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How to write a case study — examples, templates, and tools

It’s a marketer’s job to communicate the effectiveness of a product or service to potential and current customers to convince them to buy and keep business moving. One of the best methods for doing this is to share success stories that are relatable to prospects and customers based on their pain points, experiences, and overall needs.

That’s where case studies come in. Case studies are an essential part of a content marketing plan. These in-depth stories of customer experiences are some of the most effective at demonstrating the value of a product or service. Yet many marketers don’t use them, whether because of their regimented formats or the process of customer involvement and approval.

A case study is a powerful tool for showcasing your hard work and the success your customer achieved. But writing a great case study can be difficult if you’ve never done it before or if it’s been a while. This guide will show you how to write an effective case study and provide real-world examples and templates that will keep readers engaged and support your business.

In this article, you’ll learn:

What is a case study?

How to write a case study, case study templates, case study examples, case study tools.

A case study is the detailed story of a customer’s experience with a product or service that demonstrates their success and often includes measurable outcomes. Case studies are used in a range of fields and for various reasons, from business to academic research. They’re especially impactful in marketing as brands work to convince and convert consumers with relatable, real-world stories of actual customer experiences.

The best case studies tell the story of a customer’s success, including the steps they took, the results they achieved, and the support they received from a brand along the way. To write a great case study, you need to:

• Celebrate the customer and make them — not a product or service — the star of the story.
• Craft the story with specific audiences or target segments in mind so that the story of one customer will be viewed as relatable and actionable for another customer.
• Write copy that is easy to read and engaging so that readers will gain the insights and messages intended.
• Follow a standardized format that includes all of the essentials a potential customer would find interesting and useful.
• Support all of the claims for success made in the story with data in the forms of hard numbers and customer statements.

Case studies are a type of review but more in depth, aiming to show — rather than just tell — the positive experiences that customers have with a brand. Notably, 89% of consumers read reviews before deciding to buy, and 79% view case study content as part of their purchasing process. When it comes to B2B sales, 52% of buyers rank case studies as an important part of their evaluation process.

Telling a brand story through the experience of a tried-and-true customer matters. The story is relatable to potential new customers as they imagine themselves in the shoes of the company or individual featured in the case study. Showcasing previous customers can help new ones see themselves engaging with your brand in the ways that are most meaningful to them.

Besides sharing the perspective of another customer, case studies stand out from other content marketing forms because they are based on evidence. Whether pulling from client testimonials or data-driven results, case studies tend to have more impact on new business because the story contains information that is both objective (data) and subjective (customer experience) — and the brand doesn’t sound too self-promotional.

Case studies are unique in that there’s a fairly standardized format for telling a customer’s story. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for creativity. It’s all about making sure that teams are clear on the goals for the case study — along with strategies for supporting content and channels — and understanding how the story fits within the framework of the company’s overall marketing goals.

Here are the basic steps to writing a good case study.

1. Identify your goal

Start by defining exactly who your case study will be designed to help. Case studies are about specific instances where a company works with a customer to achieve a goal. Identify which customers are likely to have these goals, as well as other needs the story should cover to appeal to them.

The answer is often found in one of the buyer personas that have been constructed as part of your larger marketing strategy. This can include anything from new leads generated by the marketing team to long-term customers that are being pressed for cross-sell opportunities. In all of these cases, demonstrating value through a relatable customer success story can be part of the solution to conversion.

2. Choose your client or subject

Who you highlight matters. Case studies tie brands together that might otherwise not cross paths. A writer will want to ensure that the highlighted customer aligns with their own company’s brand identity and offerings. Look for a customer with positive name recognition who has had great success with a product or service and is willing to be an advocate.

The client should also match up with the identified target audience. Whichever company or individual is selected should be a reflection of other potential customers who can see themselves in similar circumstances, having the same problems and possible solutions.

Some of the most compelling case studies feature customers who:

• Switch from one product or service to another while naming competitors that missed the mark.
• Experience measurable results that are relatable to others in a specific industry.
• Represent well-known brands and recognizable names that are likely to compel action.
• Advocate for a product or service as a champion and are well-versed in its advantages.

Whoever or whatever customer is selected, marketers must ensure they have the permission of the company involved before getting started. Some brands have strict review and approval procedures for any official marketing or promotional materials that include their name. Acquiring those approvals in advance will prevent any miscommunication or wasted effort if there is an issue with their legal or compliance teams.

3. Conduct research and compile data

Substantiating the claims made in a case study — either by the marketing team or customers themselves — adds validity to the story. To do this, include data and feedback from the client that defines what success looks like. This can be anything from demonstrating return on investment (ROI) to a specific metric the customer was striving to improve. Case studies should prove how an outcome was achieved and show tangible results that indicate to the customer that your solution is the right one.

This step could also include customer interviews. Make sure that the people being interviewed are key stakeholders in the purchase decision or deployment and use of the product or service that is being highlighted. Content writers should work off a set list of questions prepared in advance. It can be helpful to share these with the interviewees beforehand so they have time to consider and craft their responses. One of the best interview tactics to keep in mind is to ask questions where yes and no are not natural answers. This way, your subject will provide more open-ended responses that produce more meaningful content.

4. Choose the right format

There are a number of different ways to format a case study. Depending on what you hope to achieve, one style will be better than another. However, there are some common elements to include, such as:

• An engaging headline
• A subject and customer introduction
• The unique challenge or challenges the customer faced
• The solution the customer used to solve the problem
• The results achieved
• Data and statistics to back up claims of success
• A strong call to action (CTA) to engage with the vendor

It’s also important to note that while case studies are traditionally written as stories, they don’t have to be in a written format. Some companies choose to get more creative with their case studies and produce multimedia content, depending on their audience and objectives. Case study formats can include traditional print stories, interactive web or social content, data-heavy infographics, professionally shot videos, podcasts, and more.

5. Write your case study

We’ll go into more detail later about how exactly to write a case study, including templates and examples. Generally speaking, though, there are a few things to keep in mind when writing your case study.

• Be clear and concise. Readers want to get to the point of the story quickly and easily, and they’ll be looking to see themselves reflected in the story right from the start.
• Provide a big picture. Always make sure to explain who the client is, their goals, and how they achieved success in a short introduction to engage the reader.
• Construct a clear narrative. Stick to the story from the perspective of the customer and what they needed to solve instead of just listing product features or benefits.
• Leverage graphics. Incorporating infographics, charts, and sidebars can be a more engaging and eye-catching way to share key statistics and data in readable ways.
• Offer the right amount of detail. Most case studies are one or two pages with clear sections that a reader can skim to find the information most important to them.
• Include data to support claims. Show real results — both facts and figures and customer quotes — to demonstrate credibility and prove the solution works.

6. Promote your story

Marketers have a number of options for distribution of a freshly minted case study. Many brands choose to publish case studies on their website and post them on social media. This can help support SEO and organic content strategies while also boosting company credibility and trust as visitors see that other businesses have used the product or service.

Marketers are always looking for quality content they can use for lead generation. Consider offering a case study as gated content behind a form on a landing page or as an offer in an email message. One great way to do this is to summarize the content and tease the full story available for download after the user takes an action.

Sales teams can also leverage case studies, so be sure they are aware that the assets exist once they’re published. Especially when it comes to larger B2B sales, companies often ask for examples of similar customer challenges that have been solved.

Now that you’ve learned a bit about case studies and what they should include, you may be wondering how to start creating great customer story content. Here are a couple of templates you can use to structure your case study.

Template 1 — Challenge-solution-result format

• Start with an engaging title. This should be fewer than 70 characters long for SEO best practices. One of the best ways to approach the title is to include the customer’s name and a hint at the challenge they overcame in the end.
• Create an introduction. Lead with an explanation as to who the customer is, the need they had, and the opportunity they found with a specific product or solution. Writers can also suggest the success the customer experienced with the solution they chose.
• Present the challenge. This should be several paragraphs long and explain the problem the customer faced and the issues they were trying to solve. Details should tie into the company’s products and services naturally. This section needs to be the most relatable to the reader so they can picture themselves in a similar situation.
• Share the solution. Explain which product or service offered was the ideal fit for the customer and why. Feel free to delve into their experience setting up, purchasing, and onboarding the solution.
• Explain the results. Demonstrate the impact of the solution they chose by backing up their positive experience with data. Fill in with customer quotes and tangible, measurable results that show the effect of their choice.
• Ask for action. Include a CTA at the end of the case study that invites readers to reach out for more information, try a demo, or learn more — to nurture them further in the marketing pipeline. What you ask of the reader should tie directly into the goals that were established for the case study in the first place.

