Being an Umbraco Gold Partner: how to leverage cloud-first strategy

Cloud-first or how to earn back your partnership fee

Arlanet has been building sites on Umbraco since 2005. And it’s simple - as Umbraco evolves, so do we, hence we’ve also become a Gold Partner. We love the benefits the partner program gives; it also validates the knowledge and skills of a partner. 

Being an Umbraco Gold Partner also compliments our cloud-first strategy, as the discount we get on Umbraco Cloud projects basically earns back the partnership fee.

How we got the lead

A few months back we received a lead from Umbraco HQ. It was a project for an international company with headquarters in our area. 

As with most leads, multiple selected partners were referenced by Umbraco, so you will always need to follow up yourself and see if you’re the best fit for that company. In the end it turned out that we were and we successfully converted the lead to a great client - Lobster Ink.

Also, according to Inge Prozesky, Digital Marketing Manager at Lobster Ink: “We were in contact with several agencies (some recommended by Umbraco and some found organically). We were looking for simplicity and flexibility as our old website was complex and time-consuming. Arlanet aligned with us from the start. We were looking for a partner that complemented our vision and allowed us to be hands-on without having to do the technical heavy lifting. Their enthusiasm for our project and their knowledge of Umbraco (plus the gold partner status) did the trick.”

Why Umbraco Cloud was a no-brainer for this project

As Umbraco is growing as a company, it attracts bigger clients who need 24/7 managed hosting and support. For us, Umbraco Cloud was a no-brainer as it helped to provide the right quality for the client.

Having started early with Umbraco Cloud we know that it has gotten much better in recent years and what is capable of today. We now rely fully on Umbraco Cloud for new clients.

Lobster Ink had the right knowledge about Azure, but did not know about Umbraco Cloud yet. Knowing that the platform was running on Azure and the Professional plan could provide a great DTAP environment with short time to market, we agreed on Umbraco Cloud. It was simply the perfect fit for the company.

60 days from start to finish. How did we do it?

In 2019 Lobster Ink was acquired by a 14 billion revenue company Ecolab and needed to scale up their website, doing so fast. Nowadays companies are moving faster than ever and the previous Lobster Ink’s website was showing its limits. 

The client wanted to be able to scale with their marketing team, hence the tight deadline. And to be totally honest, who wouldn’t like to have their new website within a short timeframe?

We combined Umbraco Cloud with our own Umbraco Accelerator, which does what it implies - accelerates things. Umbraco Accelerator has an optimized editing experience and a complete library of pre-built blocks that create a huge upside on quality, flexibility and time to market. 

Combining that with Umbraco Cloud we have optimized the process of creating new projects very fast in an automated way. Umbraco Cloud helps with tooling like SSL and setting up instances on the spot.

Lobster Ink now has full flexibility

Lobster Ink’s marketing team now has the flexibility to arrange their website any way they want. Change rows, columns, backgrounds and re-use any functionality already available - they don’t need us to work on their website. This also enables them to spend their budget on new functionalities and much less on maintenance.

So, for us as an Umbraco Gold Partner, the Cloud-first strategy not only makes sense financially, it also leads to a much more optimized, simpler processes when developing client projects and onboarding them afterwards.

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Intrigued?

See even more of what Umbraco Cloud has to offer.

Or unwrap the full story of how Arlanet crafted Lobster Ink' website in a dedicated case study.