The Burden of Legacy Was Stalling Innovation
A major automotive distributor in Australia was ready to lead in digital, but their technology stack was holding them back. After nearly a decade on legacy Sitecore infrastructure, development costs were soaring, onboarding new talent was slow, and publishing content had become a manual, time-consuming process.
With the national used vehicle market booming, this organization identified a high-impact opportunity: reinvent the online car-buying experience. But to make it happen, they needed to modernize their platform - fast.
Their vision was clear: move to composable microservices to unlock simplicity, flexibility, reuse, and speed - all while preparing for a future with headless and cloud-native platforms.
“We were spending more time maintaining systems than delivering value.”
High Costs, Low Velocity, and Operational Drag
The internal development team was stuck juggling code fixes and infrastructure firefighting. Every change felt risky. Their cloud costs were rising steadily, and none of it was translating into a better customer experience.
Meanwhile:
- Multiple Sitecore instances with siloed deployment workflows were bogging teams down.
- Disaster recovery and log management were lacking, increasing operational risk.
- Developer onboarding was slow due to fragmented frontend stacks.
- Teams were focused on firefighting infrastructure issues instead of delivering customer value.
Without change, they’d stay locked in a high-cost, low-agility operating model.
Mounting Costs and Missed Opportunities
The risk wasn’t just technical - it was business-critical.
- Slow delivery cycles were affecting time-to-market.
- Performance issues were impacting the customer experience.
- New developers and partners took weeks to onboard.
- Internal teams couldn’t support marketing at the pace required.
Simply put, operational inefficiencies were threatening growth, experience, and digital competitiveness.
“Composable was the goal, but without the right foundation, it was just out of reach.”
A Hot Market and a Tipping Point
The surge in used car demand created urgency. Customers needed a faster, smarter way to browse inventory - and internal stakeholders demanded a site that was easy to manage, quick to change, and future-ready.
The team had already invested in research around composable architecture, MACH principles, and JAMStack - but every solution seemed to require high risk, high cost, or a total rebuild.
That’s when they discovered Dataweavers, who offered a way to move incrementally and get results immediately:
- A hybrid environment that could support both legacy MVC and new headless builds
- Headless implementation using Sitecore Experience Edge and Dataweavers Edge
- Fast-tracked setup using SXA Headless, reducing complexity and consolidating multiple sites into a single platform with independent heads
Better use of existing Sitecore XC licensing to enable new e-commerce capabilities like OrderCloud and Discover.
“There are thousands of decisions you have to make when going headless. With Dataweavers, they’ve made most of them for us.”
Lower Cost. Higher Performance. Future-Ready.
Within 12 months , this automotive brand had launched a new used vehicle marketplace, migrated flagship websites to headless, and significantly improved operational and developer efficiency.
The results:
- 60% reduction in monthly Azure infrastructure costs
- (from $50K/month to $12K/month)
- Developer onboarding reduced from 1 week to a few hours
- Unified component library enabled reuse across multiple sites and brands
- Streamlined deployments and fewer operational issues
- Increased focus on business value and customer experience
“The benefits have been exponential - faster builds, easier onboarding, and a real drop in operational costs.”
60%
less Azure spend monthlytly
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developer onboarding
developer onboarding
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“The transition from MVC to NextJS headless has given us a lot of opportunities to deliver better customer experiences and avoid repeating old mistakes. Dataweavers expertise, and their close partnership with Sitecore, has given us a stable, secure and reliable foundation for our legacy code partnered with a flexible, fast and responsive home for our new components, all wrapped up in a cost-effective bow.”