Template 2 — Data-driven format

• Start with an engaging title. Be sure to include a statistic or data point in the first 70 characters. Again, it’s best to include the customer’s name as part of the title.
• Create an overview. Share the customer’s background and a short version of the challenge they faced. Present the reason a particular product or service was chosen, and feel free to include quotes from the customer about their selection process.
• Present data point 1. Isolate the first metric that the customer used to define success and explain how the product or solution helped to achieve this goal. Provide data points and quotes to substantiate the claim that success was achieved.
• Present data point 2. Isolate the second metric that the customer used to define success and explain what the product or solution did to achieve this goal. Provide data points and quotes to substantiate the claim that success was achieved.
• Present data point 3. Isolate the final metric that the customer used to define success and explain what the product or solution did to achieve this goal. Provide data points and quotes to substantiate the claim that success was achieved.
• Summarize the results. Reiterate the fact that the customer was able to achieve success thanks to a specific product or service. Include quotes and statements that reflect customer satisfaction and suggest they plan to continue using the solution.
• Ask for action. Include a CTA at the end of the case study that asks readers to reach out for more information, try a demo, or learn more — to further nurture them in the marketing pipeline. Again, remember that this is where marketers can look to convert their content into action with the customer.

While templates are helpful, seeing a case study in action can also be a great way to learn. Here are some examples of how Adobe customers have experienced success.

Juniper Networks

One example is the Adobe and Juniper Networks case study , which puts the reader in the customer’s shoes. The beginning of the story quickly orients the reader so that they know exactly who the article is about and what they were trying to achieve. Solutions are outlined in a way that shows Adobe Experience Manager is the best choice and a natural fit for the customer. Along the way, quotes from the client are incorporated to help add validity to the statements. The results in the case study are conveyed with clear evidence of scale and volume using tangible data.

The story of Lenovo’s journey with Adobe is one that spans years of planning, implementation, and rollout. The Lenovo case study does a great job of consolidating all of this into a relatable journey that other enterprise organizations can see themselves taking, despite the project size. This case study also features descriptive headers and compelling visual elements that engage the reader and strengthen the content.

Tata Consulting

When it comes to using data to show customer results, this case study does an excellent job of conveying details and numbers in an easy-to-digest manner. Bullet points at the start break up the content while also helping the reader understand exactly what the case study will be about. Tata Consulting used Adobe to deliver elevated, engaging content experiences for a large telecommunications client of its own — an objective that’s relatable for a lot of companies.

Case studies are a vital tool for any marketing team as they enable you to demonstrate the value of your company’s products and services to others. They help marketers do their job and add credibility to a brand trying to promote its solutions by using the experiences and stories of real customers.

When you’re ready to get started with a case study:

• Think about a few goals you’d like to accomplish with your content.
• Make a list of successful clients that would be strong candidates for a case study.
• Reach out to the client to get their approval and conduct an interview.
• Gather the data to present an engaging and effective customer story.

Adobe can help

There are several Adobe products that can help you craft compelling case studies. Adobe Experience Platform helps you collect data and deliver great customer experiences across every channel. Once you’ve created your case studies, Experience Platform will help you deliver the right information to the right customer at the right time for maximum impact.

To learn more, watch the Adobe Experience Platform story .

Keep in mind that the best case studies are backed by data. That’s where Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform and Adobe Analytics come into play. With Real-Time CDP, you can gather the data you need to build a great case study and target specific customers to deliver the content to the right audience at the perfect moment.

Watch the Real-Time CDP overview video to learn more.

Finally, Adobe Analytics turns real-time data into real-time insights. It helps your business collect and synthesize data from multiple platforms to make more informed decisions and create the best case study possible.

Request a demo to learn more about Adobe Analytics.

https://business.adobe.com/blog/perspectives/b2b-ecommerce-10-case-studies-inspire-you

https://business.adobe.com/blog/basics/business-case

https://business.adobe.com/blog/basics/what-is-real-time-analytics

Brent Barnhart | B2B Content Writer

7 Superb SaaS Case Study Examples (and Why They’re So Effective)

It’s no secret that the SaaS space is crowded.

Heck, the average business is juggling hundreds of apps at any given time.

And so anything software companies can do to prove their value is a plus.

That’s why SaaS case studies are so important.

Fact: case studies are cited as the most effective type of content for influencing B2B buying decisions. Case studies are crucial for not only helping SaaS companies stand out from the crowd but also answer their potential customers’ most pressing questions.

Want to see what compelling customer stories look like in the wild? Check out the seven SaaS case study examples below.

“What does this case study do well?”

• Immediately highlights the client’s key challenge and how Gong’s product managed to solve it. The specific, positive outcomes (“more closed deals,” “increased sales productivity” and “more cross-department collaboration”) speak for themselves.
• The format is scannable and flows seamlessly, broken up by colorful visuals, client quotes and a product screenshot.
• The case study reads like an actual narrative, brimming with conversational copy and client quotes to keep the report from feeling too “matter of fact.”

Much like SaaS blog writing doesn’t have to be boring, case studies shouldn’t be a total snooze-fest. This report proves exactly that.

• Incorporates a brief video to summarize the study’s key points and provide real-world context to the client’s challenges. This is especially important for more “technical” or complicated SaaS products.
• It’s brief! In addition to the provided video, the tried-and-tested “Challenge, Solution, Results” format helps keep this study short and sweet.
• The study’s headline is compelling. From its title alone, the study highlights how a specific feature (Zylo’s SaaS renewal calendar) addressed a specific pain point (unwanted auto-renewals) and resulted in a major benefit ($50,000+ saved) for the client.

Clocking in at under 500 words, this is among the shortest of our SaaS study examples. That said, the study’s brevity is one of its key strengths.

• The study’s format gives you pretty much everything you need above-the-fold, including the client’s results and a well-produced video.
• Highlights impressive data points and outcomes immediately (“5xd conversion” and “90% retention rate”).
• Includes quotes from multiple employees to showcase how Heap’s service helps clients organization-wide (rather than just a single department).

• The case study’s title is striking, putting a massively positive client outcome (saving 40 hours per week) front-and-center.
• It feels human! The fact that the study comes from a back-and-forth client conversation not only humanizes Databox as a brand but also makes their product seem more tangible.
• The study’s unique format (a blog post that provides both a video and transcript) is fair game for prospects whether they prefer to consume content via viewing or reading. This likewise highlights how you might integrate case studies into your SaaS content strategy.

5. FunnelCake

• The study’s headline does double-duty of showcasing awesome results (1.5x conversion rates) and how quickly those results came (“Within a quarter of launching”).
• Provides multiple hard-hitting client quotes to drive home the product’s effectiveness (“finding value in the first week”).
• Couples its bold claims with specific data points (“100% adoption in the first 30 days”).

6. Chili Piper

• Major outcomes are highlighted throughout the case study (including a “5x increase in inbound meeting booked” and the “300% revenue increase” referenced in the title).
• The study uses the numbers above to hook the reader and then provide a brief breakdown of how those results came to be, moving us from Point A to Point B.
• Candid client video and quotes provide additional context and a personal touch to Chili Piper’s product.

7. Typeform

• The study is presented as a hybrid between a customer success story and a how-to blog post for new users and existing clients. Again, case studies are a valuable part of your SaaS content marketing strategy.
• Incorporates actual client screenshots and highlights the specific steps to replicate their positive results, making Typeform’s product seem super actionable.
• Integrates glowing quotes from the client to showcase benefits.

“What do the best SaaS case study examples have in common?”

As proven by the examples above, there is no “right” or singular way to put together a SaaS case study.

That said, there are a few common threads between the reports above that companies should strive to stick to.

If you’re trying to figure out how to write a SaaS case study yourself, keep the principles below in mind.

Grab readers’ attention with specific numbers, figures and data points

Sure, phrases like “increased revenue” or “saved time” are enticing.

But coupling those phrases with actual numbers can help your case study pack a much-needed punch.

For example, “increased revenue” versus “increased MRR by $10,000” or “saved time” versus “saved 15 hours per week.”

See how that works? Using actual client numbers does double duty of grabbing your target audience’s attention while also proving to prospects that your service produces meaningful results.

Integrate visuals to illustrate your points and keep readers engaged

Fact: recent visual content statistics note that both videos and graphics help push people toward making purchasing decisions.

It’s telling that five of our seven SaaS case study examples include video, right?

From stylized quotes to product screenshots and client headshots, it’s crucial that your reports are more than just walls of text. Written case studies can definitely be effective, granted you stick to the principle of “show, don’t tell.”

Let your clients do the talking

Again, most SaaS case studies are basically client stories.

So don’t be shy about letting your clients sing your praises. You’d be surprised at what gems of social proof they’ll say totally unprompted.

The correlation between customer testimonials and higher conversions is well-documented. Note that many of the SaaS case study examples below draw heavily on direct client quotes or interview segments.

If nothing else, making your case studies client-centric makes sense and likewise means less work on your part.

Make your case study shareable

Fact: the typical B2B buying process involves between six and ten people.

