SoftServe migrated to CMS (SaaS) in 90 days, then cut page builds to two minutes with Mark

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Days for full migration

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Faster page production

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Hyper personalized landing pages

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SoftServe’s CMO asked for something unheard of: a full website migration and a rebrand, all within a single quarter. The team signed with Optimizely on Christmas Eve, getting the new site live by the end of Q1. They now publish and launch campaigns as fast as the AI market changes, going from generic pages that took weeks to hyper personalized pages that take minutes.

SoftServe, a global AI and technology services company, and an Optimizely partner, migrated their full website onto Optimizely One in 90 days while launching a rebrand.
The team chose one platform over several fragmented solutions, based on total cost of ownership and AI roadmap. Their old stack included a DAM on a four-year contract that sat empty.
Preparation carried the deadline. Business analysts, project managers, and tiger teams planned each module before anything was replaced, and Mark, Optimizely's Agent Platform, helped classify, refresh and move more than 1,000 content items.
Page production time is down 85-93%, and faster publishing has made room for micro agile campaigns in a market where topics can go stale in three months.
SoftServe use Limitless to build a personalized page for every prospect. Fourteen agents research target accounts, then work together to build new pages in less than two minutes, saving weeks of waiting for approvals. The team were personalizing for 15 champion accounts, but are now working towards a target of 500.

Company

SoftServe

Products used

Content Marketing Platform

An unheard-of deadline

Heather Bain is Head of DXP and MarTech Strategy at SoftServe, an IT and AI consulting company that spans the globe. SoftServe have been an Optimizely partner since 2016. But for their own website, they come to Optimizely as a prospect, just like any other buyer.

The company was going through a transformation, as they wanted to move beyond being just another professional services company, to one that leads design and builds in the AI space. This meant a change of identity across the board.

"Our CMO actually asked us if we could go live with a new website. We had a new rebrand coming out," Heather says. "And he actually asked us to go live within a quarter, which is unheard of, to completely migrate your website experience in 90 days."

To migrate your website in that timeframe is a serious ask, but SoftServe have big ambitions. If they were going to step into the shoes of being a ‘digital engineering company’, as they proudly state today, then the website needed to properly represent the new brand.

The DAM nobody used

Before the move, SoftServe ran on a smaller CMS instance, alongside a spread of tools that weren’t working together. Like a lot of growing companies, SoftServe had a stack that had grown up piece by piece.

"Our ecosystem was very fragmented," Heather says, laughing. "We had a DAM that we had nothing inside of, so we didn't use it. We had a four-year contract, and we just left it empty."

When Heather started looking at vendors, one of the big things on her agenda was "making sure that everything played nicely together." "We weren't going to go in, buy a tool, and have to go through four different implementations, some integration challenges, and then have adoption issues."

SoftServe ran the same weighted evaluation they use for clients, with the criteria set before any vendor was scored. Heather attended Opticon, watched the keynotes and saw what was coming for CMS (SaaS) and Optimizely's Agent Platform, Mark, and that helped settle it.

SoftServe went with Optimizely One: Agentic CMS for the new website, plus the Content Marketing Platform (CMP) and Optimizely Data Platform (ODP). They decided at the start of Q4 to move ahead, and signed the contract on Christmas Eve. "It was a jolly time for all involved," Heather says.

Why Optimizely won

Learn how SoftServe approached their DXP evaluation and migration.

Architecture is everything

Then the real work began. A rebrand to launch. Decades of content to move. A fragmented stack to leave behind. And 90 days to do it. SoftServe handed the job to the people who do it for clients every day: their own partner team.

"They did our implementation for us along with the onboarding from Optimizely. And it was a great experience," Heather says. The partner team's solution architects worked alongside SoftServe's digital and web team and its developers.

Before anything was ripped out, they planned. "Having a great business analyst that understands what you're doing, having great project managers. We had phenomenal BA and PMs.”

"Understanding what your pain points were before so that you're not just up and lifting your broken instance into a new instance. It's still going to be broken. So now's the time to solve all the problems that you had before."
Heather Bain|Head of DXP and MarTech Strategy

"Architecture is everything," Heather says. "We broke each module, each product offering out into tiger teams across the organization." With the partner team and Optimizely's onboarding behind them, SoftServe could plan before touching anything. "We were able to plan efficiently before we started ripping and replacing and building new things," she adds. "It was all about the preparation."

