Customer Solution Case Study

Audio Company Enhances Image, Cuts Costs

with Global Web Content Management

Overview Country or Region: Japan

Industry: Manufacturing—High Tech

and Electronics

Customer Profile

D&M Holdings, based in Japan, with

2,500 employees, markets its premium

audio and video equipment through

brands that include Denon, Marantz,

McIntosh, and Boston Acoustics.

Business Situation

D&M Holdings needed centralized

management of its brand websites to

improve marketing and reduce costs.

Solution

D&M Holdings used Microsoft

SharePoint Server 2010 as the

foundation for enterprise web content

management. Marketing teams control

content and distribute it to 74 sites.

Benefits

Simplified web content management

Better user experience boosts

marketing success

Better collaboration, less complexity,

big savings

Streamlined development and

integration

“SharePoint Server 2010 helped us build a much more

standardized, streamlined, impactful brand image.”

Vaishali Benner, Director of Strategic Marketing, D&M Holdings

D&M Holdings manufactures nine brands of premium consumer

electronics, including Denon and Marantz, and sells its products

in North America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific region. The

company needed to streamline management of its brand

websites to improve marketing and reduce costs. D&M Holdings

selected Microsoft SharePoint 2010 for Internet Sites as the

foundation for a global web content management system. With

the solution, the company has consolidated nine different

website platforms into one, centralized content management for

its marketing teams, and created a cohesive brand image.

Website user experience has improved so much that the number

of visitors leaving the site after viewing only one or two pages

has dropped nearly 25 percent. Further, the company expects to

recover its investment in the solution in just one year, due to

reduced IT complexity and software licensing costs.

Situation D&M Holdings, a privately owned

electronics company headquartered in

Japan, produces and markets premium

audio and video electronics equipment.

Its nine brands are renowned for quality

and innovation, and their longevity

proves this: Denon, established in 1910,

just celebrated its 100-year anniversary.

Other D&M Holdings brands include

Marantz, McIntosh, Boston Acoustics,

Denon DJ, Calrec, and Allen & Heath.

D&M Holdings has grown through

acquisitions and has marketing,

manufacturing, and distribution centers

in the Asia Pacific region, North America,

and Europe. As a result of its acquisitions,

D&M Holdings experienced a

proliferation of disparate IT systems and

services, including more than 200

consumer websites which were based on

nine different technology platforms such

as the PHP scripting language, and

Adobe ColdFusion. It also relied on the

services of multiple hosting providers

and third-party design and development

firms to maintain these websites. “Our

hosting, development, and software

costs were very high,” says Lalit Panda,

Chief Information Officer at D&M

Holdings. “And, we did not have

centralized control over our website

source code or content.”

D&M Holdings must coordinate product

branding and website management

efforts among marketing offices and

distributors. However, the decentralized

website environment challenged the

company’s global marketing efforts. Each

region, country, and even product

distributor developed its own website

content. Thus, it was impossible for the

company to maintain a cohesive brand

image. “Our global brand websites

lacked design and branding continuity,

and this negatively affected our

marketing exposure,” says Vaishali

Benner, Director of Strategic Marketing

at D&M Holdings.

Furthermore, creating or modifying

website content was a time-consuming

and costly process. Many of the

company’s websites relied on older

content management software, but, says

Benner, “Using our legacy platform, it

took a few hours to do a simple task like

post a new product to a website.” To

offload this burden for the marketing

department, the company hired a

freelancer to update its websites, which

resulted in additional costs. Also, it was

difficult to feature product promotions

because the structure of the websites

varied enormously. For instance, only

some D&M Holdings sites could support

banner ads. Therefore, ads had to be

created in different sizes, using different

creative material, which further increased

costs and impeded collaboration.

“Requirements varied so much that our

marketing teams had no reason to work

together on design or messaging.”

For its European sites, which span many

countries and cultures, D&M Holdings

found it extremely challenging to

support multiple versions of the same

content in different languages. Each

country built and maintained individual

websites for each supported language,

which totaled 22 websites in all. “We

couldn’t maintain brand consistency

because the central European office

wasn’t controlling content for all the

sites,” says Bert Kiggen, Director of

Product and Marketing at D&M Holdings

in Europe. “Nothing was shared. This

wasn’t a sustainable strategy for meeting

our objectives of premium brand

management and effective cost

containment.”

“Our global brand

websites lacked design

and branding continuity,

and this negavitely

affected our marketing

exposure.”