And so anything you can do to make your case study shareable to multiple stakeholders is a smart move.

This again speaks to why so many SaaS case studies incorporate video or are formatted as succinct, scroll-friendly PDFs.

Beyond that, conversational language and a summary of key points can also make a report more shareable. In short, your case study should be accessible even to people who don’t have a deep knowledge of your product.

Which SaaS case study examples stand out to you?

SaaS providers have a ton of freedom when it comes to how they put together their case studies.

Want to keep it brief? Looking to take a deep dive into your product and its specific features? Go for it.

Hopefully these examples and best practices provided some insight into what makes a “good” case study in the software space.

Got any other SaaS case study examples I should totally check out? Let me know on  Twitter , comment below or  shoot me an email .

This post was last updated on 1/5/2021.

January 6, 2021 at 8:26 am

Great piece for me as a marketing analyst who is looking to learn more about the SaaS industry

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Data and Analytics Case Study

Made possible by ey, exclusive global insights case study sponsor.

GE’s Big Bet on Data and Analytics

Seeking opportunities in the internet of things, ge expands into industrial analytics., february 18, 2016, by: laura winig, introduction.

If software experts truly knew what Jeff Immelt and GE Digital were doing, there’s no other software company on the planet where they would rather be. –Bill Ruh, CEO of GE Digital and CDO for GE

In September 2015, multinational conglomerate General Electric (GE) launched an ad campaign featuring a recent college graduate, Owen, excitedly breaking the news to his parents and friends that he has just landed a computer programming job — with GE. Owen tries to tell them that he will be writing code to help machines communicate, but they’re puzzled; after all, GE isn’t exactly known for its software. In one ad, his friends feign excitement, while in another, his father implies Owen may not be macho enough to work at the storied industrial manufacturing company.

Owen's Hammer

Ge's ad campaign aimed at millennials emphasizes its new digital direction..

The campaign was designed to recruit Millennials to join GE as Industrial Internet developers and remind them — using GE’s new watchwords, “The digital company. That’s also an industrial company.” — of GE’s massive digital transformation effort. GE has bet big on the Industrial Internet — the convergence of industrial machines, data, and the Internet (also referred to as the Internet of Things) — committing $1 billion to put sensors on gas turbines, jet engines, and other machines; connect them to the cloud; and analyze the resulting flow of data to identify ways to improve machine productivity and reliability. “GE has made significant investment in the Industrial Internet,” says Matthias Heilmann, Chief Digital Officer of GE Oil & Gas Digital Solutions. “It signals this is real, this is our future.”

While many software companies like SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft have traditionally been focused on providing technology for the back office, GE is leading the development of a new breed of operational technology (OT) that literally sits on top of industrial machinery. Long known as the technology that controls and monitors machines, OT now goes beyond these functions by connecting machines via the cloud and using data analytics to help predict breakdowns and assess the machines’ overall health. GE executives say they are redefining industrial automation by extracting lessons from the IT revolution and customizing them for rugged heavy-industrial environments.

One such environment is the oil and gas industry, where GE sees a $1 billion opportunity for its OT software. In an industry where a single unproductive day on a platform can cost a liquified natural gas (LNG) facility as much as $25 million, the holy grail for oil and gas is minimizing “unplanned downtime” — time that equipment is unable to operate due to a malfunction. Ashley Haynes-Gaspar, software and services general manager at GE Oil & Gas, notes that refining operations are typically tightly run but are in hard-to-access, remote locations. Increasing uptime is critical — particularly with oil prices at their lowest in six years. “An average midsize LNG facility sees five down days a year. That’s $125 million to $150 million. For an offshore platform, it can be $7 million per day, including oil deferrals, and these assets are never down for a single day. They have got to figure out how to drive productivity in their existing assets,” she says, “especially now that they are facing declining revenues from lower energy prices.”

What Is the Industrial Internet?

Ge is developing an industrial internet platform for the oil and gas sector..

Improving the productivity of existing assets by even a single percentage point can generate significant benefits in the oil and gas sector (and in other sectors). “The average recovery rate of an oil well is 35%, meaning 65% of a well’s potential draw is left in the earth because available technology makes it too expensive,” explains Haynes-Gaspar. “If we can help raise that 35% to 36%, the world’s output will increase by 80 billion barrels — the equivalent of three years of global supply. The economic implications are huge.”

GE executives believe software, data, and analytics will be central to the company’s ability to differentiate itself within the oil and gas industry. “I think the race is on from a competition perspective,” says Haynes-Gaspar, “and everybody understands the size of the Industrial Internet prize.”

The Software Behind GE’s Industrial Internet

In September 2015, GE projected its revenue from software products would reach $15 billion by 2020 — three times its 2015 bookings. While software sales today are derived largely from traditional measurement and control offerings, GE expects that by 2020, most software revenue will come from its Predix 1 software, a cloud-based platform for creating Industrial Internet applications.

GE has long had the ability to collect machine data: Sensors have been riding on GE machines for years. But these pre-Internet of Things (IoT) sensors were used to conduct real-time operational performance monitoring, such as displaying a pressure reading on a machine, not to collect data. Indeed, a technician would often take a reading from a machine to check its performance and then discard the data.

GE researched companies that were producing high-quality data analytics quickly and inexpensively, but it wasn’t the traditional IT companies that were excelling; it was the consumer-facing Internet giants. GE drew lessons from these companies around speed and cost, though the scale and data were different. Indeed, the sheer volume of data that GE hoped to collect — 50 million data variables from 10 million sensors installed on its machines — would be many times more than most social and retail sites could ever generate. “Machines generate time-series data, which is very different than social or transactional data. We had to optimize for the kinds of analytics that would help us understand the behavior of machines,” says Bill Ruh, GE’s chief digital officer.

To handle these massive data sets, GE needed a new platform for connecting, securing, and analyzing data. They began developing their solution in 2012, a cloud-based software platform named Predix that could provide machine operators and maintenance engineers with real-time information to schedule maintenance checks, improve machine efficiency, and reduce downtime. Initially developed for GE, not only would this data inform their own product development activities, but it would also lower costs in its service agreements. “When we agree to provide service for a customer’s machine, it often comes with a performance guarantee,” explains Kate Johnson, vice president and chief commercial officer, GE Digital. “Proactive identification of potential issues that also take the cost out of shop visits helps the customer and helps GE.”

It didn’t take long for GE engineers to realize that they could find interesting and unique patterns in the data. They thought the patterns of sensor data could be used to provide an early — albeit weak — signal of future performance problems and better predict when its machines should be scheduled for maintenance. In early 2013, GE began to use Predix to analyze data across its fleet of machines. By analyzing what differentiated one machine’s performance from another — what made one more efficient, for example — GE could more tightly hone its operational parameters. “We’re moving from physics-based modeling, where you create maintenance manuals based on generic operating models, to combining it with very high-performance analytics,” says Ruh. When GE combined the physics modeling and the data modeling, it found that, in Ruh’s words, it could “do what no one’s ever done in the world before for industry.”

Predix: GE's Platform for the Industrial Internet

Ge develops an internet of things platform to drive productivity..

For example, in the last few years, GE started to notice that some of its jet aircraft engines were beginning to require more frequent unscheduled maintenance. “If you only look at an engine’s operating parameters, it just tells you there’s a problem,” says Ruh. But by pulling in massive amounts of data and using fleet analytics, GE was able to cluster engine data by operating environment. The company learned that the hot and harsh environments in places like the Middle East and China clogged engines, causing them to heat up and lose efficiency, thus driving the need for more maintenance. GE learned that if it washed the engines more frequently, they stayed much healthier. “We’re increasing the lifetime of the engine, which now requires less maintenance, and we think we can save a customer an average of $7 million of jet airplane fuel annually because the engine’s more efficient,” Ruh explains. “And all of that was done because we could use data across every GE engine, across the world and cluster fleet data.” Johnson credits Predix directly with improving the productivity of these engines, as this would not have been possible without a robust data and analytics platform.

That same year, GE executives began to think there could be a market opportunity for Predix, much as Amazon.com Inc. created a market for its cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services Inc. “We realized that there were three developing markets for cloud platforms — consumer, enterprise, and industrial. Industrial was essentially being treated as an extension of enterprise, which we knew wouldn’t work. There were no credible cloud-based platforms for industrial being developed, and we saw that as a potential opportunity for growth,” says Ruh. Why now? GE executives say the economics of amassing, storing, and running analytics on large lakes of data — pools of customer data that combine maintenance and repair data with time-series performance information — have dropped dramatically in the last 10 years, making the market viable.

The driving force behind taking Predix to market was the scope of the opportunity: GE determined that the market for a platform and applications in the industrial segment could reach $225 billion by 2020. 2 GE spent a year evaluating the market, all the while using Predix 1.0 to further develop its offerings and collect internal and external feedback. The company built a team to develop the commercial version, Predix 2.0, and in October 2015 made the platform directly available to channel and technology partners as well as customers who could use the platform to build their own set of analytics. “We feel we’ve got it right for ourselves, and now we’re taking it out to customers and partners,” says Ruh.

