Avid Technology’s composable commerce transformation

At Sitecore Symposium 2024, Sameer Khasnis, Vice President, Avid Technology and implementation partner Phil Bui, Senior Vice President, XCentium shared the company’s transformative journey to composable commerce.

Avid Technology is a global technology company headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, that develops high-end software, SaaS, and hardware products and solutions for the film, music, and broadcast television and media streaming industries.

When the company realized that their monolithic CMS and ecommerce architectures were no longer serving the brand’s personalization and merchandising strategy, they knew it was time to flip the script and switch to an agile, future-ready solution.

Rising costs associated with Azure hosting, Salesforce, and maintaining the company’s disjointed, monolithic tech stack were a concern, while a total dependency on technical teams meant Avid Technology was unable to react as quickly as they needed to customer and market demands.

A flexible, cost-effective, and efficient solution

The company wanted to drive better conversion while reducing infrastructural, operational, development, and consumption costs.

To do so, they needed a flexible, efficient solution that would help the company deliver on their key priorities:

• Provide personalized, relevant experiences.
• Increase site speed.
• Improve analytics.
• Enhance search experience and product recommendations.
• Enable timely feature updates.

Working with implementation partner, XCentium, they identified the need for a best-of-breed combination of scalable headless architecture including Salesforce headless commerce solution, Sitecore’s headless CMS and CDP solutions, and Coveo’s headless search solution.

For Avid Technology and XCentium, ‘best-of-breed’ involved selecting the right solution based on ROI at the time, so this meant retaining some of the existing platform that Avid Technology already had in place.

Discussing Avid Technology’s ‘a la carte’ approach to composable architecture, Bui emphasized the freedom of choice and flexible advantages of composability, pointing out that while Avid Technology stayed on their existing Sitecore XP, Managed Cloud containers solution, they still have the full benefits of Vercel, Next.js, and composability.

With this flexible new approach, XCentium has provided Avid Technology with an infrastructure that not only meets their needs and requirements today, but also lays the foundations needed for future innovation. According to Bui, at the time of the site’s launch, in-app commerce was not available to Avid Technology’s customers, but XCentium has ensured the necessary infrastructure is in place so that Avid Technology can activate this service whenever they are ready to launch this capability– or any other features that satisfy changing customer behavior.

Since switching to a flexible, composable approach, Avid Technology is already seeing remarkable results and significant cost savings.

One of the most powerful takeaways from this session was Avid and XCentium’s conscious decision to keep certain systems and extract others, allowing them to maximize the value of their existing tech stack, without having to undergo a complete system overhaul.

Thanks to their future-ready, fully customizable composable infrastructure, Avid Technology is already looking forward to introducing additional enhancements and improvements in the near future.

Discover more about how Sitecore’s composable SaaS portfolio gives you the power to build with freedom of choice and complete flexibility.