Vaishali Benner, Director of Strategic Marketing, D&M Holdings

And for customers, the website

experience was less than ideal. For

example, on some D&M Holdings sites

search functionality was limited, while

other sites did not even support search

functionality. Navigation was

cumbersome, and customers found it

challenging to locate product

information. Because users could not

find what they were looking for, the

“bounce rate,” or rate at which visitors

left the websites after viewing just one or

two pages, was high. “On the Denon U.S.

site, our bounce rate was 30 percent,”

says Benner. To improve the user

experience, D&M Holdings turned to

outside vendors to provide

enhancements to search functionality

and other components of the sites. “We

were spending money to fix something

that was truly broken. We were using

stopgap measures when we really

needed a complete website

infrastructure overhaul.”

Solution In late 2009, D&M Holdings conducted a

thorough evaluation of web content

management systems, including

solutions from EMC and Autonomy

Interwoven. It also evaluated Microsoft

SharePoint 2010 for Internet Sites. The

company’s primary requirements of the

new platform were that it help to reduce

cost and complexity, integrate well with

the rest of the company’s IT

infrastructure, was easy-to-use for

nontechnical people, and could extend

to support future integrations, such as e-

commerce, customer relationship

management, and a company intranet.

“On all those points, SharePoint 2010

proved to be the best solution,” says

Panda.

D&M Holdings then engaged Omnie

Solutions, a Microsoft Registered Partner

with expertise with Microsoft SharePoint

Server, to help the company design,

develop, and implement an enterprise

web content management solution

based on SharePoint 2010 for Internet

Sites. “Omnie is our go-to partner in this

project,” says Benner. “The company

understands our business and how to

address our needs in the SharePoint

environment.”

In March 2010, Omnie Solutions helped

D&M Holdings begin a global migration

of its websites. The project includes

consolidating more than 200 disparate

sites to 74, centralizing content

management to core marketing teams in

Europe, North America, and the Asia

Pacific region, and relocating website

infrastructure to the D&M Holdings

North American headquarters in

Mahwah, New Jersey.

Figure 1. New Marantz website

home page, based on

SharePoint Server 2010.

Creating an Engaging User Experience

The new D&M Holdings sites feature

streamlined navigation and easy-to-

browse product catalogs. Developers

used the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010

Ultimate development system, Microsoft

Visual Studio Team Foundation Server

2010, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010

Web Parts, and Microsoft SharePoint

Designer 2010 to create a rich,

interactive user experience. (See Figure 1

for an example of one of these new

sites.) D&M Holdings incorporated

animations to boost visibility for

products and services being promoted,

and mapping functionality to help

customers locate nearby resellers.

Developers also used SharePoint list

functionality to create a repository to

store and manage product catalog data.

“Visual Studio 2010, and its seamless

connection to SharePoint Server 2010,

helps our team dramatically,” says Niraj

Patpatia, Technical Architect and Senior

Business Analyst at Omnie Solutions. “We

can deploy code directly within the

SharePoint Server environment.”

Centralizing Web Content

Management

Developers customized the environment

using out-of-the-box SharePoint Server

2010 features such as master pages and

page layouts, which allow D&M Holdings

to create and maintain “templates” that

include site design and branding

guidelines for each brand. Content

owners in each brand’s marketing

department use a web-based text editor

to modify site content without help from

the IT department. The site templates

also allow D&M Holdings to quickly and

easily deploy new sites as it enters new

markets or works with new distributors.

D&M Holdings relies on the variations

feature of SharePoint Server 2010 to

disseminate content from its core

marketing sites to individual country or

distributor sites. For instance, the core

marketing team in Europe, which is

based in the Netherlands, creates

website content for all of the company’s

European sites. An automated workflow

in SharePoint Server 2010 ensures that

content is routed to and reviewed by a

designated series of approvers such as

copywriters, editors, designers, and

marketing managers. All digital assets,

including graphics, logos, text, and

multimedia files, are stored in a central

repository in SharePoint lists. Individual

site owners select the assets they need

such as graphics and website copy,

translate the content, and publish it in

their respective languages. Global

changes (such as modifying site

navigation) are automatically propagated

to all the sites.

Integrating and Improving Search

To help customers find information more

easily, the company employed search

functionality in SharePoint Server 2010.