A New Approach to Oil and Gas

GE has enjoyed success as a physical infrastructure provider, known worldwide as the company that “brings good things to life.” But that corporate identity is beginning to shift. “When we think about the future, digitizing our customers’ businesses requires a technology shift, a business model shift, and a skill shift,” says Ruh, noting that GE and its customers will need to optimize all three to be successful. Indeed, in the oil and gas sector, where customers have been struggling to improve productivity amid declining revenues, GE is using Predix to transform what it’s selling, how it’s selling, and who is invited to the negotiating table.

Delivering New Services to a Conservative Market

GE entered the oil and gas industry in 1994 through the acquisition of Italy-based Nuovo Pignone, a manufacturer of turbo machinery, compressors, pumps, static equipment, and metering systems. Just over 20 years later, GE’s oil and gas subsidiary has become a roughly $20 billion business, ranging from oil and gas drilling equipment and subsea systems to turbo machinery solutions and downstream processing. The company considers itself a “full-stream” provider, operating across the entire oil and gas value chain: upstream exploration and production, midstream transportation (via pipeline, oil tanker, or the like) and storage of crude petroleum products, and downstream refining of petroleum crude oil and processing of natural gas.

GE’s customers in the oil and gas market are known for being conservative, a necessity in the highly dynamic and sometimes harsh environments in which they work. “They wait for their peers to try something new, and if it’s successful and they see there’s value in it without added risk, they jump all over it,” says Steve Schmid, GE senior product manager. As a result, GE runs pilots — lots of pilots. “I tell customers about a new product and a pilot we’re doing with a highly respected operator in their industry. They say, ‘Fantastic, keep us up to speed on your progress. Once you’ve got a product released, we want to know the results, and then we’ll be interested in entertaining moving forward with a proposal.’ But it’s difficult to take that first leap,” says Schmid. “However, those that do so are the first to gain an incredible competitive advantage in the market — and others are soon a fast follow.”

Jeff Monk, GE’s global key account executive for North America, adds: “In general, oil and gas companies like to keep things close to their chests. They don’t see a lot of value in publicizing the details of their operations — whether those be big wins or big saves. If a customer can save $100 million as a result of data analytics, that’s great, but they will be concerned about publicizing that because they believe stakeholders will think they might not have avoided those costs. Oil and gas companies have to come to terms with the market’s need for them to be more transparent, and the added value that data and analytics provide is relatively new, so that issue is somewhat mitigated.”

GE’s Intelligent Pipeline

Ge uses the industrial internet to improve safety and lower risk for pipeline operators., new service value propositions.

GE believes Predix can help the oil and gas industry address four of its most pressing challenges: improving asset productivity; creating a real-time picture of the status of an entire operation; stemming the costly loss of tacit knowledge from an aging workforce; and building an Industrial Internet platform that meets customer needs.

Asset Productivity

GE had spent years developing analytic applications to improve the productivity and reliability of its own equipment, with oversight from GE global monitoring centers. GE’s strategy is to deploy these solutions and then expand to include non-GE plant equipment as part of the solution. GE’s work with RasGas Company Limited, one of the world’s foremost integrated LNG enterprises, is an example of that approach. RasGas’s LNG production facility in Ras Laffan, Qatar — where over 2,000 critical assets are installed — has the capacity to produce approximately 37 million tons of LNG per year.

GE’s equipment specialists and analytic scientists, who were already monitoring the GE turbine components of the RasGas production power trains, worked closely with RasGas operations experts to enhance LNG productivity overall, including the non-GE components. This close collaboration identified critical components, failure modes, and process challenges.

In an initial proof of concept, the team focused on three LNG trains. Their primary goal was to demonstrate that a suite of next-generation predictive analytics tools could enhance asset reliability and maintenance effectiveness while optimizing processes. In early results of the asset performance management (APM) solution implementation, the team identified areas of improvement to eliminate wastes in production on one of the trains, which will translate to a significant LNG production improvement. Today, GE and RasGas are working in conjunction toward a full-plant APM solution deployment at the Ras Laffan site.

Operations Productivity

GE wants to go beyond helping its customers manage the performance of individual GE machines to managing the data on all of the machines in a customer’s entire operation. For example, if an oil and gas customer has a problem with a turbo compressor, a heat exchanger upstream from that compressor may be the original cause of the problem. Analyzing data from the turbo compressor will thus only tell part of the story. “We’re selling equipment that sits side by side with competitors’ equipment. Our customer cares about running the whole plant, not just our turbine,” says Johnson. GE is in discussions with some customers about managing sensor data from all of the machine assets in their operation.

Customers are asking GE to analyze non-GE equipment because those machines comprise about 80% of the equipment in their facilities. “They want GE to help keep the whole plant running. They’re saying, ‘It does me no good if my $10 million gas turbine runs at 98% reliability if I have a valve that fails and shuts my entire plant down,’” explains Dan Brennan, executive director for the Industrial Internet for GE Oil & Gas. Indeed, capital-intensive equipment such as gas turbines are already well-instrumented with sensors and data controls. “They’re well-protected to make sure they’re reliable,” he says. The supporting, smaller-investment equipment often did not warrant the cost of instrumentation and data gathering. But industry thinking has evolved as the cost of getting data from those less expensive assets has declined logarithmically, opening up a whole new world of monitoring by looking at the system not as a collection of critical equipment but as an ecosystem. For one pilot program with a major customer, GE is analyzing data on all their rotating and static equipment — regardless of the machines’ original equipment manufacturer (OEM). The first phase is on all 160 of the customer’s gas turbines across the world, even though only 40% of them are GE gas turbines. GE characterizes it as an “agnostic” solution.

How do the OEMs feel about having their equipment monitored by GE? Erik Lindhjem, executive product line leader for GE Oil & Gas, acknowledges that some competitors are more comfortable with the idea than others. “I think there’s an uneasiness for some of the GE OEM competitors about how the data’s collected and our reach into it. However, ultimately it’s the end user — our mutual customer — who drives the use of the technology and the data,” says Lindhjem. GE also points out that its competitors are quietly exploring the same strategy, albeit not by building it themselves but by partnering with other software providers. Siemens has entered into a partnership with SAP, while Solar Turbines, a Caterpillar company, has partnered with a startup, Uptake, to try to equalize the value proposition that GE is bringing to market.

Because Predix is an open platform, GE Oil & Gas Digital Solutions CDO Heilmann emphasizes that GE encourages developers to write applications to support their own needs. “I can see a day in the future where we would encourage other OEMs, whether it’s a pump or a fan or a valve manufacturer, to participate in the Predix ecosystem and write applications for their own equipment and use the data to improve the operation of their own equipment,” he says.

In today’s oil and gas industry, operators seldom share data and collaborate with one another. “Operators view that data as a source of competitive advantage,” says Brennan. Schmid agrees, noting that oil and gas operators differentiate themselves by the way they operate: “They can buy the same tools, the same type of equipment. And they have very few choices in suppliers. We’re not at a point where they’re going to start sharing how their operational excellence gets them a lower cost per barrel of oil than their competitors. Today, the only cross-operator data they are interested in is baselining against their competitors on how they perform, but not sharing how they actually drive up their efficiency over their competitors.”

Brennan says oil and gas companies are unlikely to ever share data around their exploration activities, but he could imagine a day when they might be willing to share operational data. “Maybe five or six years from now, we’ll begin to see companies more willing to share data that could unlock new levels of collaboration across the entire supply chain. They might start to release pockets of data if they realize they can learn from each other and drive efficiencies back into the entire industry,” he says. One path forward would be by sharing anonymized data. Maybe. “I’m hopeful because I think that’s where you’re going to see the next tranche of value.”

GE has already begun to discuss the idea of anonymizing data with customers, but without much success. “We’ve said, ‘What if you could see how you were doing relative to everybody else in the industry on a completely anonymized basis?’ And everybody’s response has been, ‘That’s great, but my data won’t be in the set,’” says Haynes-Gaspar, though she, too, is optimistic that given time and perspective, the industry will likely come to embrace sharing. “Because the things that are differentiating for them today will change based on how the Industrial Internet shapes where we’re going,” she says.

GE Digitizes Experience-Based Knowledge

Ge develops a software solution to meet the challenge of a workforce in flux., support for an aging workforce.

A large portion of the oil and gas workforce — by some estimates as much as 50% — will be retiring by 2025, taking years and even decades of domain knowledge with them. “There’s a lot of knowledge in people’s heads that has not been digitized, documented, and built into practice,” says Brad Smith, business leader for the GE Oil & Gas Intelligent Pipeline business unit. He says some companies with multimillion-dollar operations are dependent upon too few individuals whose domain knowledge can be very difficult to replace, which will challenge the industry to maintain or improve workforce productivity.

