ACU wanted to understand what SitecoreAI could offer, without pulling the rest of its digital estate off Sitecore XP that still runs everything else, and without a lengthy, ground-up implementation to get there.
Impact, ACU’s flagship storytelling hub with more than 50 stories spanning research, careers, life and study, was the ideal proving ground. Rather than scope a traditional rebuild, Dataweavers deployed Arc, our front-end hosting and platform operations product for SitecoreAI, to stand Impact up as ACU’s first SitecoreAI site in a matter of weeks.
Arc is Dataweavers’ product for getting organisations onto SitecoreAI quickly and safely. Instead of a bespoke build from the ground up, Arc gave ACU a SitecoreAI environment, provisioned in ACU’s own Azure tenant, that came with the guardrails Dataweavers builds into every deployment already in place:
That meant ACU’s ITD and MER digital content teams could focus on what mattered most: the content, structure and experience of Impact, while Arc handled the heavy lifting of getting a well-governed SitecoreAI environment live, fast.
This wasn’t a wholesale platform migration. ACU’s Sitecore XP environment continues to run the rest of the university’s digital estate, and nothing about that changed. What changed is that ACU now has a live, production SitecoreAI site to point to, deployed and managed by Dataweavers, that proves the platform, the process and the experience firsthand.
That gives ACU something a slide deck or a demo never could: real operational experience with SitecoreAI, running in production, alongside their existing environment. It’s the foundation for a confident, deliberate conversation about what, and when, to move more of the estate across next while training their internal teams on new features and functionality introduced in the SitecoreAI platform.
For ACU, this project is about more than one website going live, it’s a low-risk way to build confidence in SitecoreAI before committing further. Key benefits include: