Case Studies

Custom Marketing Platform Enhances Capabilities for Partners Worldwide

Project At a Glance
RDA worked with our client to create an updated, custom solution that enables partners to leverage a vast amount of resources to deliver sophisticated, coordinated marketing plans. Through Partner Marketing (TPM) is the result of these efforts: a single platform that services partners in every nation in the world.

About Our Client

Our client's partner program is a worldwide registered membership organization that works with businesses of all sizes which are focused on integrating with or implementing their technologies. The program recognizes partner expertise, rewards partners for their impact in the technology marketplace, and delivers tools and resources to help their businesses become profitable regardless of size or focus. The program focuses on developing skills, increasing opportunities, closing more sales, and supporting customers.

Background

Each of our client's business units develops marketing content to be leveraged by partners. Historically, this content was provided worldwide in various forms and methods with very little consistency from one subsidiary to another.

RDA designed, developed, and delivered a pilot website which served as a first generation solution that addressed a subset of the marketing content provided by the business units. The site was originally built on ASP.NET 1.1 and was subsequently upgraded to ASP.NET 2.0 by RDA. Developed using a wizard-based pattern, the minimum number of pages that a user had to navigate exceeded 40. The site was capable of delivering high quality print-based assets such as postcards, business letters and flyers, in addition to maintaining a large library of rich text content along with sophisticated and updatable layout structures. Although it was a truly unique solution that provided most of the required functionality, it was expensive to maintain and its complex navigational structure frustrated partners. It was also difficult to introduce new types of marketing assets, and coordinating the delivery of print-based marketing items through an order fulfillment system was not scalable globally.

Our client sought an updated solution that would enable its partners to leverage a vast amount of resources to deliver sophisticated, coordinated marketing plans. Through Partner Marketing (TPM) is the result of these efforts: a single platform that services partners in every nation in the world.

Solution Detail

The detailed business requirements document for TPM included replacing the original pilot, providing a unified framework across all TPM sites for guidance, establishing a new marketing sophistication level for partners, and integrating with existing systems.

TPM had a maximum budget of $1.75 million and a production deadline that was only four months away. RDA's task was to replace the existing pilot and vastly improve the administration experience. Based on this, we delivered a working prototype whereby a partner could complete the same use case in a single page (compared to the 40 pages needed with the pilot). Additionally, RDA convinced our client that Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) would be the appropriate architecture and really the only chance for meeting the combination of an aggressive deadline and concurrent changes in the feature sets.

Embracing a Scrum approach, RDA coordinated development on approved product features, continued to refine potential features, established a hosting environment, physically installed the server software and provided ongoing graphic design support. The initial engineering focused on replacing the existing pilot and establishing integration with the Windows Live ID (Passport), which would provide a fully customized and integrated security service for MOSS.

One month into the project, our client added a marketing design firm to the team which radically redesigned the user experience. Within two months, RDA demonstrated the first single page replacement for the pilot archetype, a Rich Internet Application-based layout tool. The RDA team continued working to accommodate a 70% change in scope, which now included:

The creation of a marketing plan that relegates the original pilot as one of four possible types of content referred to as Marketing Tactics.
A new partner activity center which would coordinate activities from various contacts within a partner’s organization across a specific marketing campaign, technologies and international boundaries.
Allowing client administrators to work in their native languages worldwide.
The delivery of a fully functional business intelligence solution, which would service reporting needs that were yet to be specified.
Meeting the original schedule and budget requirements.

Today, TPM services worldwide partners in 10 languages with two front-end MOSS servers, a SQL Server and an application server. There have been no unplanned system outages and our client is very pleased with the results.

Benefits

RDA's client has assigned values for each download action that registered partners take. The original pilot project had a total download count of around 1,500 items in the 2.5 years it was in production. Since project completion, PMC has generated over 8,000 downloads by partners which has realized an estimated $92 million in additional revenue to our client.

Additional benefits include the following:

This solution has allowed our client to create a vast array of new customizable tactics in formats and layout that we never anticipated during the development of the project.
The vast majority of the administrative functions are through the direct interaction with standard MOSS document libraries, lists and image libraries. Memory objects are stored as XML in a modified text column in the lists where a more sophisticated type of object was required.
All data to support the application from lists of secured users, persistent user data and reporting data is stored in MOSS lists. There is no direct access to SQL server tables, which allowed the application to be very flexible and to leverage the built-in functions of MOSS to provide a much improved client administrative experience.
The solution incorporates a full data warehouse and analysis services reporting cubes that are updated nightly as part of a scheduled process that reads the information stored in MOSS lists, populates in memory business objects and then replicates itself to a relational model version of a subset of the information for reporting. Downstream, SIS packages transform the data into a Star schema and ultimately into a reporting cube.