The retirement problem is most visible upstream, during the exploration process and at the oil wells themselves. Ron Holsey, Digital Commercial Leader, Surface, GE Oil & Gas, explains:

As we bring a well into production, the natural pressure of the reservoir makes the oil flow to the surface. Over time, that pressure subsides and operators need artificial lift to pull the oil out of the ground. The engineers in the field have 20, 30, 40 years of experience — they’re like pumping-unit whisperers. They can walk up to a unit, and they can hear it creak and groan and grind and understand the stress points. Today, if you’re at a university studying to be a petroleum engineer, you get maybe one textbook chapter during your four years on artificial lift. We just don’t have the next wave of engineers coming up.

To stanch the brain drain over the past few years, many companies have been forced to hire back retiring workers to serve as consultants — an unsustainable practice. Brennan says that the industry needs a way to capture and codify the departing knowledge. “But there’s also got to be a refresh so that you can attract new talent and arm them with tools, technology, and the capability to get their work done efficiently,” he says. “The tools that a 26- or 28-year-old PhD in petroleum engineering wants to use are fundamentally different than ones preferred by somebody who’s leaving the workforce,” he adds, noting that Millennials expect that cutting-edge analytics and tools will be available in the workplace. “When I entered the workforce, I had better tools at work than I’d ever had access to at home, but most of the employees we bring into GE have access to better technology than we allow them here, and we’ve been playing catch-up. The same thing is happening with our customers,” says Brennan.

GE hopes to use Predix to help its oil and gas customers fill the industry’s talent and knowledge gap, but there are challenges associated with trying to essentially supplant human experience with analytics. For one, the industry is extremely slow to adopt new technology. A related problem is getting engineers to trust the data. GE had well-analysis software that could determine if a pump was operating at its optimal range and adjust its speed to run faster or slower to optimize production. Despite several case studies and a pilot on 30 wells showing an incremental gain of 1 million barrels of oil over two years, GE’s customers will not allow the software to change pump speeds on its own. “We still have to have the human intervention. Why? The customer and the industry are reluctant to adopt the new technology,” says Holsey.

Platform Benefits

Predix was designed to be a software platform, not just a tool for collecting, analyzing, and managing sensor data. For GE customers, this approach is expected to have several benefits. The platform has open standards and protocols that allow customers to more easily and quickly connect their machines to the Industrial Internet. The platform can accommodate the size and scale of industrial data for every customer at current levels of use, but it also has been designed to scale up as demand grows. The number and variety of Predix-related apps are not limited to what GE offers. Whereas customers may develop their own custom applications for use on the Predix platform, GE executives are working to build a developer community and create a new market for apps that can be hosted on the Predix platform. Finally, data security, a concern for many companies considering IoT applications, is embedded at all platform application layers: services enablement, data orchestration, and infrastructure layers.

Transforming the Sales Process

GE’s traditional sales model within the oil and gas industry has been big-ticket and transactional: Customers purchased machines, as well as parts, maintenance, and repair service contracts at fixed prices — what Brennan refers to as a tactical, product-centric sales model.

Adding Predix software to the mix has made the sales process more complex and much less product-centric, even though the new software represents a relatively small sell — a “tiny little sprinkling on top of the deal,” says GE Digital’s Johnson. GE’s salespeople, for instance, have to engage in more strategic conversations around solutions rather than product features. Software technicians are involved earlier in the selling process. “Now, when we sell an electronic submersible pump,” says Johnson, “the equipment sales manager brings along an application engineer who understands technically how that pump is going to operate in the environment in which it’s going to be placed. You need the same exact set of capabilities when you’re talking about software. You need to know how it fits into the overall solution architecture of hardware, software, and service. Your typical hardware sales leader doesn’t have the Predix domain knowledge to have that conversation for software.”

Not surprisingly, GE has had to address internal resistance to the shift away from a productcentric sales focus. “It was definitely a change in how our sales personnel approach customer conversations,” says Lorenzo Simonelli, president and CEO of GE Oil & Gas. “Instituting software-solution selling techniques required us to embark on both a training exercise and an effort to infuse our organization with software selling expertise, working with our GE industry experts who have held customer relationships for decades. Additionally, these types of digital conversations and sales decisions now involve new customer participants. We needed to understand these roles so each could become Industrial Internet champions in their respective organizations.”

GE is finding that its traditional buyer — typically a VP of operations or plant manager — is changing too, as increasingly the CIO now takes a seat at the table. In the past, GE’s salespeople never brought customers’ CIOs into the selling process; they spent most of their time in the production and engineering offices. But selling software is completely different than selling hardware. “You’ve got different stakeholders, like the CIO and the CTO, suddenly coming into the story,” says Johnson. Smith agrees that CIOs and CTOs are becoming critical stakeholders and have places at the table — though he still believes the decision making will reside with the COO. “Operations will define the requirements and agree on the scope because the IT teams will inherently not bring the domain expertise that their operational partners have acquired through years of practice,” he says. “But the programs, large and small, will be governed, purchased, and project-managed out of the IT organization.” Indeed, Johnson says CIOs may end up being the true heroes of the digital industrial space: “CIOs are starting to wake up to the enormous opportunity they have in the operational technology space where they have traditionally not been a part of decision making.”

Though many of GE Oil & Gas customers are already familiar with the company’s software offerings, Predix adds another dimension to the conversation. “Generally we’re first met with, ‘Well, what is this Industrial Internet?’” says Brennan. Typically, a discussion around system architecture ensues. “CIOs’ concerns are around connectivity,” says Holsey. “The challenge is, instead of the old ‘rack it and stack it and have servers sitting in the client’s office,’ do I go to a cloud-based system?” Customers are starting to come around, particularly U.S. companies. “They have started to evolve from, ‘That’s the most insane thing I’ve ever heard of, putting it on a cloud,’ to, ‘Wow, it’s easier to maintain and I don’t have to worry about keeping my servers up to date.’ There’s more acceptance now,” says Holsey. However, he thinks it will take another three to five years to become commonplace: “Then, there won’t be a question of whether a cloud or not a cloud.”

GE sales teams were finding that one of the most significant value propositions they had to offer customers was the creation of data lakes that sit on the cloud and enable data sharing and analytics. “Today, those systems don’t talk. But with Predix, customers are able to have a data lake, their data in a central repository,” says Haynes-Gaspar. As a result, oil and gas operators with operations in disparate parts of the world can allow local operators to share vital, problem-solving data.

Selling by Pilot

For GE, a pilot is often an essential step of the adoption process. In early 2015, GE executed a four-week engagement with one of the largest global energy companies, which wanted to reinvent how it manages its “static” equipment — specifically, its storage tanks used during oil and gas processing. Like other producers, this company spends heavily on maintaining these assets from corrosion and other threats but because they aren’t instrumented, they are inspected infrequently, often once every two or three years. GE positioned Predix to help the customer rethink how it manages them. During the four-week exercise, GE’s designers met with the customer’s subject-matter experts, corrosion engineers, and reliability engineers. At the end of the four weeks, GE developed a software solution that took the form of a scripted narrative on a static set of screens. The customer used the screens to “walk through” how its reliability engineers could use them to better manage its static assets. Though the project was successful in its own right, it also offered GE a way to discuss future engagements.

GE hopes to have three more customers booked by early 2016 to run pilots — or what Brennan refers to as “lightweight proof of concept” — for Predix offerings. GE executives see the pilots as a way to bring customers onto the selling team. “To get anywhere in the oil and gas industry, we need help selling. We need customer voices out in the industry with success stories, or we’re just not going to come to the table with the credibility that we need. So we need to inspire our customers to want to do that.”

Outcome-Based Pricing

Whether a customer buys an aircraft engine or a heavy-duty gas turbine, GE and the customer often arrange a 10- to 15-year contractual services agreement that allows the company to connect to and monitor that machine, perform basic maintenance and diagnostics, and provide fixed-interval repairs. If GE keeps the equipment running at a certain agreed-upon threshold, the company receives a bonus payment. Such outcome-based pricing may also be applied to coverage of non-GE machines.

Moving forward, GE will use a subscription model to commercialize its software, relying less on traditional licensing models. “We believe deeply in subscription models being the future, so we’re trying to build subscriptions that are priced based on the value that they deliver,” says Johnson. “If we’re talking about taking cost out of the service agreement and providing a subscription to an app that has a set of analytics to help do that, then it’s outcome-based.”

