Growing business by tackling bigger projects.
Global Reach enhances its SiteViz platform using Adobe ColdFusion to add features that support complex web applications.
Creates new business opportunities
by adding features and functionality to its web development platform
Products:
Objectives
Expanding product and service offerings to attract new and larger clients
Enhancing developer productivity without sacrificing application security or performance
Deploying scalable, flexible, high-performance applications
Results
Creates new business opportunities by adding features and functionality to its web development platform
Lets developers quickly create and enhance applications from a library of trusted and tested modules
Proven technology anchors secure, stable, flexible and future-proof applications
Clusters of Adobe ColdFusion Enterprise servers help optimise application performance and service availability
Imagining greater possibilities
Global Reach Internet Productions, LLC, starts every engagement by documenting clients’ current needs and processes. Then the company asks them to imagine and aspire: How could a fully featured, scalable, search engine optimised website drive revenues, enhance service delivery or improve customer communications?
Since 1995, Global Reach has become a leader in web content management systems and customised website development. Today, it serves more than 600 clients in 48 states and 12 countries spanning industries from agriculture, financial services and education to government, healthcare and manufacturing. Global Reach sites have won more than 60 web design awards, including six in 2018 (Web Marketing Association Outstanding Website Award, two Silver and one Gold Davey Awards and two Silver W3 Awards).
Global Reach applies imagination and aspiration to its own business by continually expanding its product and services portfolio, including its SiteViz platform. In addition to planning, developing and creating sites and content, Global Reach is now building and managing highly secure, flexible and scalable IT systems for websites of any size.
“We’re now attracting larger clients because we are able to offer them a robust, highly secure and comprehensive solution that is also very agile and customisable,” says Iacovos Zachariades, President and CEO, Global Reach Internet Productions, LLC. “Clients also like the fact that we can make changes to solutions in hours instead of days using our concise, self-contained application modules.”\
“Since Global Reach implemented Adobe ColdFusion in 2000, we’ve never considered another development framework. Adobe maintains ColdFusion so well that we think we’ll always accomplish more work with less effort than we could with other programming languages.”
Iacovos Zachariades
President and CEO, Global Reach Internet Productions, LLC
More work, less effort
The company’s flagship web content management system, SiteViz CMS, lets users easily and affordably manage responsive, mobile-friendly websites without requiring coding experience. SiteViz supports multiple content authors, scales with client needs and users don’t have to worry about complicated software updates or security gaps associated with open source CMSs.
Global Reach started building the current version of SiteViz in 2013 with Adobe ColdFusion. ColdFusion has been the company’s rapid web application development platform for nearly 20 years.
“Since Global Reach implemented Adobe ColdFusion in 2000, we’ve never considered another development framework,” says Zachariades. “Adobe maintains ColdFusion so well that we think we’ll always accomplish more work with less effort than we could with other programming languages.”
The Global Reach team developed SiteViz from self-contained ColdFusion modules, each designed to accomplish a specific objective. Modularity helps improve application performance, reliability and maintenance combining simple building blocks to accomplish complex tasks. Additionally, built-in Adobe ColdFusion functionality simplifies how SiteViz supports everything from creating charts to leveraging multiple data sources. Such functionality lets programmers focus on solving problems instead of worrying about connections and configurations.
“With Adobe ColdFusion at its foundation, SiteViz Premier can easily pull information from remote websites using CFHTTP or from databases with CFQUERY,” says Mark Bockenstedt, Technical Manager, Global Reach Internet Productions, LLC. “Easy, convenient connections to remote application programming interfaces also make it simpler for developers to complete tasks.”
Rising to the challenge
Currently, Global Reach employs 13 full-time ColdFusion developers ranging from novices to Adobe Certified Experts. Modular minimalism lets developers grasp the purpose of each ColdFusion module quickly. Having fewer lines of code to read and understand frees developers from having to wade through disorganised or complicated code sequences during projects.
For example, Global Reach hired a talented front-end developer with no previous server-side development experience. The developer was assigned tasks in a way that enabled her to pick up ColdFusion skills on-the-job. She eventually progressed to more challenging work on projects such as SiteViz Commerce, the Global Reach eCommerce solution that integrates seamlessly with SiteViz Premier.
“Because Global Reach uses ColdFusion so extensively, it was straightforward to have an inexperienced developer evolve from simpler tasks to harder problems,” says Zachariades. “Using Adobe ColdFusion the way we do, we didn’t need additional staff to complete our eCommerce module.”
Developers at Global Reach also leverage the expansive online community of Adobe ColdFusion developers who post helpful blog entries, answer peer questions and share solutions or frameworks. ColdFusion experts from Adobe frequently participate in online communities that have helped expedite answers to complex questions.\
“With each release, ColdFusion becomes faster, more stable and more secure—foundations that give us confidence in the integrity of everything we build.”
Iacovos Zachariades
President and CEO, Global Reach Internet Productions, LLC
A stand-alone stack
To prepare for expected business growth, Global Reach is currently planning an upgrade to Adobe ColdFusion Enterprise (2018 Release) from Adobe ColdFusion Enterprise (2016 Release). The company also maintains Adobe ColdFusion 10 instances for legacy solutions.
“Adobe’s security track record with ColdFusion is excellent. We fully intend to use it for future releases of our SiteViz platform,” says Zachariades. “With each release, ColdFusion becomes faster, more stable and more secure—foundations that give us confidence in the integrity of everything we build.”
In tandem with Adobe enhancements to ColdFusion, Global Reach continually pursues SiteViz performance gains by optimising its ColdFusion modules. Long, complex ColdFusion server requests can slow application performance, so Global Reach developers try to keep ColdFusion server requests as short as possible.
Global Reach is also building a high-availability infrastructure for the SiteViz platform, which includes clusters of Adobe ColdFusion Enterprise servers, caching servers, database servers and redundant firewalls and load balancers. The goal is to grow its business as a stand-alone provider of website technology and services for larger customers that have more advanced websites, intranets and mobile web presences.
“As Global Reach has grown, we’ve scaled Adobe ColdFusion horizontally and vertically,” says Bockenstedt. “We’re now able to push more requests through each Adobe ColdFusion server while adding more servers to our cluster. Scaling in both directions is helping us to achieve our highest levels of service availability to date and we look forward to future growth and performance.”
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