Using managed metadata capabilities in

SharePoint Server, D&M Holdings

centrally defines taxonomies for its

website content, which allows the

company to easily manage and apply

tags to website content to deliver

context-sensitive search results. This

metadata tagging capability also helps

the company increase its visibility in

search engines and attract more

customers to its sites.

Connecting to Social Networking Sites

D&M Holdings also uses configurable

Web Parts in SharePoint Server 2010 to

connect its websites to popular social

media forums such as Twitter, YouTube,

and Facebook. This is just the first step in

the company’s strategy to capitalize on

technology to increase exposure for its

brand. D&M Holdings plans to extend

this connection to its customer

relationship management (CRM) system.

“For instance, if a customer comments on

a product through a social networking

site, this detail will be captured in CRM,”

explains Benner.

Consolidating Infrastructure

Previously, D&M Holdings maintained

website infrastructure in dispersed data

centers in multiple countries. The new

infrastructure is located in a single data

center in New Jersey, where two servers

run the Windows Server 2008 R2

operating system and SharePoint Server

2010, and two servers run Microsoft SQL

Server 2008 R2 Enterprise data

management software. Active Directory

Domain Services provides user

authentication capabilities to manage

access to the authoring environment.

D&M Holdings uses the content

deployment feature of SharePoint Server

2010 to schedule and control the

publishing of content from its authoring

environment to the production

environment, and it relies on Microsoft

System Center Operations Manager 2007

R2 to manage and monitor the health of

its SharePoint Server environment and to

help ensure top performance and

availability.

Future Plans

In April 2011, after gathering and

organizing data from its 200 disparate

sites and finalizing guidelines for a new

global brand image, D&M Holdings

completed its migration of the Denon,

Marantz, and McIntosh websites to

SharePoint Server 2010. “The

development was one of the quickest

parts of this comprehensive brand

revitalization process,” explains Manish

Om Maheshwary, Chief Executive Officer

at Omnie Solutions. The company plans

to complete the migration of its

remaining six brand sites to the new

platform by August 2011. In future

phases, D&M Holdings plans to deploy

an e-commerce platform to enhance its

business-to-business sales capabilities,

using Microsoft Commerce Server 2009.

The company will use Microsoft BizTalk

Server 2010 to enable interoperation

among SharePoint Server 2010,

Commerce Server 2009, the company’s

Oracle-based enterprise resource

planning (ERP) system, as well as third-

party shipping and taxation service

providers.

Benefits Using SharePoint Server 2010, D&M

Holdings has simplified its web content

management processes, empowered its

marketing departments, reduced IT costs,

improved customer experience, and

streamlined its development efforts.

Simplified Web Content Management

In its previous environment, content for

each country and distributor website was

developed independently, with no

oversight from core marketing teams.

D&M Holdings managed and maintained

more than 200 websites. With SharePoint

Server 2010, D&M Holdings has reduced

the number of sites by more than 50

percent. The company uses features such

as master pages, page layouts, and site

variations to enable its marketing teams

in Europe, North America, and the Asia

Pacific region to manage website content

for the company’s nine brands and

distribute it for publication to 74 sites, in

18 countries, and 10 languages. “With

SharePoint Server 2010, the process is so

simple that our marketing staff can make

quick modifications and updates to the

sites without IT intervention,” says

Benner. “That was impossible for us to

do, before. It took hours of our time and

“With SharePoint Server

2010, the process is so

simple that our

marketing staff can make

quick modifications and

updates to the sites

without IT intervention.”

Vaishali Benner, Director of Strategic

Marketing, D&M Holdings

we had to engage outside resources.

The improvement is astronomical.”

Alex Alexandrou, Vice President of Web

Technology at D&M Holdings adds,

“With SharePoint Server 2010 as our

global web content management system,

our environment is vastly simpler. We

can now truly support the marketing

department in its efforts to build and

maintain a strong, global brand

presence.”

Better User Experience Boosts

Marketing Success

Now that all D&M Holdings sites are

based on a common infrastructure, the

company’s dispersed marketing teams

can use the same website assets—such

as creative campaign materials for a

product promotion—across multiple

sites. The consistency results in a better

customer experience. “Before, among

regions, our brand sites had a very

disjointed look and feel. SharePoint

Server 2010 helped us build a much

more standardized, streamlined,

impactful brand image,” says Benner.