Holsey says the pricing model is evolving from a capital expenditure that bundles equipment with service and software to an operational expense model. “We’ve got some customers that don’t ever want to actually buy the equipment. They just want us to come out and get paid based on production. It’s a service contract that wraps up equipment, services, software, and all the analytics,” says Holsey. He thinks it represents GE putting its money where its mouth is. “If we improve, say, their power consumption by X, we get $1; by Y, we get $1.50,” he says, noting that customers are becoming more open to this type of arrangement and to sharing the data necessary to establish the baseline measurements that makes the model work. “In order for us to leverage the analytics, customers are asking us to put a little bit more risk on the table ourselves, and that’s the difference that we’ve seen in the market,” says Holsey.

Where it can get a little muddy is in trying to assign value to what oil and gas operators bring to the table. “With a company like GE, our intellectual property is a very tangible asset for us. You can look at a drawing. You can see a piece of equipment. For an oil and gas operator, their intellectual property is the way they operate. So when they participate in a program like this with GE, we truly respect the fact that they’re giving us insights into their operations, and that’s really their intellectual property,” says GE’s global key account executive for North America Monk.

In agreeing to outcome-based pricing, customers will also need to cede some control to GE. “If we’re going to work with an oil and gas drilling contractor and commit to a certain amount of nonproductive time decrease, then we have to have some contractual agreements with both the driller and the contracting oil company on what levers we can pull. For example, what data do we have access to? What operational influence do we have in terms of calling for scheduled downtime?” says Jeremiah Stone, general manager for GE Digital’s Industrial Data Intelligence business.

Racing to Lead the Industrial Internet

For GE, its big bet on data coincided with widespread investment in the Industrial Internet. Global spending on the Industrial Internet was $20 billion in 2012. Analysts were forecasting that number would reach $514 billion by 2020, creating nearly $1.3 trillion in value. 3

Both traditional information technology and operations technology players might have posed a competitive threat to GE's emerging Industrial Internet business. But GE executives do not worry much about these competitors because, they say, these companies make moves that are highly visible. While acknowledging that big technology stalwarts are very good at analyzing historical data and in areas like artificial intelligence, Brennan adds that the work of connecting and monitoring large volumes of real-time data is not their core strength. GE's manufacturing expertise, he says, is also a source of market advantage especially against traditional IT companies that try to adapt their enterprise IT software to a heavy-industrial operations technology environment.

What Haynes-Gaspar does lose sleep over, though, are the nimble Silicon Valley startups that are creeping into the space — and have the full attention of venture capital firms. One such example is a startup that offers cloud-based production optimization solutions for the oil and gas industry. “These guys came to talk to us and they had just graduated with PhDs in advanced mathematics from Stanford and they told us, ‘You’re big GE. Why don’t you let us take the data and the analytics, and you guys can be the equipment guys.’ The hubris was breathtaking, but their company was valued for $100 million a year later,” says Haynes-Gaspar. They may not have GE’s billion dollars, but they received millions in round A funding, which, “focused in the right way, could get them market share fast,” she says. Indeed, more than $1.6 billion in venture capital has been pumped into the Internet of Things space, specifically to capitalize on software, data, and analytics opportunities. “It keeps me up at night, too,” says Brennan.

Despite GE’s $1 billion investment in the Industrial Internet, the company won’t be going it alone and wants to partner with startups. “We can’t do everything ourselves, nor should we. There are things that we need to be unapologetically awesome at, and there are areas where we need to partner,” says Haynes-Gaspar. GE wants to be “unapologetically awesome” at data and analytics. “That’s where we’re making our organic investment.” She cites oil and gas market and trading systems as an example of a space where GE does not have domain knowledge and therefore prefers to partner with companies that do. GE intends to build up a large base of partners and together create a robust ecosystem capable of managing every facet of an oil and gas operator’s operation through Predix. “That’s the vision,” says Haynes-Gaspar.

GE also has one very significant advantage over the startups: deep, established relationships with virtually every major industrial company in its competitors’ crosshairs. “Yes, in the past we may have been perceived as big and slow. We may not have had the same reputation as nimble startups out here in Silicon Valley, but we’ve got access to customers,” says Brennan. “With the establishment of GE Digital, we now have access to resources at a scale that will allow us to speed innovation around our customers’ biggest problems. We believe this combination of speed and customer access is one that our competitors won’t be able to touch.”

Simonelli says GE’s days of being seen solely as an equipment provider are drawing short: “Software puts us at the table as a true partner at the heart of the discussion around outcomes our customers are trying to deliver. We will be there for the entire life cycle of a project and solution for 20 to 30 years.”

Undoubtedly, as GE brings more and more of its customers’ data under its management, new kinds of business models will be developed. “Instead of assets under management, the new metrics will become data under management,” says Stone. He envisions a future similar to the one taken by GE’s commercial financing teams. “They actually created a pipeline for the equipment businesses, by virtue of the capital business. We think Predix can play that role as well as we demonstrate the value of a digital industrial approach.”

“The race is on,” Schmid says, admitting that, realistically, GE is taking its initial steps on a very long road. “First, GE needs to be seen as a leader in the industrial enterprise software space.” GE executives believe the company can follow in Google’s footsteps and become the entrenched, established platform player for the Industrial Internet — and in less than the 10 years it took Google to reach that status. “I think that our investment appetite combined with the lessons that we’ve learned on the consumer side, we ought to do it in less time, but that’s a journey that we’re on. First we have to continue on our path to being a great application provider,” says Brennan.

GE’s Calculated Bet on Analytics

Sam Ransbotham

By now, the imminent onset of the Internet of Things isn’t a “dark horse” anymore. Nor is it a mystery that one of the biggest players in the emerging IoT game is GE . But most people aren’t just wondering whether GE’s IoT gamble will pan out in the end — they’re also wondering what playing a similar hand might mean for their organization. Fortunately, GE’s “big bet” gives us insight into four transitions stemming from the soon-to-be ubiquitous stream of IoT data.

Transition #1: The transition from reactive to proactive. The standard mantra of IoT goes like this: With countless of interdependent parts, something is bound to break, fail, or decrease in performance — whether it’s an oil refinery, a jet engine, or a small patch of material within miles upon miles of natural gas or oil pipeline, there is no question in anyone’s mind that entropy or the environment will somewhere create a breakdown in the system. The IoT’s ultimate raison d’être — one that GE is investing in heavily — is to give everyone a heads up on what specific thing will break and when its performance will sag, so that those who make repairs can be in the right place at the right time to avoid an Aliso Canyon-type equipment failure that leads to a natural, economic, and public health disaster .

The concept of anticipating isn’t new; organizations have long prepared for problems by preordering parts according to an average life expectancy, servicing equipment at routine intervals, or locating repair stations so that average response time is low. But GE’s work with sensor data underscores the depth of evidence that can bolster companies’ preparation as well as the breadth of interconnected organizations that can benefit from it — and those are the new factors that IoT allows. In the case, this depth and breadth let GE and others know the ways in which specific pieces of equipment and machines are not average, profiting by being precisely prepared for (or even preventing) adverse events — meaning, they spend exactly the time and resources needed to address them, no more and no less, in contrast to the outlays made by other organizations expensively over-preparing or cleaning up after a disastrous equipment failure.

Transition #2: Analytics helps organizations transition from myopic to holistic. GE knows that, best case, their equipment is a small fraction of the total equipment at a site, yet all of these other components work together with GE’s components. As processing, storage, and communication costs continue their relentless decline, it is feasible to gather data on more and more equipment. Combining data from more equipment lets GE help their customers avoid analytical myopia , where pursuit of isolated gains can distract from the bigger picture. For GE, this holistic approach prompted them to work to integrate data from multiple customers — even competitors’ machines. Unsurprisingly, GE has struggled with this step, as everyone loves the idea of benefiting from everyone else’s data, but is far less excited about sharing their own — a tragedy of the commons . The potential is there, but incentives are not well aligned.

Transition #3: Analytics helps organizations transition from physical to digital. GE has long been known for physical products — lighting, radios, televisions, turbines, industrial automation, motors, locomotives, jet engines, etc. But the company’s big bet on digital is, well, big. Huge, even.

Moving away from a product-centric sales focus is a radical change — and it’s not without risks. Certainly the Predix platform offers GE another way to provide additional value . In GE’s case, a complete switch from atoms (physical) to bits (digital) is unlikely and unnecessary — the optimal solution will likely be a blend, where the physical and digital products create the most value by working together. If it’s done well, GE may create a virtuous cycle of physical and digital lock-in as customers embed GE components not only in their infrastructure, but also their processes. Done poorly, GE may find itself casting aside a century of experience to become just another cloud vendor.

Transition #4: Analytics helps organizations transition from people to machines. As society races to build smarter and smarter machines, not every retiring member of the “aging workforce” will be replaced by another worker, or at least not one doing the same job. This also isn’t new; the type of work people do is always changing. What has changed is the efficacy of ways to capture and codify the “departing knowledge” — which, for GE, starts with capturing vast data. Not all of it will be immediately useable or eliminate the need for workers. However, data and analytics will change the mix of people that GE needs going forward as more and more operational knowledge is embedded into algorithms.

