Brand and enterprise WordPress development for leading cloud data management service provider
Our longtime client Actifio was acquired by Google Cloud a few years ago, and has since become the cornerstone of the company’s enterprise SaaS backup and disaster recovery capability.
You might be interested to learn we’ve been credited – by people who know on the client side – with helping pave the way for this strategic outcome working as the company’s digital agency in the 5 years that preceded it.
“The good news about building a company during times like this is, that the companies that do succeed are going to be extremely strong and resilient.”
Marc Andreesen – Andreesen Horowitz
A desire to simplify complex things is a hallmark of smart clients, and that’s the way we see the world too. As a cloud data management platform, Actifio was always a complicated proposition just waiting to be made consumable. Our job was to deliver a highly distilled but compelling sensibility to every aspect of their marketing operation:
- End-to-end online brand / UX / UI development
- Corporate website redesign (multi-site enterprise WordPress with international language localization)
- Global technical diagram / illustration / iconography system
- Interactive experiential content
- Rep-driven sales enablement tools
- Marketing campaign development
- Online ad creative design & execution
- Out-of-home ad creative design & execution
- Salesforce CRM and HubSpot system integration
- B2B email campaigns
- Trade show booth design & execution
- Global sales & partner meeting hype videos, conference art direction and program execution
- Thought leadership content
- Marketing campaign development
Our work started as usual with design roadmap exercises with our Actifio client partners, which led to an evolved / elevated digital brand standards / UI kit that we’d use to design and build their new site.
A great roadmap always gets you to the right place. We worked extensively with our Actifio client partners to understand what was so uniquely different and important about them, to help them stand out in a glutted vendor landscape.
There was a lot of talk in our planning sessions about how Actifio solves for “siloed data”. Data that’s mission critical, but someplace else than where it’s needed at a given time. Picture a large global banking organization like Deutsche Bank, with offices and development operations in data centers all over the world. How on Earth to make all those petabytes of geographically distributed data instantly available for use in London, when its origin point is in say, Tokyo?
We worked a lot of late nights with our client to finally crack the code. To arrive at a simple concept around what you get when you knock down silos (well, you get a pipeline). By exposing that basic but critical idea to the industry, and marrying it to the notion of the company’s new “Virtual Data Pipeline” (VDP) platform, we helped Actifio to define itself for the entire rest of the time it was even called that – meaning prior to the Google acquisition.
Simplicity’s almost always the key to success – and the hardest thing to pull off in design. When you do manage the feat – as we did with Actifio – it looks like you’ve done nothing. Because, oh my God, it’s so simple. Which is why the main component to achieving simplicity is confidence. A good designer finds a way to put everything you need on a page. But a great designer convinces you – as we did with Actifio – that half of it’s not even necessary.