One of the most trusted names in public health, this U.S.-based nonprofit organization plays a critical role in educating the public on heart health, supporting research, and providing emergency information when every second counts.
Digital Instability Was Putting Mission-Critical Work at Risk
Their website isn’t just a marketing tool - it’s often the first point of contact in a medical emergency.
But behind the scenes, the platform was fragile. The team was running a highly customized Sitecore XP environment, overloaded with technical debt, outdated software, siloed teams, and an aging Solr infrastructure. Releases were unreliable. Performance was inconsistent. And every change felt like a gamble.
An attempt to offload the burden to a traditional managed services provider didn’t help. That partner focused on infrastructure, not the platform itself - which meant the internal team was still spending nights and weekends troubleshooting Sitecore, alone.
Excessive cost, low Reliability, lack of Agility
Without deep Sitecore platform support, the org couldn’t move forward. Every release introduced risk. The team couldn’t take full advantage of Sitecore XP’s features. And upgrading from version 9.3 (which was nearing end-of-life) felt daunting.
They weren’t innovating - they were surviving through:
- Outdated Sitecore version with low confidence in upgrades
- Poor deployment success rates and long publishing cycles
- High Azure spend with little to show for it
- Developer and infrastructure silos causing misalignment and delays
- Slow content publishing and frustrating for business users.
Real Cost, Real Risk, Real Frustration
If nothing changed, the organization risked:
- Rising cloud costs from overprovisioned infrastructure
- Wasted development effort on patching, not progress
- Declining internal morale due to broken tooling and friction
- Diminished trust in the digital channel - both internally and externally
And with their site considered tier one for emergency respons e, every second of downtime carried serious reputational and operational risk.
Complexity Had Become a Liability
The writing was on the wall: keeping the lights on wasn’t good enough. The org needed a reliable platform that empowered - not handicapped - their development and digital marketing teams.
They didn’t need another infrastructure partner. They needed a team that understood Sitecore inside and out - and could own the full platform from infrastructure to experience delivery.
Rebuilding Trust in the Platform with Dataweavers
That’s where Dataweavers stepped in.
Rather than focus on server specs or CPU metrics, we anchored everything in measurable front-of-house outcomes - reliability, deployment success, and platform performance.
What changed:
- UAT release velocity increased to 100 releases/month, with a 96% success rate
- Non-prod deployments reduced to just 15-20 minutes
- Azure spend dropped from $27K/month to $13K/month across environments (We identified thread-safety issues in customer code that had previously been masked by overscaling.)
- Site speed (TTFB) improved 20%, from 548ms to 422ms
- High availability: 99.97% uptime, exceeding the 99.9% SLA
And because we manage Solr directly as part of our platform offering, they no longer needed a separate vendor just to keep their search infrastructure afloat.
A Reliable, Agile Digital Foundation
With the firefighting days behind them, the organization now runs a resilient, performant, and trustworthy platform - one that enables their mission, rather than blocking it.
Outcomes:
- Teams now focus on delivering value, not debugging pipelines
- Devs are confident in releases that mirror production
- Developer onboarding is faster, with laptop setup taking hours instead of weeks
- Releases run smoothly and consistently - no more surprise rollbacks
- Uptime and performance deliver peace of mind to internal stakeholders and end users alike
They’ve stopped micromanaging infrastructure and started accelerating innovation.