So is GE actually making a “big bet”? Betting involves chance and randomness, and GE’s future in this arena is far from certain — so there is a chance this wager may be lost.

But it isn’t that simple. Betting involves both calculating the stake and assessing the odds.

Consider the stake: In GE’s case, the stake of their bet on data and analytics can’t be measured in isolation. The alternative of not pursuing data and analytics also has a sizeable stake. Refusing to go in this direction may not be a safe alternative, as data from devices has the potential to radically redistribute market power.

Now consider the odds: GE can do (and is doing) a lot to improve their odds of success. Instead of waiting to see how everything turns out, GE is working to minimize uncertainty. This work isn’t dramatic or glamorous. It requires vigilance with data governance, attention to details of massive infrastructure, and adjustments in culture. They show efficacy with small pilots, make a small change, and then show efficacy again. Every small step is work, but it adds up to advantage. In this way, GE is not only making their odds better — it’s also making the potential jackpot bigger. Thus, their IoT strategy is by no means a game of Russian roulette — it’s more like a fast-flowing game of poker.

What can other organizations learn from observing GE’s “big bet”?

First, keep in mind that GE isn’t starting from zero; they have an ace in the hole. They are building digital advantage from competence in complementary physical assets. Other organizations must carefully assess their baseline capabilities to know what their unique advantage might be.

Second, GE has paid their ante to get a seat at this table. The company has a history of exploratory initiatives around analytics that gave them the experience necessary to even consider these transitions. Other organizations must put in the effort required to build basic analytical capabilities.

Third, GE knows their cards, and they are not bluffing. Before putting in their chips, they learned what they were playing for. They learned from existing data about oil platforms to quantify the potential savings from changing unplanned maintenance to planned. They learned from consumer-facing Internet giants but recognized differences in their own context. They learned from using Predix internally to “tightly hone” their own operations before introducing it externally. Other organizations likewise need to learn where data and analytics could make a difference… and where there is less potential.

Sam Ransbotham is an associate professor of information systems at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College and the MIT Sloan Management Review guest editor for the Data and Analytics Big Idea Initiative. He can be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter at @ransbotham.

About the Author

Laura Winig is a contributing editor to MIT Sloan Management Review .

1. Predix is a trademark of General Electric Company.

2. M. LaWell, “Building the Industrial Internet With GE,” IndustryWeek, October 5, 2015.

3. D. Floyer, “Defining and Sizing the Industrial Internet,” June 27, 2013, http://wikibon.org.

i. S. Higginbotham, “BP Teams Up With GE to Make Its Oil Wells Smart,” Fortune, July 8, 2015.

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10 Important Cloud Migration Case Studies You Need to Know

Aug 1, 2019 | Engineering

For most businesses considering cloud migration, the move is filled with promise and potential. Scalability, flexibility, reliability, cost-effectiveness, improved performance and disaster recovery, and simpler, faster deployment — what’s not to like? 

It’s important to understand that cloud platform benefits come alongside considerable challenges, including the need to improve availability and latency, auto-scale orchestration, manage tricky connections, scale the development process effectively, and address cloud security challenges. While advancements in virtualization and containerization (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes) are helping many businesses solve these challenges, cloud migration is no simple matter. 

That’s why, when considering your organization’s cloud migration strategy, it’s beneficial to look at case studies and examples from other companies’ cloud migration experiences. Why did they do it? How did they go about it? What happened? What benefits did they see, and what are the advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing for these businesses? Most importantly, what lessons did they learn — and what can you learn from them? 

With that in mind, Distillery has put together 10 cloud migration case studies your business can learn from. While most of the case studies feature companies moving from on-premise, bare metal data centers to cloud, we also look at companies moving from cloud to cloud, cloud to multi-cloud, and even off the cloud. Armed with all these lessons, ideas, and strategies, you’ll feel readier than ever to make the cloud work for your business.

Challenges for Cloud Adoption: Is Your Organization Ready to Scale and Be Cloud-first?

We examine several of these case studies from a more technical perspective in our white paper on Top Challenges for Cloud Adoption in 2019 . In this white paper, you’ll learn:

• Why cloud platform development created scaling challenges for businesses
• How scaling fits into the big picture of the Cloud Maturity Framework
• Why advancements in virtualization and containerization have helped businesses solve these scaling challenges
• How companies like Betabrand, Shopify, Spotify, Evernote, Waze, and others have solved these scaling challenges while continuing to innovate their businesses and provide value to users

#1 Betabrand : Bare Metal to Cloud

Betabrand (est. 2005) is a crowd-funded, crowd-sourced retail clothing e-commerce company that designs, manufactures, and releases limited-quantity products via its website. 

Migration Objective 

The company struggled with the maintenance difficulties and lack of scalability of the bare metal infrastructure supporting their operations. 

Planning for and adding capacity took too much time and added costs. They also needed the ability to better handle website traffic surges.

Migration Strategy and Results 

In anticipation of 2017’s Black Friday increased web traffic, Betabrand migrated to a Google Cloud infrastructure managed by Kubernetes (Google Kubernetes Engine, or GKE). They experienced no issues related to the migration, and Black Friday 2017 was a success. 

By Black Friday 2018, early load testing and auto-scaling cloud infrastructure helped them to handle peak loads with zero issues. The company hasn’t experienced a single outage since migrating to the cloud.

Key Takeaways

• With advance planning, cloud migration can be a simple process. Betabrand’s 2017 on-premise to cloud migration proved smooth and simple. In advance of actual migration, they created multiple clusters in GKE and performed several test migrations, thereby identifying the right steps for a successful launch.
• Cloud streamlines load testing. Betabrand was able to quickly create a replica of its production services that they could use in load testing. Tests revealed poorly performing code paths that would only be revealed by heavy loads. They were able to fix the issues before Black Friday. 
• Cloud’s scalability is key to customer satisfaction. As a fast-growing e-commerce business, Betabrand realized they couldn’t afford the downtime or delays of bare metal. Their cloud infrastructure scales automatically, helping them avoid issues and keep customers happy. This factor alone underlines the strategic importance of cloud computing in business organizations like Betabrand. 

#2 Shopify : Cloud to Cloud

Shopify (est. 2006) provides a proprietary e-commerce software platform upon which businesses can build and run online stores and retail point-of-sale (POS) systems. 

Shopify wanted to ensure they were using the best tools possible to support the evolution needed to meet increasing customer demand. Though they’d always been a cloud-based organization, building and running their e-commerce cloud with their own data centers, they sought to capitalize on the container-based cloud benefits of immutable infrastructure to provide better support to their customers. Specifically, they wanted to ensure predictable, repeatable builds and deployments; simpler and more robust rollbacks; and elimination of configuration management drift. 

By building out their cloud with Google, building a “Shop Mover” database migration tool, and leveraging Docker containers and Kubernetes, Shopify has been able to transform its data center to better support customers’ online shops, meeting all their objectives. For Shopify customers, the increasingly scalable, resilient applications mean improved consistency, reliability, and version control.

• Immutable infrastructure vastly improves deployments. Since cloud servers are never modified post-deployment, configuration drift — in which undocumented changes to servers can cause them to diverge from one another and from the originally deployed configuration — is minimized or eliminated. This means deployments are easier, simpler, and more consistent.
• Scalability is central to meeting the changing needs of dynamic e-commerce businesses. Shopify is home to online shops like Kylie Cosmetics, which hosts flash sales that can sell out in 20 seconds. Shopify’s cloud-to-cloud migration helped its servers flex to meet fluctuating demand, ensuring that commerce isn’t slowed or disrupted.

#3 Spotify: Bare Metal to Cloud

Spotify (est. 2006) is a media services provider primarily focused on its audio-streaming platform, which lets users search for, listen to, and share music and podcasts.

Spotify’s leadership and engineering team agreed: The company’s massive in-house data centers were difficult to provision and maintain, and they didn’t directly serve the company’s goal of being the “best music service in the world.” They wanted to free up Spotify’s engineers to focus on innovation. They started planning for migration to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in 2015, hoping to minimize disruption to product development, and minimize the cost and complexity of hybrid operation. 

Spotify invested two years pre-migration in preparing, assigning a dedicated Spotify/Google cloud migration team to oversee the effort. Ultimately, they split the effort into two parts, services and data, which took a year apiece. For services migration, engineering teams moved services to the cloud in focused two-week sprints, pausing on product development. For data migration, teams were allowed to choose between “forklifting” or rewriting options to best fit their needs. Ultimately, Spotify’s on-premise to cloud migration succeeded in increasing scalability while freeing up developers to innovate. 

