Zambon is a chemical-pharmaceutical multinational founded in Vicenza in 1906, on the history of an innovative Italian family business. Strengthened by its values, today it is a company projected towards the future that has in innovation the basis of its growth project.
Replatforming and redesign of all product sites in a multi-cloud and fully Cloud Native perspective
After having designed from scratch the entire ecosystem of the Zambon Corporate site and the Zambon Pharma country sites, Zambon also wanted to apply the same approach to the redesign of the sites of product, starting from two leading brands as pilot projects.
The objective of the project was to create a central hub for the production and centralized management of product sites on a global scale, with a view to optimizing the speed to market, costs, quality and reuse of assets in a transversal way on different brands and geographical areas.
The initial situation, similar to that of corporate sites, consisted of many sites managed by individual countries, with different technological solutions and with sometimes limited, if not impossible, possibilities for intervention.
The same needs then reappeared, but with a broader scope:
To achieve this, we had to streamline the work done for the corporate sites, establishing a clear workflow for the development of all new sites. The processes therefore had to become reproducible in terms of methods and, consequently, predictable in terms of costs.
We have expanded the integrated service already operating in the direction of creating a single platform, based on the concepts of method, infrastructure and architecture designed for the Zambon Corporate site and for country sites Zambon Pharma.
In close collaboration with the Zambon Digital department, we worked on the generalization of the Design System of the Corporate site, so that it could be used for the generation of product sites, while at the same time leaving creative freedom to the agencies.
The constantly evolving digital catalog can be consulted by brand managers and creative agencies. The technical solutions for modular development have been systematized and made available as a default feature for all sites, with a set of already existing components and the possibility of introducing new ones for each specific case. The combination of different components and the graphic design designed for them by the agencies has led to the development of sites that are technologically similar but visually very different and identifying the brand.
We therefore customized Drupal to make it a Cloud-native platform, able to support us throughout the process, and thus we gave birth to Firestarter. In developing this tool we have always taken into consideration the needs of Delivery processes and the potential offered by Cloud operations.
The Cloud-native approach has allowed us to elastically expand the existing infrastructure to accommodate the other sites of the group.
Also in this case we have adopted a multi-vendor strategy with Google Cloud Platform for the West and Alibaba Cloud for the East, which ensures us resilience, high performance and availability in all geographical areas, including China.
GLOBAL CDN
The automatic use of global CDNs ensures immediate response times from anywhere in the world, reducing the number of visits that would impact servers and databases, also to the advantage of security.
HIGH-AVAILABILITY
The production clusters are equipped with auto-scaling and auto-healing, ensuring very high uptime, even during deployments and maintenance interventions.
CHINA-COMPATIBLE
The infrastructure configuration can be replicated entirely on vendors that allow access to the Chinese area with response times that would otherwise be impossible.
All support activities are provided by Sparkfabrik for the entire stack, with guaranteed response times. This means that the ordinary and extraordinary maintenance of the application and infrastructure take place in a unified way and without rebounds.
UPDATES
Updates and improvements are automatically propagated to all sites without the need to coordinate activity between multiple players.
EVOLUTIVE
The evolutions are performed by a team that knows the organization as well as the product and the service stack, with reduced costs, greater speed and high confidence.
SECURITY
Security does not only concern the application code, but also and above all the services that keep it alive. Devops means eliminating the supply constraints typical of our sector and guaranteeing a unique service.
FLEXIBILITY
As an optional service, it is possible to host legacy or third-party sites, calculating the cost of hosting and a custom workflow for deployment, to be defined from time to time based on needs.
CUSTOMER CARE
Support in the use of the platform is guaranteed to editorial and technical operators.
This strategy has allowed Zambon to turn to a single supplier for delivery and to be able to make use of a single shared platform, always maintaining control of digital assets and promoting internal interoperability.
With the adoption of this model, today marketers can focus on communication, delegating the implementation of a content management application, hosting and maintenance to a centralized system.
A model that brings Zambon the benefits of:
New projects don’t necessarily require designing from scratch and jumping into the void, because co-suppliers (creative agencies, marketing professionals, etc.) can take advantage of shared guidelines. The individual project can certainly still require a specific design, but in any case it takes advantage of a platform with flexibility and scalability, to respond easily to business needs.
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION & SERVICE DESIGN STRATEGIST, ZAMBON SPA
DIGITAL MARKETING, ZAMBON COMPANY