Zambon Product Websites
How the Zambon product websites became Cloud Native
The objective
After designing from scratch the whole ecosystem of Zambon Corporate website and of the country websites Zambon Pharma, Zambon wanted to apply the same approach to its product websites with a redesign, starting from two flagship brands as pilot projects.
The goal was to create a central hub for the centralized development and management of the product websites on global scale, with the aim to optimize the speed to market, costs, quality and reuse of assets across different brands and geographic areas.
Similarly to the corporate websites The starting scenario,, displayed many websites managed by single countries, based on mismatching technological solutions and with possibility of intervention that was sometimes limited, if not impossible.
The needs presented were, therefore, the same, but with a larger scope:
- To have a shared platform for the production of new websites
- Improve the ability to forecast and control costs of development and maintenance
- Bring homogeneity to websites pertaining to the same brand
- Funnel all websites on the same infrastructure
- Evolve the initial Design System in a reusable catalogue for future projects
To achieve this result we had to rationalize the work done on the corporate websites, defining a precise workflow for the development of all new websites. The process, then, had to become reproducible in modality and, therefore, foreseeable in costs.
The Strategy
The digital inventory, constantly evolving, is consultable from the brand representatives and creative agencies. The technical solutions for the modular development have been systematized and made available as default functionalities for all websites, with a set of pre-existing components and the chance of introducing new ones for specific needs.
We then personalized Drupal to make it a Cloud Native platform, able to support us in all steps of the process, thereby creating Firestarter. While developing this tool we always referenced to the Delivery processes needs and the wherewithal offered by the Cloud operations.
Multi-Cloud infrastructure high availability, high performance
In this case as well we adopted a multi-vendor strategy with Google Cloud Platform for western countries and Alibaba Cloud for eastern countries, to ensure resilience, high performance and availability in all geographical areas, China included.
Global CDN
The automatic use of global CDN assures immediate response times from anywhere in the world, reducing the number of hits that would affect the server and database, benefitting the security as well.High-availability
Production clusters are provided with auto-scaling and auto-healing, guaranteeing high uptime even during deploy and maintenance intervention.China-compatible
The infrastructure configuration can be replicated fully on vendors that allow access to the Chinese area with response times otherwise impossible.Unified support and management
Updates
The updates and the improvements are automatically propagated to all websites, removing the need to coordinate various actors.Evolutive Development
The evolutive development is executed by a team who knows the organization as well as the product and the services stack, allowing reduced costs, higher speed and more confidence.Safety
Safety isn’t only about the code of the application but also, and mainly, about the services that keeps it alive.Flexibility
As an optional service it is possible to host legacy websites or third party websites, evaluating the costs of hosting service and of a deploy custom workflow to be defined from time to time based on specific needs.Customer care
Support in the use of the platform is guaranteed to editorial and technical operators.
The results
This strategy allowed Zambon to turn to a single supplier for the delivery and to benefit from a single shared platform, always keeping control over the digital assets and facilitating inner interoperability.
While adopting this model, marketing can today be focused on communication and delegate the implementation of a content management application, hosting and maintenance to a centralized system.
A model that brings to Zambon the benefits of:
- Foreseeable costs
- Cloud Native CMS and centralized support
- Centralized cloud operations
- More efficient engineering and design
The new projects won’t require a from-scratch designing process and leaps of faith, because the co-suppliers (creative agencies, marketing staff, etc) can apply the shared guidelines. The single project can, for sure, require a specific design, but will still take advantage of a flexible and scalable platform, to respond with agility to business needs.
Laura Zordan
Digital Transformation & Service Design Strategist,
Zambon SPA
The production of the centralized platform for the design of our product websites represents another important goal in the digital transformation journey Zambon started in 2017. In particular, through this shared platform we are able to guarantee to all of our local affiliates a better homogeneity and coherence in the digital experience design of the communication of our product, remarkable decrease of production costs and times and process clarity on a global scale.
Once more, the SparkFabrik team has proved to be a strategic partner able to measure up to this challenge. Method, reliability, safety and quality of the service are values we can find every day in the work we do together.
Eduard Cors
Digital Marketing,
Zambon Company
In Zambon Spain, we are very happy to be working with Sparkfabrik. The design system they have created for our corporation is already a very important tool and an easy way to show what we exactly wanted.
Sparkfabrik’s expertise has been a very relevant part of our customer centricity strategy which places us closer to our patients daily needs. The website design projects developed show a great quality standards, just as the strategic consultancy service provided. Sparkfabrik has set a simple way to work which makes it very comfortable providing feedback and solving problems in the fastest way. We are now closer to our digital goals.
