Xerox meets shifting needs with a cloud-based environment

Migrating to a cloud-first strategy to suit the needs of the modern day B2B business challenge

Over the last 20 years Xerox has adapted its offering considerably. Having started life inventing the copier, laser printer and Ethernet, Xerox more recently launched its service business helping organisations in the insurance, healthcare, government and retail sectors with their IT and other back office challenges. Its key focus at present is print technology with a lot of its work centred around 3D printing and metallic print.

Xerox’s SMART Centre website was created for salespeople, both internal and external, to access all of the company’s sales content and collateral to help them on their selling journey. The site was designed to make the salespersons journey a lot easier and more streamlined and sees up to 7,000 unique visitors per month.

Project objective

Xerox has worked with Optimizely for many years using its Ektron Content Management System for its SMART centre website. However, the UK&I team saw an opportunity to transform their digital operations over to the cloud. This would not only save on server costs in but improve its online experience for colleagues, sales staff and distribution resellers.

Transforming the printing industry one page at a time

Xerox migrated to Optimizely’s Digital Experience Platform which provides a cloud-first approach to engagement including high availability and performance, easy connectivity with other cloud services and existing systems, ability to manage spikes in customer demand and a platform that is ready to seamlessly adopt the latest technology updates. The new platform helped to adapt the site to the changing needs of the salesperson from previously being a library of downloadable content to a site with more functionality, different types of views and more calls to action.

The results   

The key reason for the migration was to save on server costs as having everything hosted on a local Xerox service when the company was still using Ektron was costly. The move saved the printing company a considerable amount of money on these costs alone.

Other benefits have included performance improvements in terms of site speed and load times. Xerox chipped off two seconds from its average page load speeds using the cloud service and has also noticed less instances where the site has experienced downtime, which was common when it was still using its local servers.

The functionality of the site has also improved since the migration. Using advance and insights enabled on the platform, Xerox was able to create a connection point for most of the company’s sales tools into a tools marketplace to allow users access to them in an app store format. This has been advanced further with AI by providing recommendations for sales tools that users might want to use depending on which part of the sales cycle that they are currently in.

Future plans

Xerox’s future plans are centred around content. The company produces lots of content daily which is also translated and a lot of analysis is currently happening to see if producing so much content is justified. Because of the in-depth insights offered on the new platform, Xerox is able to capture usage information to tell who is reading the content and how users are interacting with the platform.