Cadence Design Systems

Social Networking Enhances Brand for Electronic Design Automation Firm

A world leader in electronic design automation technologies, Cadence Design Systems communicated with its customers through two Web sites, a corporate Web site, and a community site where Cadence software users could share best practices and resources. To expose prospective customers to its user community and better connect its employees with customers, Cadence wanted to integrate the two sites. Building a single Web site with Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 and Community Server by Telligent, Cadence incorporated product, company, and user information with blogs, forums, and other social networking features. The integrated site meets the Cadence brand promise of being an indispensible partner to drive customer success, while exposing community content, enhancing the Web-site experience, and making content and contact management more efficient and effective.

 

Situation

Cadence Design Systems is one of the world’s leading providers of electronic design automation (EDA) technologies and services. Companies use Cadence technologies to design and prepare advanced semi-conductors and electronic systems for manufacturing, forming the foundation for today’s wired and wireless electronic devices and computer systems, including desktop and portable computers, mobile devices, and entertainment and gaming devices. Most electronics manufacturers use Cadence EDA technology at some point in their design cycle.

With Office SharePoint Server 2007 … we have created a vibrant user community and a powerful sense of partnership between Cadence and its customers. Peter Simonsen Group Director of Enterprise Web Strategy, Cadence Design Systems

Founded in San Jose, California in 1988, today Cadence operates almost 60 facilities throughout Asia, Europe, and North America. The company employs more than 5,100 people worldwide and in 2007 earned U.S.$1.6 billion in revenue.

To communicate with and serve its customers—electronics and semiconductor engineers, designers, managers, and business stakeholders—Cadence operated two public-facing Web sites, its corporate site at www.cadence.com, and a community site called cdnusers.org. Cadence customers could use public forums on cdnusers.org to share best practices, resources, and information regarding semiconductor design as well as Cadence products and services.

Cadence built the community site on the DotNetNuke open source platform, and the company built and managed the content on the corporate Web site using the Microsoft® .NET Framework, TeamSite, and an Utraseek search engine.

Cadence used the cdnusers.org site to help establish a level of trust in the company’s ability to operate an unbiased social networking community—Cadence used customer moderators alongside company moderators in the forums and published articles by both customers and Cadence designers. “As a leader in our industry, we used the community site to involve and engage our users directly,” says Peter Simonsen, Group Director of Enterprise Web Strategy at Cadence.

While providing experience in online community building, the independent site had limited exposure and one tenth the traffic of Cadence.com. The company decided that it could expose both its user community and its larger customer audience to more content, connect more customers with their peers and with Cadence employees, and give customers greater opportunity to provide direct feedback by integrating the community site with the corporate site and expanding the features of a combined Web site.

Cadence wanted to incorporate cdnusers.org as a new community zone inside cadence.com, reorganize the entire Web site, and present all the site content, product information, company information, and community-generated content in a more dynamic way. It wanted to introduce blogs—which cdnusers.org lacked—as a communications vehicle between Cadence and its audience, and it wanted to reorganize product information in a more user-centric way.

“Through cdnusers.org, we got the social networking experience we needed. Then we brought everything together to better demonstrate Cadence’s core brand values around innovation and customer focus,” says Adolph Hunter, Vice President for Corporate Marketing at Cadence. “We wanted to align the presentation of our offerings with the way customers are organized, while making the site more interactive and engaging. Our mission was to provide an environment where users and Cadence can communicate, learn, and share best practices. By adding blogs, we provide an important new component to traditional Web communication that drives peer-to-peer dialogue and an opportunity to connect with the broad technology blogosphere.”

Additionally, the company wanted to ensure brand consistency across cadence.com and the regional versions of the Web site, which were operated separately from the main corporate site. Cadence also wanted to distribute more content-management responsibility to its business users. It wanted to enhance an existing Siebel contact-management system and build a validated, comprehensive contact profile of site visitors and interested prospects.

Cadence hoped to build a solution that could take advantage of its internal expertise and experience, while consolidating a Web site environment that was somewhat fragmented between its .NET Framework, open source, TeamSite, and Ultraseek technologies.

Solution

Working with Microsoft and speakTECH, a solutions integrator and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Cadence implemented a project to reconfigure cadence.com and integrate its social networking and corporate Web sites, using a combination of Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 and Community Server, a community collaboration platform developed by Microsoft Gold-Certified Partner Telligent Systems. Cadence used Web content management and search capabilities in Office SharePoint Server 2007 to build and manage product, company, and user information on cadence.com, and to integrate the Web site with the blogs, forums, and other social networking features in Community Server.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 has given us content management, search, presentation, application functionality, and security and authentication capabilities on a single platform so that we can operate the Web site more effectively. Jim Price Group Director of Web Operations, Cadence Design Systems

In May 2007, speakTECH was invited by Microsoft—based on the integrator’s deep experience with Office SharePoint Server 2007 implementations—to present an initial architectural design session to Cadence, demonstrating how it could apply Office SharePoint Server 2007 to the project. The project was kicked off in October of 2007. Design, configuration, and deployment took approximately eight months, and Cadence launched the new cadence.com Web site in July 2008.

Cadence used the capabilities in Office SharePoint Server 2007 to provide various page layouts and templates to help manage and populate content and quickly create new sections on the Web site. Now Cadence business users can author and publish their own content outside the social networking pages, and site users can search for both Cadence and user provided content with the enterprise search features in Office SharePoint Server 2007. By incorporating regional versions of the Web site into Office SharePoint Server 2007, Cadence makes it easy for local teams to maintain their own content while ensuring that their sites are consistent with corporate branding guidelines.

