toolset that’s very easy to use and as an organization whose deployed significant number of content management systems over the years, the feedback that we get from our users is that Sitefinity is the most user friendly content management system from the people who are going to be using it most often.”

I definitely agree that we have to remember that stakeholders are a key component especially for those who are going to access the website “certainly as a stakeholder we always think of the target audience or the customer whos prospects and customers are going to use it but we can’t abandon the thought that the end user is also going to be your stakeholder, is also going to be content administrator who needs to publish content and the easier that they have the opportunity to publish content the more frequently and successfully they’re going to be able to use the tool.”  

Ending Notes

To end things off, I want to highlight the question I asked Kevin on his thoughts on the ProgressNEXT 2018 event and what values he will take away from it “the take away value I’m going to take back to my home is the interaction with the partner network.” As Kevin mentioned, a lot of people come to these types of events to attend the individual breakout sessions, meet other partners and to network but "it's been very collaborative​ and as I'm sitting here at a table or in sessions with Sitefinity partners, at the end of the day when an end user customer buys a Sitefinity solution, their buying it from someone sitting in that room."

Nowadays, we are really seeing customers setting standards and are truly the ones that are inspiring those and other changes that are coming about to the industry today. If you have the chance to check out next year’s ProgressNEXT event, I highly recommend you do so and of course, if you have any questions please feel free to get in touch with us!
 

Gabriella Pirrone

Gabriella is the Digital Marketing Assistant for CMSC Media. She brings a wealth of knowledge from not only a CMS perspective but also content, SEO and eCommerce. She enjoys everything social media and staying ontop of the latest trends in the digital marketing world.