Global software company Episerver uses Azure Data Explorer to gain enhanced consumer insight

Founded in 1994 in Sweden, with headquarters in both Sweden and the United States, Episerver operates across 10 countries, delivering personalization services, web content management, digital commerce, and marketing to over 8,800 customers around the globe. “We aim to help companies build customer-centric digital experiences that are continuously more intuitive,” says Dmytro Duk, Big Data Team Leader and Architect at Episerver. “Basically, we want to provide products that allow people to build websites, applications, and solutions with content that fits the expectations and needs of the specific user.”

When a major client asked Episerver’s engineers to develop additional data functionality—visitor segmenting based on historical activity—Microsoft Azure Data Explorer (ADX) formed the heart of an innovative solution.

Seeking new insights

A key pillar of Episerver’s activity is AI-based personalization enabling automated, dynamic consumer targeting based on behavior and intent. It focuses on giving customers seamless one-to-one experiences, without having to build complex rules or hire data scientists. 

Yet when a specific client requested additional targeting functionality, Episerver was compelled to rethink its data and storage solution. 

“We had one high priority client who needed historical data functionality available in three months,” explains Jonas Bergqvist, Director of Software Engineering at Episerver. “So, we had to go from having zero support for creating segments based on historical data for end users, to delivering just that for this particular client. And we had three months to do it.”

Understanding Episerver’s new data and functionality needs, Microsoft’s Commercial Software Engineering team suggested the company begin testing the capabilities of an early version of Azure Data Explorer. 

“We worked with the Azure Data Explorer development team to understand the product’s full-range of capabilities in terms of tracking, management, and segmentation, and started to do some POCs,” explains Duk. “After some evaluation, we realized this was a much better fit than the current storage solution we used. Our communication with Microsoft was always fluid, and they provided us with a great deal of assistance. The process was very comfortable.”

Matching customer expectations in time

After delivering the new dynamic data solution in under three months, Episerver would go on to roll out the new functionality to other customers in only an additional two months.

The solution—part of Episerver Visitor Intelligence and CDP—enables customers to track visitor activity, manage visitor profiles, and segment visitors based on collected data. The solution incorporates data on page views, product views, category views, searches, modifying a wish list or a shopping cart, checkouts, orders, sending email messages, and when recipients open messages and click links. Tracking is not limited to use on websites or with Episerver products, and custom event tracking is possible. 

“The stakes were high, and we managed to quickly create a simple and effective solution to meet the pressing demand of an important customer,” says Duk. “Also, this implementation created a foundation for storing historical data events that could be used for different products in Episerver—to track data, to store data, and query and analyze this data. We’re already using it for several other products, and we may use it for even more solutions. We need to store great volumes of data, and to be able to query and analyze all that data with great precision. ADX is the natural fit for our use case,” says Duk.

“Our clients can now very easily create consumer segments,” adds Bergqvist. “They can use these segments in different campaigns: to send out mails, to personalize content on their site, and also to promote discounts and special offers. Azure Data Explorer has been instrumental in making this happen. It’s helped us provide a much better marketing service.”

Getting time back to innovate

Azure Data Explorer also brought the Episerver team an additional benefit—freeing engineers from the burdensome task of managing the system. “Our previous data solution required a lot of attention and management,” admits Duk. “We had to manage the virtual machines ourselves, especially when they reached capacity, maintaining and updating and so on. What’s great about Azure Data Explorer is that it's a managed service, so we don't have to worry about these virtual machines and perform all this operational stuff. We can focus on developing the product and working with data.” 

The Kusto query language (KQL) was also easy for the Episerver team to learn and work with. “We found that it was very, very simple to understand,” says Bergqvist. “KQL is an important piece here because it’s not only used internally, we're giving the partner developers the possibility to use it as well, through our API.”

According to Duk, when it comes to ADX and support from Microsoft, “For me, the best thing was just the fact that we can easily get to the product team and discuss directly with people who actually work on the product—who have the most of knowledge about all the limitations and features, and the different ways to implement.”

“Everything has just been getting better and better over the years when it comes to our relationship with Microsoft,” notes Bergqvist. “From the weekly check-ins to make sure things are going according to plan, to resolving whatever problems come up, and reaching out to us whenever there's a new service or feature coming out. I'm thrilled at the future prospects of our collaboration considering how well things have been evolving so far.”