By integrating Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Community Server features on cadence.com, Cadence can seamlessly combine information about its products and services with social networking and community-generated content, such as forum posts and ratings, and comments on blog entries written by Cadence staff. Cadence reorganized its products and solutions information on the Web site around nine user segments, which align with the same nine segments in the community zone. Cadence staff members manage blogs within each segment. One or more user forums are associated with each segment, as well as a resource library of technical papers, marketing collateral, conference proceedings, and other technical content.

Users can go directly to the community zone on the Web site to access and participate in the blogs and forums, or they can access community content within the products and solutions pages. On each product page, they can see content from the community blogs and user forums that is directly relevant to those specific products or services. “It demonstrates to our customers the value that we put on community-generated content,” says Simonsen. “We don’t limit it to a separate area. We present it alongside our own marketing and technical content to show that we recognize how valuable it is to our users.”

Cadence uses Office SharePoint Server 2007 to support a user registration and authentication process, which is synchronized with the Seibel contact management system so that user contact information is fully integrated with the company’s CRM system. “It’s very significant that we have built our social media, marketing communications, and user profiling functions in one platform,” says Jim Price, Group Director of Web Operations at Cadence. “Office SharePoint Server 2007 has given us content management, search, presentation, application functionality, and security and authentication capabilities on a single platform so that we can operate the Web site more effectively.”

Benefits

By integrating its corporate Web site with Office SharePoint Server 2007, Cadence achieved its goal of updating cadence.com to represent and enhance the Cadence brand and become a more valuable resource to its customers and other site visitors. The site exposes prospective customers to a vibrant community of Cadence users and exposes existing customers in the community forums to new product information through integration of the community forums and product pages. With the Web site Cadence maintains brand consistency and delivers an enhanced user experience. The new Web site also benefits Cadence content owners, site administrators, and business stakeholders by making site, content, and contact management more efficient and effective.

“With Office SharePoint Server 2007 we’ve significantly improved our Web presence and overall communication strategy,” says Simonsen. “By connecting directly with our customers, we have created a vibrant user community and a powerful sense of partnership between Cadence and its customers. These are significant benefits to accomplish with a non-transactional corporate Web site.”

Improved Customer Communication

By incorporating social networking into its corporate Web site, Cadence exposes community-generated content in a significant way. When customers visit the site to research Cadence product information, they can access useful, relevant content from peers inside and outside of Cadence. The company believes this type of content strategy can help drive sales.

“We want to leverage a new communication strategy that includes blogging and user forums as the key component,” says Price. “Instead of only serving customers Cadence generated technical and marketing content, we’re offering them user-generated content from community members and direct access to the designers and the developers at Cadence, demonstrating a commitment to our users.”

Enhanced Web Presence

Historically, the engineers and designers that use Cadence products have not been particularly engaged in social networking communities. The social networking efforts at Cadence have been among the most successful in the EDA space. Over a period of two years, Cadence registered 11,000 users on cdnusers.org.

The Web site has evolved from brochure-ware to a much more rewarding and engaging user experience. With Office SharePoint Server 2007, we can offer something that engages users and provides value that did not exist before. Peter Simonsen Group Director of Enterprise Web Strategy, Cadence Design Systems

But the newly integrated corporate Web site has been even more successful. In the first six months since the site was launched, more than 30,000 people registered on cadence.com. The Web site receives 6,000 to 7,000 visits and 30,000 page-views per day, and community content now accounts for approximately 17 percent of site traffic. Overall site traffic is up more than 10 percent, forum postings have increased 100 percent, and the average length of stay on the site has increased 20 percent to over eight minutes. “The Web site has evolved from brochure-ware to a much more rewarding and engaging user experience,” says Simonsen. “With Office SharePoint Server 2007, we can offer something that engages users and provides value that did not exist before.”

By developing the Web site with Office SharePoint Server 2007, Cadence will be able to take advantage of stable, reliable SharePoint technology to manage content efficiently and scale the site easily as the Web site content and traffic expands.

Easier Management and Maintenance

Content owners can use Office SharePoint Server 2007 to modify page layouts, build new content on existing page layouts, and publish information like event descriptions and training catalogs without having to rely on system administrators. By taking advantage of distributed authoring, Cadence can manage more content with less effort and make it much easier to change content across all different sections and the regional sites while maintaining brand consistency.

“In the case of our training catalog, regions completely update their course data sheets and we simply do the deployment,” says Price. “That’s hundreds of pages that the content owners can do themselves, saving us many hours or days per week of editing, queuing, and reviewing content.”

Better Contact Management

Using Office SharePoint Server 2007 with its Seibel contact management system, Cadence has significantly improved its ability to expand target marketing. The company anticipates having its entire contact management database updated in the first year, completely self managed by customers through the Web site, with actionable profile data that has been fully validated and segmented by technology interests.

“We now have tens of thousands of customer contacts with complete profiles, many of which we never had before,” says Price. “And it will only continue to grow. We’re not even slowing down on a rate of registering more than 200 people a day.”

Enhanced Brand

Cadence.com is a demonstration of the company’s commitment to innovation and customer focus, and an opportunity for Cadence to build and demonstrate brand credibility. By providing customers the opportunity to engage with each other as well as Cadence employees via forums, blogs, and social networking technology, Cadence is meeting its brand promise of being an indispensible partner to drive customer success.

“Cadence is not just speaking the technology; we have implemented it,” says Dan Salisbury, Corporate Vice President of Information Technology at Cadence. “Our unique business partnership with Microsoft has allowed us to use their comprehensive suite of products to help us realize another example of our brand promise to customers.”

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