Link Consulting named Ibexa Partner of the Month for October

Link Consulting is a Portuguese IT services company that has built up an extensive service portfolio spanning digital experience, data leveraging, intelligent automation, digital workspace, and cloud transformation since its foundation at the turn of the millennium. With a turnover of roughly €60 million and a headcount of 750, Link has plans to expand aggressively over the coming years.

The company has its headquarters in Lisbon, with offices in Porto and Leiria, as well as an international footprint in Brazil, Spain, and the Middle East. “But as part of our growth ambitions, we are looking to open agencies and establishing strategic partnerships in Central Europe and the Nordics fairly soon,” says Jose Rodrigues, Director of ICE (Integration, Cloud, and Experience) at Link Consulting.

“We provide the market with an A-to-Z full-service portfolio,” says Rodrigues, “but to support our expansion we wanted to optimize the capabilities we could offer to our customers. For instance, our group recently acquired a Spanish company that focuses on pure mobile development and that was a technical skill we didn’t have.”

“The other missing link in our project orchestration from dream to strategy, and from design to hard-core digital engineering, was a Digital Experience Platform (DXP). And that soon led us to Ibexa.”

Link Consulting is our Partner of the Month for October.

“We landed on Ibexa DXP for one incredibly important reason – and I’ll get to that in a moment,” says Rodrigues. “First of all, we were satisfied that from a technological standpoint, Ibexa offered one of the best DXPs out there. Its modularity means you can start small and build from there and companies like that.”

“What we all feel internally is that we can easily position Ibexa DXP in our A-to-Z experience sales pitch as a very important but very transparent piece. Our approach is to focus on the business outcome that we want to deliver – not on the ins and outs of the technology that is helping us do that. If nobody talks about the technology, the technology has done its job! And Ibexa DXP reinforces this approach because it is intuitive, seamless, and flexible.”

Rodrigues continues: “But the main reason why we committed to becoming an Ibexa Partner at the beginning of this year was the proximity. What do I mean by that? I mean that from the earliest days of our relationship, Ibexa showed a genuine interest in what we were doing. We always felt that we were a priority and that whatever we were doing we were doing it together.”

“Ibexa is the only DXP we are partnering with,” adds Rodrigues, “and I can’t see that changing. Our customers and potential customers also appreciate Ibexa’s proximity. When they have a question it is answered promptly – much more promptly than other offers in the market.”

“As a technically evolved consultancy boutique, Link is not only capable of providing and taking advantage of Ibexa’s DXP solution, but can extend the platform with special technical solutions, such as adding AI layers to the overall user experience, the use of chatbots with full behavior bidirectional integration, and user behavior analysis in real-time, which allows for a complete customization of the user/customer experience, to improve the conversion rate on sales funnels.”

Ibexa has been there every step of the way as Link is spreading the message and pitching for projects.

“We have been working closely with Ibexa’s team in the Middle East on some key projects, with a special emphasis on technical excellence, as some projects have an audience of millions per week.”

“Ibexa DXP has a significant advantage over rival offerings that are purely SaaS. Saudi Arabia and the Emirate states do not want any data to be held outside their territory, but Ibexa DXP can be installed on-premise so that’s another selling point.”

Link and Ibexa are manning a joint booth at the DigiMarCon event, currently taking place in Dubai on October 1 and 2. “Middle Eastern companies are experiencing the same pain points as anyone else so we see great opportunities for us in these markets.”

A second pre-sales collaboration was for a digital transformation project to migrate a large and growing Spanish company from Oracle Web Center to Ibexa. “This prospect had outgrown its technology platform and needs a DXP that is very scalable in terms of creating new sites while being sufficiently robust to stand up to huge spikes in demand. And that’s Ibexa in a nutshell. We are expecting to hear from them very soon.”

One area where Rodrigues sees a lot of opportunities for Link/ Ibexa – and indeed for other Partners in the ecosystem – is automotive retail. “The major manufacturers are divesting themselves of their retail partners because they want to pivot to the Tesla business model where you have a centralized showroom with the transactional experience going online. This is a huge, huge shift. Effectively, the car makers want to offer a D2C experience which is forcing them to rethink their digital strategy and footprint. A massive opportunity for us.”

“Link is well-prepared for those opportunities: we have several developers certified in Ibexa, as well as a number of designers and creative experts, with a target for several new certifications set until the end of the year.”

 “We believe it’s important to get our digital creative agency to do the certification,” adds Rodrigues. “Because in the end, when we think of an experience that will solve a customer’s challenge, it will be useful for the creative people to know what is possible on the platform. I think we’ll get a better outcome that way.”

“We take our partnership with Ibexa very seriously. We are planning to present Ibexa to all our business units and local customers through a town hall-type event we call Link Views in which our CEO also participates. Together with people from Ibexa, we will showcase our joint efforts and goals.”

“Link Consulting has set itself ambitious targets for the next few years,” says Rodrigues, “and we are very happy to have Ibexa as a partner and ally to support us in realizing them.”