Almavia CX Named Ibexa Partner of the Month for May

In 2022, Almavia CX moved up from being an Ibexa Silver Partner to acquiring gold status – but the digital agency is hungry for more.

“We are very focused on gaining Platinum status,” says Nicolas Paillous, Account Director of the Web and Mobile Business Unit of Almavia CX. “This would make us the only Platinum Partner in France.”

Almavia CX has worked with Ibexa DXP for over two decades and is more confident than ever about the market opportunities for the platform.

“From a pre-sale’s perspective, I see a lot of needs linked to content personalization and a better, more flexible customer experience. We tell these customers that Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs) can go much further – and faster – in meeting these requirements than CMS.”

Florian Lamboley is CTO of Almavia CX. He adds: “From a technical perspective, customers are looking for a turnkey solution. They want the cloud, they want a Customer Data Platform (CDP), they might want ecommerce, now or later, and they want to integrate painlessly with other data sources. What they don’t want is to manage a complex infrastructure. Ibexa DXP ticks all these boxes. The recent addition of a CDP and iPaaS capabilities in Ibexa Connect is very appealing to our customer base.”

Almavia CX works with other solutions, Nicolas points out, but Ibexa DXP is the most important. “Our joint projects are still getting bigger every year,” he says, “and this is why we are actively pursuing Platinum status. We have a pool of some 20 colleagues with Ibexa certification, and 10 of our developers recently certificated for the latest version of the platform.”

Almavia CX is our Partner of the Month for May.

The agency employs around 245 people in offices all over France, from Lille to Montpellier, and from Strasbourg to Bordeaux. It also has teams in Geneva and Kyiv.

Almavia CX has deployed Ibexa technology in a wide range of projects. Their customers include the French Ministry of Culture; CARAC, the mutual savings bank; Hibu, the multinational directories and internet services company spun out of Yell Group; and the Centre des Monuments Nationaux. For the latter, Almavia CX leveraged Ibexa Site Factory to develop sites for each of the 94 French national monuments and included a map as an additional means to find and access the discrete sites.

“We implement Ibexa DXP projects with these customers on an ongoing basis,” says Florian. “For example, the Ministère de la Culture is currently moving to the latest version of Ibexa DXP for the main website, the .gouv.fr site, which is really the flagship for them.”

By far the largest Almavia DX/Ibexa DXP collaboration is for Groupe Atlantic, one of the most digitally mature manufacturers in France. With an annual turnover of €2.2 billion, it sells thermal comfort solutions such as radiators, boilers, and air conditioning systems with 18 brands across four continents.

Almavia CX implements Ibexa-based projects for many of these brands, as Florian explains.

“Groupe Atlantic has a brand logic of operating separate brands in each of its markets. So you have Atlantic France with two dedicated websites to cover B2C and B2B, Lazzarini in Italy, and Hamworthy in the UK. We don’t reinvent the wheel for all these operations but roll out innovation using a core-model logic.

“This means we are very agile in the implementation of new websites or new functionalities because they’re based on the same Ibexa DXP module – that can be Product Information Management (PIM), content management, or ecommerce.

“I call this approach ‘bundlelization’. We reuse features and technical connectors between each website. These sites can be very different from each other because each brand has a distinct image. That’s the presentation layer, the front-end. But for the technical basis, we use the same bundle, the same approach, the same configuration.”

This “bundlelization” of Ibexa DXP modules has enabled Almavia CX to make digital progress in many areas across Atlantic’s brands.

In 2021, Almavia CX delivered a B2B site for Atlantic France, which consolidated a multitude of discrete product sites. The new backend was segmented horizontally with three tiers of content visibility – open and accessible to everyone, visible but not accessible to everyone, and content only available after log-in. A good example of the second level would be a PDF with product specifications – you can see that it is online, but to open it or email it to a customer, you must log in.

Content is segmented vertically for 10 personas or “typologies”, such as architects, civil engineers, developers, and product installers. After log-in, these personas receive information targeted specifically to their needs.

“So, two huge steps forwards,” says Nicolas. “Stakeholders can go to one site for all Atlantic France products and they are presented with highly personalized information when they log in.”

More recently, Almavia CX has implemented Ibexa CDP across a number of the Atlantic brands. “This is a relatively new addition to Ibexa DXP and one that is very appealing to marketers,” says Lamboley.

For the Sauter brand, in addition to the CDP module, Almavia CX added PIM capabilities and implemented the ecommerce module on Ibexa DXP 4.4.

“At this stage, you can buy some but not all products in the Sauter catalog,” explains Lamboley. “Accessories, spare parts, non-complex products – these can be transacted in a B2C manner through the site.”

Because ecommerce is part of its Ibexa core model Almavia CX will be able to reuse it for other Atlantic brands if and when there is such a requirement. “So the further Atlantic progresses on its digital journey, the greater the synergies.”

For the past few months, Almavia CX and Ibexa have been working intensively on acquiring an important public sector client. “This would be a four-year project and involve Ibexa Commerce, Ibexa Cloud, and Ibexa Connect alongside the ‘standard’ platform,” says Nicolas.

“We are very hopeful of winning this contract because the fact that we worked so closely together made a big impression on the prospective customer. It made the presentations and the whole process so much better – and also reassured the customer about the relationship going forward.

“The agility and helpfulness Ibexa bring to the pre-sales process is a massive selling point for us and another reason why we want to move up to Platinum.

“Whether we win or don’t win this contract, it’s still a positive experience to us,” concludes Nicolas, “because it confirms once again that Ibexa DXP and Almavia CX are a great fit.”