WEBCONSOL: Your Trusted Partner in Digital Transformation

Lawrence Tenuta, VP of Technology and Sothea Nim, President

Being an incredibly powerful platform that serves as the foundation of customer experience management, AEM (Adobe Experience Manager), however, needs the right expert partner that understands the depth and capability of the platform for implementation. Through its GX2CMS platform, Montreal-based WEBCONSOL not only enables the right implementation of AEM, but also accelerates a business’ marketing goals by using AEM to its full potential and boosting UI development for AEM without vendor lock-in. Sothea Nim, the president of WEBCONSOL explains how.

What makes WEBCONSOL unique?

Early on in my career, I was introduced to CQ prior to Adobe acquiring the software; I had initially not thought that it would play such an important role in transforming the industry the way it has, although I did find the software advantageous. While I did not see an alternative at the time, I focused on strengthening my CQ skills. It was when I accepted a position with Autodesk for several of their projects, that I realized more people were signing up for AEM/CQ than ever before, but there still existed a huge knowledge gap in the understanding of CQ. That presented an opportunity for me to contribute my knowledge of CQ to the industry and help businesses with AEM/CQ implementations. I began to build solutions ranging from API gateways to microservices, and third-party integrations, specifically commerce into AEM. It was difficult for businesses to implement the platform due to several reasons including the project type, timelines, and budgets. About 50 to 60 percent of such implementations had a very low delivery quality. Although businesses pointed out the mistake on the platform itself, the real challenge was with the integrator.

The main idea we at WEBCONSOL want to promote is that AEM is a great tool and we can implement it the right way. Our products can enhance the usage, help reduce costs and shorten time to go to market. We developed our GX2CMS framework, which has proven to solve a lot of the aforementioned problems. It is a user interface (UI) development framework, which helps save front-end development costs by 20 percent, while integrating a creative design into AEM, and at the same time, eliminates the need for the AEM front-end developer, providing flexible continuous integration flow for front-end and back-end developers in their own lanes. In addition to these advantages, we ensure that the quality of the codes is of a superior quality and accessibility compliant.

What challenges do businesses face with respect to AEM implementation and how do you address them?

We pride ourselves on our expertise in some of the most important Adobe Marketing Cloud products like Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target.

AEM is a great tool and WEBCONSOL can implement it the right way

We also specialize in Scene7, a dedicated delivery network for content, assets, and documents in the cloud. Then, there is the platform that bridges the gap between all these products—Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). Businesses have their analytics data integrated, by collecting all the user details, alongside the detecting tool that will leverage the analyzed and transactional data to enhance that experience, make it accurate, and deliver a more targeted campaign. Adobe Target then leverages the analytics data to send out automated target mails. AEM acts as a central hub connecting other systems, which empowers a marketer to manage digital experience independent of IT. However, the cost of AEM implementation has proven to be high and time to market is slow. An AEM front-end developer needs to dissect the HTML code and break it down into AEM components and templates, then integrate the code with HTL or JSP for it to be functioning in AEM. There are at least five steps to get to the final deployment stage.

With our GX2CMS framework, we transform the creative that we receive, into a front-end AEM-ready code, which can be integrated into AEM project. Our solution, which saves at least 20 percent on front-end development time, eliminates the need for an additional UI developer for AEM.

We typically go through three important steps during our implementation—discovery, planning, and solution. We take time to understand our clients’ exact requirements, their specific challenges, business goals, and the stakeholders, after which, we craft our understanding into a solution that would tackle the problems discovered. Then, we involve ourselves in proper planning of the execution of solutions, and once we have the solution planned concretely, we develop and roll out a quality product that will solve the problems addressed in the discovery phase.

Could you demonstrate WEBCONSOL’s efficacy with a customer success story?

We have a client that needed to implement an AEM DAM (Digital Asset Management) integrated with Scene7. The client also had an e-commerce solution and a pricing system implemented in their system. They wanted to automate their asset in such a way that when they see the product page, it had to have all the associated assets displayed on their website. They wanted to automate the entire set of assets related to a single product, in the front-end on their website, which had to be integrated with their product information segment. They had thousands of assets for all their products.

We enabled them to design a solution in such a way that they could retain their business process of how the asset was input into the system and approved. In addition, the asset had to be appropriately tagged with all the metadata needed in a way that it would be searchable and would have the required permissions for the front-end user to view the assets. We needed to index the metadata into Solar, a search engine tool. Another issue that had to be solved on the business side was that they had different systems that managed the assets. We needed to migrate all the assets into a new solution and this also required that all the metadata be automated and tagged the right assets. We were able to achieve this in a matter of eight weeks, thanks to our GX2CMS tool.

What is the envisioned roadmap for the company?

Our primary goal is to continue to ensure the best possible implementations of Adobe Marketing Cloud products, especially AEM as this is our expertise. Our company has a boutique feel to it and we develop very personal relationships with our clients as we grow our partnerships. While we already have several clients in North America, we are looking to expand into the Asia Pacific region, where we see several opportunities. WEBCONSOL is truly specialized within the AEM world, is efficient, and is capable of handling projects of any size. In addition, we have several exciting products being developed to help businesses to better implement Adobe Marketing Cloud products.