The Silicon Valley Godfather and Adobe Experience Manager

Rebirths are not only for Buddists, Christians, and New Age spiritualists. Everything from soccer teams and companies go through a retransition, a reimagining, a rebirth.

“We were no longer the 75-year-old company that’d been around for a while,” said Keith Orchard, senior manager of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, formerly known as Hewlett-Packard Company, or simply HP.

“We’d become a brand-new company,” added Keith, “but with extensive industry knowledge and expertise. We wanted to show a fresh face to our audiences, and creating a new website was one of the biggest steps we took. That’s what led us to Adobe.”

That vast experience that Keith is pointing to stretches back to 1938 when Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett began innovating in a garage. They would fuse and go on to become a worldwide technology heavyweight. 

So heavy, in fact, that by 2015 the tech giant decided to break away into two separate companies – one would focus on consumer products (the PCs, the printers, etc.) and the other would focus on platform-as-a-service.

The latter of which became Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Which had to be built from scratch. Including a whole new website.

“HPE was a new company that deserved a fresh start,” said Keith. And it had a handful of decades of knowledge from its former site (hp.com) to channel into the new endeavor, as well as having the chance to move into a fresh strategic direction.

One of the fundamental aspects of this new site had to be speed – essential for any high-performing brand, but particularly for a brand whose bread and butter is highly-functional technology. And with no legacy tech weighing down the new direction, there was no excuse for a slow site.

“As we were building for our Day One launch,” added Keith, “we knew we had to take the future into account. We wanted to have a system in place that could support anything, from targeting audiences to rolling out new countries to language localization to providing analytics and tracking engagement  — even if we weren’t going to use it right away.”

And that system that was chosen by HPE to take on this responsibility was Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) – much more than a fully-competent content management system and more like a leading digital experience manager.

AEM happens to have the exact bundle of attributes that HPE were seeking in order to build a website suitable for a world leader. Attributes that include smart templates, reusable media content, effective and centralized asset management, its emphasis on customer experience.

“Adobe has the Cadillac of product offerings,” added Keith. “Not only is it extensible, but the breadth of products it offers to digital marketers is great… We can have different databases, different servers, and different interconnected applications. And the ability for Adobe’s product line to adapt and offer different solutions to suit our needs was pretty important.”

Another A+ attribute of AEM is its scalability – also a fundamental aspect for HPE. The launching of the new HPE website had to hit the ground running, as it would be going live in 10 languages and 45 regions… and holding around 15,000 pages (a monumental amount of content).

“The ability to publish once and have content replicated in all our markets is a huge time saver,” said Keith. “We can have those sites live within an hour, globally. It’s a big deal, especially when you have a news item come up, or a new product launch. It really gives you the ability to quickly produce something that can be consumed by your audience in a timely manner.”

Storytelling

“At HPE, we don’t build your old, stale web pages,” said Keith. “We have very hardworking pages.” These pages featured localized content, personalized banners that are based on their own customers’ user experience and behavior. And then a layer of interactivity, customer engagement, and a depth of media.

Far than simply a buzzword of our times, personalization lies at the very core of best practices. It’s what consumers want and expect, and it’s what many brands and retailers are striving to ensure that they can tailor content for each individual customer.

Adobe Experience Manager is built for personalization, with dynamic content that adapts to language, geography and the behavior of customers. Wherever a customer is based, wherever in the world, they now get tailor-made digital journeys thanks to the sophisticated inner-workings of AEM.

Today, thanks to the help of Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, and Adobe Consulting Services, HPE is ranked number 6 overall on siteIQ (a site which ranks best practices for websites) and number 1 in systems. And also today, HPE has personalized and localized pages for other 55 regions.

PS: ArganoUV is one of the world’s leading Adobe Experience Manager integrators. Contact us to see how we can work together.