Greater consistency, improved

navigation, engaging content that

includes rich multimedia experiences,

and enhanced search capabilities all

contribute to a better customer

experience.“ The bounce rate for our

Denon site has decreased by 29

percent—that’s almost a 100 percent

improvement since implementing

SharePoint Server 2010,” says Benner. In

addition, D&M Holdings takes advantage

of the extensible nature of the

SharePoint Server 2010 environment to

improve customer service in creative

ways. For instance, by integrating its

CRM system with SharePoint Server

2010, D&M Holdings will be able to

capture key customer information

through the website. “When a customer

posts to Facebook or Twitter about one

of our products, we can capture those

details in CRM,” explains Benner. “This

will provide us with valuable insight into

the customer’s situation should they later

contact us with a question or a service

request.”

Better Collaboration, Less Complexity

Means Big Savings

Enterprise web content management

capabilities have helped D&M Holdings

marketing teams achieve better brand

consistency, innovation, and cost savings.

“Now that all regions have the same

website capabilities, if one region creates

a unique website innovation or

enhancement, all regions benefit from it,”

explains Benner. “Essentially, we are now

splitting many of our design, marketing,

and development costs three ways,

among Europe, North America, and Asia

Pacific instead of creating similar

features, functionalities, or product

promotions three different times.”

Additionally, the common platform

encourages collaboration. “Before, we

had little reason to collaborate on a

global scale because each region had its

separate challenges to overcome and

technologies to work within,” says

Kiggen. “Now, we are working with the

same tools, in the same environment.

SharePoint Server 2010 has helped us

collaborate and cooperate on a global

scale.”

From an IT perspective, SharePoint

Server 2010 helps D&M Holdings reduce

costs by reducing IT complexity. “All of

our brand websites are now hosted

centrally in the same data center. We

have reduced our footprint and

increased our control,” says Panda.

“Enhancing our marketing efforts and

“SharePoint Server 2010

has helped us

collaborate and

cooperate on a global

scale.”

Bert Kiggen, Director of Product and

Marketing, D&M Holdings, Europe

achieving operational cost savings are

essential to our success.” D&M Holdings

will recoup its investment in SharePoint

Server 2010 quickly. “The money we are

saving in hosting, development, and

software licensing costs will result in a

return on our investment in SharePoint

Server 2010 in just one year,” says Panda.

“And that is not including the time

savings we are realizing from the

decreased burden of content

management on our IT staff.”

Streamlined Development and

Integration

The SharePoint Server 2010 environment

also streamlines development and

integration work for Omnie Solutions

and D&M Holdings. “With SharePoint

Server 2010, we reduce our time-to-

market for websites by approximately 30

percent,” says Om Maheshwary. “I

attribute this to out-of-the-box

functionality, such as prebuilt SharePoint

Server Web Parts, and easy connection

to other systems.”

Alexandrou adds, “With SharePoint

Server 2010 and the rest of our

Microsoft-based environment, we

experience tight integration and strong

product support. In this environment, we

don’t need to do special, complex

integrations to get things to work. We

have the luxury of working with products

that are easy to integrate and work

within the Microsoft .NET Framework to

expand our capabilities enterprisewide.”

“The money we are

saving in hosting,

development, and

software licensing costs

will result in a return on

our investment in

SharePoint Server 2010

in just one year.”

Lalit Panda, Chief Information Officer,

D&M Holdings

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 is the

business collaboration platform for the

enterprise and the web.

For more information about Microsoft

SharePoint Server 2010, go to:

www.microsoft.com/sharepoint

For More Information For more information about Microsoft

products and services, call the

Microsoft Sales Information Center at

(800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the

Microsoft Canada Information Centre

at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the

United States and Canada who are

deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach

Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD)

services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the

50 United States and Canada, please

contact your local Microsoft subsidiary.

To access information using the World

Wide Web, go to:

www.microsoft.com

For more information about Omnie

Solutions products and services, call

(404) 442-6200 or visit the website at:

www.omniesolutions.com

For more information about D&M

Holdings products and services, call

(81) 44-670-1111 or visit the website

at:

www.dm-holdings.com

Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio

− Microsoft SharePoint 2010 for

Internet Sites

− Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010

− Microsoft SharePoint Designer

2010

− Windows Server 2008 R2

− Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2

Enterprise

− Microsoft System Center

Configuration Manager 2007 R2

− Microsoft Commerce Server 2009

− Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010

Microsoft Visual Studio

− Microsoft Visual Studio 2010

Ultimate

− Microsoft Visual Studio Team

Foundation Server 2010

Technologies

− Active Directory Domain Services

Partners Omnie Solutions