By the end of Q1, there was a new brand and a new website to support it.

"We actually made it by the skin of our teeth, but we made it," Heather says. "But it was because of Optimizely and the partnership that we have."

The deadline was 90 days. The build itself took 60. The rest went on planning.

The site was live, but the content was another story. “In terms of migrating decades of content and a rebrand at the same time, I think we bit off a little bit more than we can chew," she says. “I would recommend cutting a lot of your unnecessary content first.”

Mark took on the heavy lifting. SoftServe's partner team built agents to run the migration in five stages: discover and classify, extract, transform and enrich, deploy, then QA. Anything unusual went to a person for review. One agent, a Blog Post Migrator, moved posts straight from a live URL into a draft in the new CMS. More than 1,000 content items have moved across since launch.

It was also the partner team's first year with Mark, and they built a lot of agents as they went. "We were iterating

"It was a no-brainer when we compared the cost of having one platform versus several disconnected solutions. Optimizely also had the best roadmap in terms of AI and features."

Heather Bain | Head of DXP and MarTech Strategy

Campaigns that don't go stale

For Heather, a new platform is the moment to rethink how a team works, and CMP is now the foundation for how SoftServe plans content. "Now is the time to look at your processes and workflows and iterate, which CMP definitely helps with," she says.

SoftServe began launching micro agile campaigns: fast, timely campaigns for a market that doesn't wait. Campaigns that are true to their new brand identity.

"We're in the AI space and IT. So things change very quickly," Heather says. "If you put all of this work into content and marketing and then by the time it's ready to publish, it's no longer relevant. It's a waste of your marketing resources."

On the old setup, campaigns like these weren't an option. Content had to go through "a lot of checks, manual coding, front end work, back end work. And it would take months or weeks to get content on the website."

The new Agentic CMS and Mark changed that. Page production fell from around five days to three to six hours, with no code changes needed to publish new page types. "We couldn't do micro agile campaigns if our campaigns took three months," she says. "Now, when something changes, we can react to that in real time. Our development time is down. Our content-to-market is so much faster, too."

A campaign that takes three months to build is a campaign about what was happening three months ago.

Impossible CMO requests are now possible

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Full website migration to agentic CMS

Going Limitless with Personalization

Things have not slowed down for Heather. She is now working on new projects, and alongside Adam Seabridge, Senior DXP Platform Technical Architect, she has already made an impact on one of the biggest pain points that sat with SoftServe's ABM team.

The team’s goal was to win new business, sell more into existing accounts, and displace competing platforms at target accounts. But their ABM platforms weren’t up to it. “It just wasn’t scalable,” Heather says. “Our teams weren’t able to do nearly the amount of outreach and personalization for all of our target accounts.”

The rebrand left very limited brand and digital capacity, so the ABM team were building account pages in HubSpot by hand, each one through weeks of approvals. That limited them to 10 to 15 champion accounts, out of the 2,500 they should be targeting. “We took Limitless one-to-one and we ran with it,” she says.

Adam Seabridge and his team built a pipeline of 14 agents that score and rank every account. The agents look at each account’s tech stack, digital maturity, financials, leadership changes, market sentiment, and AEO and GEO. Once a week, a workflow agent checks for new and updated account data and triggers a one-to-one agent to build the page in CMS (SaaS).

Each page is built around what SoftServe know about the account. For one law firm, that meant leading with a recent merger and a platform nearing end of life. A person can review any page before it goes live, though “we’re not seeing the need for that very often now,” Adam says.

“Any additional pages that we want to create take less than two minutes… Significant improvement from where we were even six months ago, when it took us weeks and a lot of different approvals to get anything live on our site.”
Heather Bain|Head of DXP and MarTech Strategy

SoftServe already cover well beyond their original champion accounts and are working toward 500. Going from idea to the first live page took less than two weeks. “We stood this up in days, not months,” Heather says.

The speed made the case easy to make. “We were able to spin this up quickly and get results quickly,” she says. Her advice is to start small and keep building. “You can start with the data you have, maybe CRM, and then add in like Gong or any of your ABM platforms or market signals and then keep adding.”

14 agents14 agents

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