Scranton Gillette Communications

B2B Publishing in The Digital Age

Scranton Gillette is a B2B publishing company that's been around for over 100 years. With about 15 brand publications in 9 vertical markets. Each brand has a website connecting buyers and sellers in the B2B market. They also produce newsletters and print titles. While print continues to be extremely important, the digital side of their business is becoming more significant every day.

How IT & Editorial Partner to Create Digital Bliss

The Scranton Gillette team takes pride in using their internal resources as much as possible. Their in-house editorial team focuses on great content so that their IT team—including programming—can support the business.

We’re structured in a way that allows us to deliver exceptional digital content. 

Joel Hughes, SVP of eMedia & Information Technology

1. A kind of hybrid, super-IT department. Many similar companies have specific departments for IT, programming, and design. Scranton Gillette has it all under one roof. Hughes is at the top of all things digital, from company infrastructure—like internal networks, web hosting, and all the web dev—to client websites and infrastructures.

2. A Drupal-friendly editorial department. “Because editorial strategy underlies everything we do, the editorial team has a great deal of ownership over our websites,” Hughes said. “They use Drupal directly every day to enter in all the stories and the content. Marketing also has a hand in strategy, and delivers reader-based and advertising-based promotions.”

The Problem: A Cloud That Wasn’t Very Cloud

With over 20 websites to manage, Hughes’ team is always looking for more efficient ways to run them. And the way they were doing things wasn’t very efficient. Even though they were using the cloud, it wasn’t true cloud.

Here’s how their old solution was inefficient:

1. Scaling was hard, slow & expensive. Because all 15 sites shared resources, it was hard to tell how much work each particular service instance was doing. “There could be up to 30 minutes of downtime while you upsized the server,” Hughes said. “You’re waiting for it to unmount the storage device, make the AMI more powerful, and then remount it back on. And then you’ve got to downsize it. So we were paying to scale up, and then to scale back down again. Even though it was “cloud,” the servers themselves were not abstracted. Only the hardware. Pantheon abstracts the servers away, too, because you’re using virtual site instances instead.”

2. A focused point of failure. Each instance could have up to 10 doc roots on it, and Hughes’ team never knew at an instance level where they were with resources. If one instance went down, seven sites would go down. They weren’t fully cloud, and didn’t have a clear picture of performance. Additionally, they had some very complex support subscriptions.

Why Pantheon?

“When a friend told me about Pantheon, I decided to start small with a personal website,” Hughes said. “I just loved the clean interface. Even as a free subscriber, I noticed the support was really good, too. I was getting instant responses to questions. The architecture made sense.”

But Hughes didn’t want to switch over all of the Scranton Gillette sites unless he was positive Pantheon would be more efficient than their current solution. He wanted his team to test it for themselves. 

After I brought the dev team in to tinker around with the dev environment, there was buy-in right off the bat. They were really excited once they saw the back end. It wasn’t hard to get everyone on board.

The Outcome

So far, Scranton Gillete has migrated 20 sites to Pantheon. Here’s what they love:

1. Easy migration. Scranton Gillette already had Drupal sites up and running, so migrating to Pantheon was easy. All they had to do was pull the backups, files, and code.

2. Efficiency FTW! The Pantheon dashboard interface saves Hughes’ team 5+ hours a week. “My team is saving at least 5 hours a week total in clicks and wait time, compared to before Pantheon,” Hughes said. “We love being able to download the files, code, and DB backups with one click on any of the backups. Git comments showing in the interface is great, too. The entire user experience is more efficient. Team communication is higher than it was before. Now we can apply more time to moving the company forward.”

3. Deep-dive support when it counts. Scranton Gillette recently launched a new website, and were experiencing some performance problems. “After the site went down, I hopped onto the emergency pager,” Hughes said. “We had multiple guys from Pantheon working on the site immediately. Within an hour, they were able to tell us exactly what was causing the problem. I don’t care how slick the interface is, or how many efficiencies are created. At the end of the day, we need to know the team is behind us. And now we’ve got the Batphone."

4. Best-practice workflows. A managed workflow helps prevent disaster. The ability to very easily spin up websites is great, too. You can get a website running with a Drupal install in minutes. It’s an easy handoff because it’s actually cloud.

5. True cloud makes it easy to scale up. Everything from support through to the site itself is one to one. If Scranton Gillette needs to scale up, Pantheon will automatically increase their drops.

Advice for Someone Switching Over Multiple Sites?

If you want to get your team on board quickly, start with a free instance. Let everyone bang around on it. Hughes also advises that once you’re ready to make the switch, don’t do your hardest site first--as tempting as it may be. Give yourself a quick victory early on and start with an easy site. Then proceed to a more involved site. At this point, you can call on Pantheon support to help you take it live.