Pirelli migrates 218 websites in 10 months with Contentstack

As a global leader in tire manufacturing, Pirelli manages six main digital assets across 150 regions, attracting 25M visits per year. Its digital transformation roadmap includes a robust cloud strategy, an integrated data platform to ensure data-driven decision making, the harnessing of AI and Machine Learning, and the adoption of next-generation architecture for its factories around the world. 

One core transformation on the roadmap was Pirelli’s legacy CMS, which was causing inefficiencies in the publishing process and delays in content deployment. It also came with high operational costs and did not have the ability to scale without prohibitive license costs. As Pirelli’s existing solution was at end of life, which meant no updates, security patches or infrastructure compatibility, Pirelli was looking to adopt a new CMS that could solve these existing challenges and achieve:

• Unlimited scalability: Pirelli wanted a CMS without a reliance on license upgrades, and without inherent resource limitations. 

• Reduced operational costs: A complex AWS-hosted IaaS had led to vendor lock in and expensive specialized support and infrastructure management.

• Greater publishing efficiency: Each time Pirelli wanted to deploy a new site version, the application server had to be restarted. 

• Headless delivery: The goal was fully-native composable architecture, without reliance on third-party custom software.

Using Gartner’s Market Guide for Web Content Management and The Forrester Wave for Agile Content Management Systems, Pirelli selected a shortlist of CMS vendors, with Contentstack ultimately chosen as the best solution for their needs. 

Working with the in-house team, Pirelli began the process of migrating from its previous CMS to Contentstack, minimizing the costs of dual licenses by attempting to speed up the migration of over 200 websites to under a year. 

By leveraging Contentstack’s headless technology, Pirelli was able to decouple front-end architecture from back-end processes, so the application modules that implement the graphical interface of the websites could remain the same. The team used modular blocks functionality to optimize the number of content types needed and the required stacks. 

Pirelli used a master template for all business unit websites, and performed an SEO and data test to ensure best performance. Once validated, Pirelli was able to achieve rollout quickly, automating content delivery using Contentstack-specific features as well as Backend for Frontend (BFF), a design pattern that creates a dedicated backend service tailored specifically for a particular frontend. Rather than manually entering all the data into the new websites, Pirelli could simply import the data from JSON files to Contentstack, dramatically improving migration time. 

Altogether, a team of 13 completed the migration of 218 sites in 10 months, ahead of schedule. 

Pirelli’s websites now have a streamlined content management process for efficient content delivery around the world. The brand’s content architecture uses React and Next.js on the front end for enhanced performance and scalability, a Quarkus-based Java app on the back end for BFF, and webhooks that trigger on each Contentstack change to send the right metadata to a specific BFF endpoint.

Pirelli is looking ahead to leveraging Contentstack’s wide catalog of integrations, including Google Analytics for business intelligence, Jira for productivity and DAM and PIM integration for content consistency and efficiency. Using Contentstack, Pirelli also plans to leverage AI for automatic translations, SEO and content creation, and to discover new opportunities with Contentstack Personalize.

Key wins for Pirelli with Contentstack include:

• Lightning-fast migration time: 218 websites were migrated in 10 months
• Reduced costs: Pirelli has cost-optimized by right-sizing licenses, streamlining content management, and removing reliance on third parties.
• Headless delivery: The business now has complete control over content creation and delivery, without the fear of downtime or delay.