Acquia Cloud Site Factory Delivers Massive ROI Impact for Hundreds of Digital Experiences

BURLINGTON, Mass. -- December 11, 2014 -- Acquia, the digital experience company, today released the results of an independent study conducted by Forrester Consulting into the impact of Acquia Cloud Site Factory for four key customers. The full study is available for download from Acquia.

Brands are continually challenged to deliver digital experiences that better connect customers and support their marketing and commerce initiatives. Global organizations have the added challenge of delivering localized experiences that stay true to brand guidelines. Only Acquia Cloud Site Factory simplifies the operation, management and governance of hundreds of sites, enabling small teams to deliver digital experiences at a far lower cost and achieve a faster time to market than ever possible.

Commissioned by Acquia to confirm the impact that Site Factory delivers to Global 2000 brands, Forrester’s Total Economic Impact Study concludes that, based on data from the customers who were interviewed, Site Factory dramatically reduced site development and support costs, conserved IT and marketing resources, and improved standardization, governance, and scalability — all while accelerating time-to-market and the delivery of better digital experiences. In three years, Forrester stated, a composite organization based on the Site Factory customers interviewed will achieve nearly a 950 percent return on their investment in the technology, realize a payback on their investment in a little more than two months, and reduce their overall site costs. One of the organizations interviewed was able to reduce its overall site costs by as much as 80 percent.

“Acquia’s open-cloud approach to digital experience delivery can help brands think ahead and nimbly adapt to rapid changes in technology and evolving customer expectations,” said Tom Erickson, CEO of Acquia. “Only Site Factory offers the agility to support hundreds of sites that readily connect to a brand’s marketing and IT toolset, offering direct control over the delivery of digital experiences to the various site owners who, if frustrated, will go elsewhere for their own solutions. IT manages and governs the supporting infrastructure, from operating the data center to managing code, on Acquia’s powerful, resilient cloud infrastructure."

Forrester Consulting interviewed four Site Factory users who previously employed disparate and disconnected legacy processes and systems for site production. Forrester aggregated the results across the four organizations and quantified the impact by creating a composite organization. The composite organization achieved savings of $12.4 million versus implementation costs of $1.2 million, yielding a net present value (NPV) of $11.2 million in financial impact.

Highlights of the three year ROI study, which Acquia published today on Acquia.com, include:

• Reduction in site development costs by as much as 80 percent for some organizations interviewed. The composite organization realized $10 million in savings for the 300 sites it built using Site Factory.
• Reduced staffing requirements netted savings of $1.1 million, as five fewer professionals were required to deliver and support the sites.
• Productivity gains for digital marketing, as the marketers interviewed by Forrester reported marked improvements in their time to publication. One team achieved a 50 percent gain in productivity by replacing its legacy content management system with Site Factory, realizing the equivalent of $591,218 in savings.
• Legacy licenses. Because it's built on the Acquia Platform, Site Factory added $571,000 in savings as the composite organization avoided software maintenance fees for proprietary, closed source legacy solutions. The Acquia Platform brings together Acquia solutions and Drupal, the open source web content management system.

“The customers interviewed were all searching for a standardized platform that would enable them to launch multiple websites quicker and at lower costs,” stated the November 2014 Forrester Research, Inc. report: ‘The Total Economic Impact™ of Acquia Cloud Site Factory.’ “These organizations were facing rising costs from disparate legacy processes and technology for site creation. A number of these organizations were frustrated by the length of time it took to implement new functionality or stand up new sites in their previous environments.”

Site Factory was developed by Acquia to tame the challenge faced by organizations that are confronted with the nightmare of managing and improving an expensive tangle of dozens or hundreds of websites. One vice president of digital at a major broadcast and media company told Forrester: “We can stand up as many sites as we want. The way Site Factory is structured, it allows us to scale much faster, and it allows us to actually scale margin. So if we do more, it doesn’t cost us more.”

Site Factory is a part of the Acquia Platform, which brings together Acquia’s solutions for digital engagement and experience management to unify content, community and commerce. The Acquia Platform supports DevOps best practices by helping engineers create high-quality applications faster. The Acquia Platform’s elastic cloud infrastructure and enterprise-class, follow-the-sun support automate quality assurance so the user experience is never disrupted, helping ensure great performance.

Download the study ‘The Total Economic Impact of Acquia Cloud Site Factory: Accelerating Time-to-Market and Enabling Cost-Effective Deployment of Multiple Websites’.

About Acquia
Acquia is the digital experience company. Pinterest, Mercedes Benz, Warner Music Group, Stanford University are among the more than 4,000 organizations that are transforming their digital businesses with Acquia’s open platform for integrated digital experiences. Global 2000 enterprises, government agencies and NGOs rely on Acquia to create new revenue streams, lower costs, and engage audiences more deeply through content, community, commerce and context.

For more information visit www.acquia.com or call +1 781 238 8600.

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