CityTech takes content management to the cloud
I've been learning many painful lessons about the in's and out's of content management systems over the past two months, so it was with great personal interest that I approached my recent interview with CityTech, one of Amazon's 2013 Premier Consulting Partners.
Based in Chicago, CityTech got its start in 2003 as a systems integrator specializing in Java and .NET applications. Over time, that expertise morphed into several different managed services for cloud infrastructure including one for content management that helps Fortune 500 and brands such as PGA.com deliver their brands in a personalized way.
That service, called Web Experience Management, helps businesses manage how their customers and employees view content, regardless of whether the access device is a Web brower, smartphone or tablet computer. The service is built on top of the Adobe CQ Web Experience Management and Digital Marketing Suite. Here are some of the features promised:
- The ability to handle up to 25 million hits per minute
- Localized and multi-language deployments
- Real-time personalization
- E-commerce integration
- Integration with customer relationship management (CRM) platforms including Salesforce.com, which facilitates lead management
For this, a company could expect to pay up to $2,000 per month, which includes the licensing fees for the software and the infrastructure support, said Matt Van Bergen, founder and CTO, CityTech. "There is a cost savings, but in the end it's also something that's off their plate. They can focus on their business," Van Bergen said.
For one CityTech customer, Web site MyMove.com, the service has dramatically improved the company's time to market with new information and promotions.
"Time to market is critical for us, so we looked to provide our editorial and marketing teams more direct control, so they could publish more current content and targeted offers rapidly, without having to go through our development team," said Ada Vassilovski, vice president of product and marketing for MyMove, in a published case study.
The solution from CityTech accommodated custom integration with MyMove's IBM WebSphere system (which helps the site target more than 6,000 custom deals daily) and user registration information that is store in an Oracle database. The net result has been a 25 percent improvement in customer satisfaction (as measured by MyMove) since shifting to the new Web experience platform.
CityTech also offers other managed services, including cloud infrastructure management for deployments on either Amazon Web Services or Rackspace; cloud migration planning; and mobile applications development.
The company currently has about 100 people in locations including Chicago, San Francisco, Columbus, Ohio, and Bangalore, India. In October 2013, it was awarded a Managed Service Provider competency within the Amazon Partner Network. That means, essentially, that it has met certain customer satisfaction and technical readiness criteria required under the program.
Aside from its tight ties with Amazon and Adobe, the company has extensive skills in Red Hat's JBoss middleware, and has won "partner of the year" kudos for its work with the technology.