Top B2B semiconductor company transforms customer experience with Sitecore

During a breakout session at Sitecore Symposium 2024, Parag Dave, Solutions Architect, Analog Devices Inc, Shashi Myadam, Senior IT Manager Analog Devices Inc, and Debajyoti (DJ) Basu, Director, IT Applications, Analog Devices Inc presented a deep dive into how Sitecore helped the company achieve a faster go-to-market strategy, zero downtime deployment, and low latency for global delivery.

Analog Devices is a global semiconductor leader that bridges the physical and digital worlds to enable breakthroughs at the Intelligent edge. Analog Devices combines analog, digital, and software technologies into solutions that help drive advancements in digitized factories, mobility, and digital healthcare, combat climate change, and reliably connect humans and the world. Analog.com is Analog Devices’ public-facing digital platform, which receives millions of requests each day.

Frictionless customer experience

Analog Devices has earned a global reputation for being “at the edge of the intelligent edge.” The company makes this happen by delivering actionable insights at the edge through innovative solutions, so that its customers stay ahead of what’s possible.

To continue enabling, empowering, and evolving this vision, Analog Devices recognized that its flagship digital property Analog.com had to be reimagined and reinvented. Their vision was for Analog.com 2.0 to deliver the industry’s most frictionless end-to-end customer experience and digital journey, powering both company growth and customer value.

Analog Digital’s approach to evolving Analog.com was defined and driven by four integrated strategies:

• Frictionless digital journey: Analog Digital wanted to provide customers with the industry’s most frictionless experience to find, choose, use, buy, and get support. This meant taking a customer-first approach, empowering customers to choose their channel of choice, and give them compelling reasons to come back.
• Demand generation: Analog Digital wanted the website to play a significant and measurable role in enhancing brand awareness, acquiring new customers, and accelerating the pairing of the company’s solutions with customer demand through marketing programs.
• Customer-enabled design: Analog Digital wanted to make design substantially easier and faster, enabling a software-driven system design for customers.
• Sales acceleration: Analog Digital wanted to leverage data-driven corporate intelligence and customer insights to accelerate both human and digital go-to-market strategies.

To make this strategy work and drive progress forward, Analog Digital also recognized that it had to bring together and harmonize the efforts of diverse internal groups that included software developers, design engineers, and procurement teams, and facilitate effective collaboration between IT and business.

Analog Digital targeted significant and sustainable growth in three core areas:

• Increased revenue and customer growth, driven by greater pipeline value, ecommerce revenue, and new customer count.
• Increased cross-selling and upselling, proven by a measurable boost in product categories sold per customer.
• Increased industry-leading customer experience, captured by rising Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Effort Score (CES).

Analog.com 2.0 goals

Analog Digital also identified six goals for Analog.com 2.0:

• Intuitive and impactful visual design: The website had to deliver an updated look-and-feel that represented a cutting-edge technology company. This objective was seen as critical for both building trust with customers, as well as attracting top talent.
• Engineering end-to-end: The website had to make it easy for customers to find technical information and intuitive evaluation tools. The company also wanted to drive competitive advantage and brand differentiation by elevating its peer-to-peer online technical support community called EngineerZone and make it simpler and faster for customers to design and maximize the value of the company’s products.
• Modern and scalable platform: The website had to be built on an integrated platform that could continue to evolve and adapt to market needs. The site also had to support business units and marketing teams in their efforts to create and launch new content and experiences at a faster pace than ever before.
• Customer-first approach: The website had to leverage agile ways of working to develop digital experiences that solve real customer needs and create a more consistent customer experience.
• Channel of choice: The website had to make it simple for customers — regardless of the size of their company — to find, choose, use, and buy Analog Digital’s products. It was also essential to help customers effectively self-support in the moments that matter.
• Technology modernization: The website would incorporate Sitecore’s latest CMS platform improvements and fixes, modernize application delivery using cutting-edge cloud-native containers technology, and employ automated deployments to enable continuous delivery.

The vastly improved Analog.com 2.0 is now in place and is unleashing a whole new level of capabilities and benefits — including zero downtown rollouts every three weeks. The website is also supporting 2.5 million requests per day and enforces strict security measures to protect data integrity.

Highlights of Analog.com’s new topology

• AKS node pool with 9 Standard_DS4_v2 (8 vCPU/28 GB RAM) instances.
• AKS max surge percentage set to 10%
• Microsoft Entra ID authentication with Azure RBAC

New technology and delivery capabilities of Analog.com

• Modern and scalable cloud infrastructure:
  • Private hosting with enhanced security.
  • Proactive monitoring and smart detection.
  • Highly scalable.
• Container-based application architecture
  • Platform-agnostic architecture.
  • Out-of-the-box rollback.
  • Secure application configurations.
• AI/ML-powered search technology
  • Semantic search.
  • AI-driven dynamic results re-ranking.
  • Automatic synonym detection.
  • Business enablement.
• Enhanced build and release + DevOps capabilities
  • Automated CICD pipelines for infrastructure and container images.
  • Support blue-green deployments.
• Iteration-based agile process templates
  • Supports the work of Agile teams.

The Analog Digital team wrapped up their session by reflecting on some lessons learned and key takeaways, which they encourage companies to consider as they map and move on their journey of digital transformation with Sitecore and Kubernates:

Infrastructure

• Plan the vNet CIDR range for scaling and blue-green infrastructure.
• Put the AKS cluster in a vNet/Subnet.
• Put the Application Gateway and AKS in the same vNet for seamless routing.
• For external integration, whitelist AKS IPs on target systems.

Security

• The ingress should be internal to vNet, to prevent Internet access.
• Secure the rollout by leveraging service account RBAC access to AKS cluster.
• Store Sitecore secrets in an Azure Key Vault, and leverage CSI driver on AKS.

DevOps

• Store desired state configurations YAML in GitHub repos.
• Create infra scaling pipelines in Azure DevOps.
• Create ingress/CD/CM/ID rollout pipelines.
• Run Archival for Docker images.
• Cache Sitecore base images to optimize time to build and deploy.

The Analog Digital team also stressed the importance of having the right technology partner throughout the journey.

Discover more about how to improve customer experience with these six tried and trusted techniques.