Clarivate
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Introduction
Clarivate™ helps customers discover, protect and commercialize their inventions using trusted subscription and technology-based solutions coupled with deep domain expertise. Its bold mission is to help customers solve some of the world’s most complex problems by providing actionable information and insights that reduce the time from new ideas to life-changing inventions in the areas of science and intellectual property.
Clarivate runs nearly 20 WordPress sites and leverages Pantheon’s WebOps platform for productivity. The web team, led by Govind Kudva, is responsible for the content, architecture and user experience (UX) of the WordPress sites.
Approach
Empower Global Expansion Strategy with Enterprise-Level CMS and WebOps
Clarivate chose enterprise-level WordPress to support its large population of content contributors. Employees worldwide could easily contribute content without having to submit a ticket or contact a developer to help them do it. Granting this opportunity to colleagues globally encouraged them to share their expertise without overwhelming development teams.
WordPress’ extensive plugin list gave Clarivate additional functionality. The company’s plugins include SEO enhancement, customized pop-ups and extensive lead generation and conversion testing. And Pantheon’s WebOps platform supports the Clarivate WordPress sites with unrivaled speed, uptime, and scalability.
Pantheon enabled developers to standardize design and branding across multiple sites and enabled efficient content development and distribution.
I’m a developer, and I wanted Pantheon for its reliability and for the freedom and security it gives our Web DevOps teams. Being able to implement code on the fly and easily fallback if needed is immensely valuable.
- Jeremy Williams, Web Development Manager at Clarivate
The team also used Pantheon’s extensive automation capabilities to streamline content migration from many different sites. The team used the Pantheon Migration WordPress plugin to manage migration from the Pantheon dashboard. The comprehensive self-guided migration resources and support enabled them to rapidly integrate acquisitions with de-risked migrations.
The openness of the Pantheon platform supported A/B testing and conversion optimization by making software integrations, including Oracle Eloqua and Marketo, simple.
Pantheon solved the problem of the WPML slowdowns with its New Relic integration. New Relic alerted the team that the plugin was making excessive calls to language databases, affecting site-wide performance. The team switched to a multi-regional site strategy to support different language speakers and now uses Pantheon’s site portfolio management tools to govern the new sites. A multi-regional website explicitly targets users in various regions and countries by different parameters, including major spoken languages.
Challenge: Enable Digital Marketing
The Clarivate web team faced three major challenges in enabling digital marketing testing and growth: improving the development pipeline, integrating acquired sites into a global brand and providing extensive multilingual features.
Clarivate’s global expansion plans for its website included growing its presence in the Americas, Europe and Asia. The intensive project needed an enterprise-level CMS to support extensive development and sophisticated digital marketing. However, the legacy CMS could not support the strategy.
The Clarivate team needed an agile environment that would enable the marketing team to easily conduct A/B testing to optimize conversion for marketing campaigns. It lacked the necessary workflow tools to personalize its customer experience and enhance its overall productivity. Plus, there was no formal development or testing pipeline nor separate instances for consistent testing and workflows. On top of all these challenges, working with the widely distributed Web DevOps team was exceptionally difficult.
Jeremy Williams, Web Development Manager at Clarivate, remembered, “The development pipeline was not working effectively, and it was causing delays and inefficiency. As an example, I would need to send a team member files so he could update code. But I was in the U.S., and he was in Belgium. Our time zones didn't line up, so I had to wait until the next day to update anything. ”
The second challenge, transforming multiple portfolios and websites into a single global brand, required a redesign and a highly reliable and automated platform to support the new websites. Govind Kudva, Director of Digital and Content Marketing at Clarivate added, “Our content was not with one hosting provider. Some of our sites were hosted by the product teams. Some of the sites were hosted by agencies. We needed to bring everything onto a single roof.”
Finally, the new CMS needed multilingual capabilities. They initially used the WordPress plugin WPML to translate pages for global customers. But as customer visits grew, WPML did not scale, and site performance suffered.
Why Pantheon: Agility, Efficiency, Integration
The website is heavily focused on lead generation, and Pantheon’s ease of use and automation enables the team to focus on the site as the company’s lead demand engine. Williams said, “Now we spend most of our time enhancing the site to increase demand generation, such as A/B testing and sophisticated personalization. Pantheon allows us to spend our time on our highest business priorities.”
Clarivate appreciates Pantheon’s responsive support included at the Diamond tier. Pantheon engineers quickly answer the team’s questions and deliver the results they need. In fact, between simplified management and Pantheon support, the team felt confident replacing external support with in-house management and running multiple sites themselves.
Pantheon’s deep extensibility easily enabled dozens of WordPress plugins and allowed Clarivate to run different marketing automations on the platform. The New Relic integration enabled the team to optimize and fine-tune site-wide performance.
Efficient development workflows also improved collaboration and communication between Web DevOps team members and company executives.
Collaboration used to be complex on the far-flung Web DevOps team.
Our team members work all over the world. It was hard to line up work schedules, and we used to spend hours going back and forth. Pantheon’s efficient dev environment saved us a lot of time.
- Jeremy Williams, Web Development Manager at Clarivate
In addition, Pantheon’s agility improved communications with the executive suite by allowing the team to easily create live demonstrations for stakeholders. For example, one developer created a new instance that looked exactly like the production environment. The developer’s manager easily manipulated the pages to demonstrate interactive features in real time to a group of executives, enabling a fast review and approval process.
Results: Productivity Drives Global Expansion
Productivity was a key goal, and Pantheon delivered. Before moving to WordPress and Pantheon, team members spent hours identifying development and management issues and implementing solutions. With Pantheon, the worldwide Web DevOps teams made major productivity gains. “Without Pantheon’s efficient development environment, we would need to grow our development team by 50% to accomplish the same amount of work,” Kudva noted.
Pantheon’s flexibility also accelerated digital marketing decisions. It’s simple for the developers to spin up a sample menu, design or branching workflow in WordPress. By demonstrating the dynamic changes to executives, the team gains faster and more confident management buy-in.
Pantheon’s high stability and reliability also served Clarivate’s executive global expansion strategy, including seamlessly managing regional sites for multilingual capabilities. Instead of using a WordPress plugin that slowed site performance, Clarivate enabled regional employees and customers to log in to a specific site in their language. Content contributors create and edit in WordPress using their own language, and Pantheon efficiently clones and translates the revised pages across other regional sites.
The whole process with Pantheon has been seamless. If I could think of one word to describe our experience, it would be confidence. Pantheon gave us the confidence to explore our greatest potential and the confidence to execute.
- Jeremy Williams, Web Development Manager at Clarivate
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