Everything has gone as planned, completely without surprises. Astoria has made the conversion so easy that my writers can focus on creating content and developing their skills.-- Peggy Sanchez, Cray Inc.
San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) October 23, 2014
Astoria Software, a division of TransPerfect, today announced the selection and implementation of its market-leading component content management system (CCMS) by well-known high-tech pioneer Cray Inc. The Cray team made its selection based on Astoria Software’s top scores in SaaS experience and white-glove customer service. The Cray team’s project priorities heavily weighted Astoria Software’s ability to deliver portal capabilities, which were aligned with Cray’s long-term vision for improving end-user engagement with its products.
SaaS and Customer Service Lead the Way
Cray faced two problems: a complicated and tool-heavy process for building and producing technical content, and an ineffective mechanism for delivering content directly to customers. They had also identified a business need to enable their own customers to assemble content “on the fly” to meet specific use-cases that were not contemplated by the content authoring team. An examination of their existing tools and processes exposed significant obstacles to building user-centered content, including a lack of scalability in the existing content creation infrastructure, “tool fatigue” among the writers, and a business process that did not allow rapid updates to existing content. They turned to Astoria Software for help.
Cray wanted a hosted solution to allow for rapid system deployment and minimal impact to its information technology infrastructure. To deliver a CCMS solution that met both of these criteria, Astoria Software went well beyond hosting to deliver an entire software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution: Astoria On-Demand. Astoria Software’s SaaS offering for Cray Inc. included hardware, software, bandwidth, licensing, maintenance, training, and rigorous analysis of financial and technical implications of Astoria on Cray’s overall project goals.
Astoria Software also offered personalized customer service. Cray sought a vendor-partner relationship in choosing a CCMS, particularly one that had experience advising customers through the transition from non-XML-based to DITA-based content creation and publishing. Astoria Software built a team comprised of industry experts to listen to Cray’s feedback, conduct on-site training, and give advice and counsel to Cray’s team as they made import decisions in the solution selection process. Ultimately, Cray selected Astoria Software because of Astoria’s total commitment to customer service and success.
According to Peggy Sanchez, project leader on Cray’s CCMS selection team, “Everything has gone as planned, completely without surprises. Astoria has made the conversion so easy that my writers can focus on creating content and developing their skills. The training is outstanding and I have been delighted with the swiftness that the writers are coming up to speed. This is an excellent experience.”
The Portal Drives Customer Experience
The cornerstone of Cray’s vision for delivering content directly to customers is a redesigned portal experience. Astoria Software’s strategic partnership with Mekon Limited provides an integrated, seamless connection between the Astoria On-Demand CCMS and the DITAweb portal. The strategic partnership also provides a one-stop shopping experience for Cray; Astoria Software handles all of the inter-partner details. This makes it easy for Cray to focus on describing the intended end-user experience and then developing a single project plan for implementing that experience.
Cray’s new system will be a market-leader in Customer Experience. It will deliver taxonomy-driven, personalized content to end-users and allows them to pull together disparate topics of information into customized sets of documents that can be transformed into PDF and HTML files for off-line reading. What’s more, the technical publications team will be able to update these topics in Astoria at any time and publish immediately to their end-users through Mekon Limited’s DITAweb-driven portal. This will keep end-users up to date all the time.
Michael Rosinski, President and CEO of Astoria Software, observed, “Cray Inc. is synonymous with technology innovation. We are pleased to collaborate with Cray to lead the market with a new approach to engaging with its customers, including the development of a new channel for receiving customer feedback through our advanced portal offering.”
About Astoria Software
Astoria Software is the world’s most successful Enterprise solution for XML Component Content Management and the first to deliver both an Enterprise-wide SaaS/On-Demand and an On-Premises approach to structured content management. Cisco Systems, Teradata, Xylem, Siemens Healthcare, Northrop Grumman, Citrix, LexisNexis, and other Forbes Global 2000 manufacturers rely on Astoria to meet increasingly competitive demands for product documentation — high volume, accelerated time-to-market, and globalized output. Astoria Component Content Management, whether On-Demand or On-Premise, is an enterprise-wide solution for Translation-Enabled Content Management, reducing documentation costs up to 90 percent, compressing product launch times from months to weeks, and generating productivity and management benefits with its flexible delivery model. Astoria Software, a division of TransPerfect, Inc., is based in San Francisco. For more information, visit http://www.astoriasoftware.com.