Sitecore Blog: Bradley Howard

bradley howard

Bradley Howard

Bradley Howard, Head of Digital Media

A History of Best of Breed

By Bradley Howard, March 28, 2011 | Rating:  | Leave a comment

Ten years ago we looked for an off the shelf Content Management System to cater for our sports and super-brand clients. After several months and demos from vendors, we found the market expensive and immature.

We concluded that it was cheaper and less risk to write our own bespoke Content Management System.

At this same time we were sending our own email newsletters, streaming video, web analytics – we just couldn’t find suitable products and vendors. We’d even ended up with our own content delivery network in 2000.

We found that maintaining a bespoke Content Management System was expensive, let alone trying to keep up to date with new product innovations such as article versioning, multi-lingual, content workflow.

Four years ago we looked at our technology stack again, with the aim of replacing as many legacy systems with off the shelf products. The Content Management System market had matured and costs had been reduced almost exponentially.

We began the transition by migrating our bespoke Content Management System to Sitecore. We specifically chose to migrate the Content Management System first and then build the rest of the technology stack around the CMS.

Our technology stack today looks totally different to the one ten years ago. Virtually all of our systems are loosely coupled, allowing us to interchange components depending on client requirements and existing relationships.

I find it strange that websites are still being built today without a Content Management System (cheap to build, expensive to make any changes), or with a bespoke CMS (cheap to build, cheap to make updates tomorrow, expensive to make updates in 6 months’ time).

Our best of breed approach to our technology stack has proved itself to be future proof, scalable and cost effective for the long term.

Bradley Howard is the Head of Digital Media at Endava, a well-established IT services company with over 600 staff operating across Europe from headquarters in London and offices in the UK, US, Romania and Moldova. Tune into this brief Focus on Community video conversation about Endava and a client case study.

Tags: CMS Evaluation, WCM Marketplace

Topics: Web Implementation and Integration

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