• Gaining stakeholder buy-in is crucial. Spotify was careful to consult its engineers about the vision. Once they could see what their jobs looked like in the future, they were all-in advocates. 
• Migration preparation shouldn’t be rushed. Spotify’s dedicated migration team took the time to investigate various cloud strategies and build out the use case demonstrating the benefits of cloud computing to the business. They carefully mapped all dependencies. They also worked with Google to identify and orchestrate the right cloud strategies and solutions. 
• Focus and dedication pay huge dividends. Spotify’s dedicated migration team kept everything on track and in focus, making sure everyone involved was aware of past experience and lessons already learned. In addition, since engineering teams were fully focused on the migration effort, they were able to complete it more quickly, reducing the disruption to product development.

#4 Evernote : Bare Metal to Cloud

Evernote (est. 2008) is a collaborative, cross-platform note-taking and task management application that helps users capture, organize, and track ideas, tasks, and deadlines.

Evernote, which had maintained its own servers and network since inception, was feeling increasingly limited by its infrastructure. It was difficult to scale, and time-consuming and expensive to maintain. They wanted more flexibility, as well as to improve Evernote’s speed, reliability, security, and disaster recovery planning. To minimize service disruption, they hoped to conduct the on-premise to cloud migration as efficiently as possible. 

Starting in 2016, Evernote used an iterative approach : They built a strawman based on strategic decisions, tested its viability, and rapidly iterated. They then settled on a cloud migration strategy that used a phased cutover approach, enabling them to test parts of the migration before committing. They also added important levels of security by using GCP service accounts , achieving “encryption at rest,” and improving disaster recovery processes. Evernote successfully migrated 5 billion notes and 5 billion attachments to GCP in only 70 days. 

• Cloud migration doesn’t have to happen all at once. You can migrate services in phases or waves grouped by service or user. Evernote’s phased cutover approach allowed for rollback points if things weren’t going to according to plan, reducing migration risk. 
• Ensuring data security in the cloud may require extra steps. Cloud security challenges may require extra focus in your cloud migration effort. Evernote worked with Google to create the additional security layers their business required. GCP service accounts can be customized and configured to use built-in public/private key pairs managed and rotated daily by Google.
• Cloud capabilities can improve disaster recovery planning. Evernote wanted to ensure that they would be better prepared to quickly recover customer data in the event of a disaster. Cloud’s reliable, redundant, and robust data backups help make this possible. 

#5 Etsy : Bare Metal to Cloud

Etsy (est. 2005) is a global e-commerce platform that allows sellers to build and run online stores selling handmade and vintage items and crafting supplies.

Etsy had maintained its own infrastructure from inception. In 2018, they decided to re-evaluate whether cloud was right for the company’s future. In particular, they sought to improve site performance, engineering efficiency, and UX. They also wanted to ensure long-term scalability and sustainability, as well as to spend less time maintaining infrastructure and more time executing strategy.

Migration Strategy and Results

Etsy undertook a detailed vendor selection process , ultimately identifying GCP as the right choice for their cloud migration strategy . Since they’d already been running their own Kubernetes cluster inside their data center, they already had a partial solution for deploying to GKE. They initially deployed in a hybrid environment (private data center and GKE), providing redundancy, reducing risk, and allowing them to perform A/B testing. They’re on target to complete the migration and achieve all objectives. 

Key Takeaways 

• Business needs and technology fit should be periodically reassessed. While bare metal was the right choice for Etsy when it launched in 2005, improvements in infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) made cloud migration the right choice in 2018.
• Detailed analysis can help businesses identify the right cloud solution for their needs. Etsy took a highly strategic approach to assessment that included requirements definition, RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed) matrices, and architectural reviews. This helped them ensure that their cloud migration solution would genuinely help them achieve all their goals.
• Hybrid deployment can be effective for reducing cloud migration risk. Dual deployment on their private data center and GKE was an important aspect of Etsy’s cloud migration strategy. 

#6 Waze : Cloud to Multi-cloud

Waze (est. 2006; acquired by Google in 2013) is a GPS-enabled navigation application that uses real-time user location data and user-submitted reports to suggest optimized routes.

Though Waze moved to the cloud very early on, their fast growth quickly led to production issues that caused painful rollbacks, bottlenecks, and other complications. They needed to find a way to get faster feedback to users while mitigating or eliminating their production issues.  

Waze decided to run an active-active architecture across multiple cloud providers — GCP and Amazon Web Services (AWS) — to improve the resiliency of their production systems. This means they’re better-positioned to survive a DNS DDOS attack, or a regional or global failure. An open source continuous delivery platform called Spinnaker helps them deploy software changes while making rollbacks easy and reliable. Spinnaker makes it easy for Waze’s engineers to deploy across both cloud platforms, using a consistent conceptual model that doesn’t rely on detailed knowledge of either platform .  

• Some business models may be a better fit for multiple clouds. Cloud strategies are not one-size-fits-all. Waze’s stability and reliability depends on avoiding downtime, deploying quick fixes to bugs, and ensuring the resiliency of their production systems. Running on two clouds at once helps make it all happen. 
• Your engineers don’t necessarily have to be cloud experts to deploy effectively. Spinnaker streamlines multi-cloud deployment for Waze such that developers can focus on development, rather than on becoming cloud experts. 

Deploying software more frequently doesn’t have to mean reduced stability/reliability. Continuous delivery can get you to market faster, improving quality while reducing risk and cost.

#7 AdvancedMD : Bare Metal to Cloud

AdvancedMD (est. 1999) is a software platform used by medical professionals to manage their practices, securely share information, and manage workflow, billing, and other tasks. 

AdvancedMD was being spun off from its parent company, ADP; to operate independently, it had to move all its data out of ADP’s data center. Since they handle highly sensitive, protected patient data that must remain available to practitioners at a moment’s notice, security and availability were top priorities. They sought an affordable, easy-to-manage, and easy-to-deploy solution that would scale to fit their customers’ changing needs while keeping patient data secure and available.

AdvancedMD’s on-premise to cloud migration would avoid the need to hire in-house storage experts, save them and their customers money, ensure availability, and let them quickly flex capacity to accommodate fluctuating needs. It also offered the simplicity and security they needed. Since AdvancedMD was already running NetApp storage arrays in its data center, it was easy to use NetApp’s Cloud Volumes ONTAP to move their data to AWS. ONTAP also provides the enterprise-level data protection and encryption they require.

• Again, ensuring data security in the cloud may require extra steps. Though cloud has improved or mitigated some security concerns (e.g., vulnerable OS dependencies, long-lived compromised servers), hackers have turned their focus to the vulnerabilities that remain. Thus, your cloud migration strategy may need extra layers of controls (e.g., permissions, policies, encryption) to address these cloud security challenges.
• When service costs are a concern, cloud’s flexibility may help. AdvancedMD customers are small to mid-sized budget-conscious businesses. Since cloud auto-scales, AdvancedMD never pays for more cloud infrastructure than they’re actually using. That helps them keep customer pricing affordable.

#8 Dropbox : Cloud to Hybrid

Dropbox (est. 2007) is a file hosting service that provides cloud storage and file synchronization solutions for customers.

Dropbox had developed its business by using the cloud — specifically, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) — to house data while keeping metadata housed on-premise. Over time, they began to fear they’d become overly dependent on Amazon: not only were costs increasing as their storage needs grew, but Amazon was also planning a similar service offering, Amazon WorkDocs. Dropbox decided to take back their storage to help them reduce costs, increase control, and maintain their competitive edge. 

While the task of moving all that data to an in-house infrastructure was daunting, the company decided it was worth it — at least in the US (Dropbox assessed that in Europe, AWS is still the best fit). Dropbox designed in-house and built a massive network of new-breed machines orchestrated by software built with an entirely new programming language, moving about 90% of its files back to its own servers . Dropbox’s expanded in-house capabilities have enabled them to offer Project Infinite, which provides desktop users with universal compatibility and unlimited real-time data access.

• On-premise infrastructure may still be right for some businesses. Since Dropbox’s core product relies on fast, reliable data access and storage, they need to ensure consistently high performance at a sustainable cost. Going in-house required a huge investment, but improved performance and reduced costs may serve them better in the long run. Once Dropbox understood that big picture, they had to recalculate the strategic importance of cloud computing to their organization.  
• Size matters. As Wired lays out in its article detailing the move , cloud businesses are not charities. There’s always going to be margin somewhere. If a business is big enough — like Dropbox — it may make sense to take on the difficulties of building a massive in-house network. But it’s a huge risk for businesses that aren’t big enough, or whose growth may stall.

#9 GitLab : Cloud to Cloud

GitLab (est. 2011) is an open core company that provides a single application supporting the entire DevOps life cycle for more than 100,000 organizations. 

GitLab’s core application enables software development teams to collaborate on projects in real time, avoiding both handoffs and delays. GitLab wanted to improve performance and reliability, accelerating development while making it as seamless, efficient, and error-free as possible. While they acknowledged that Microsoft Azure had been a great cloud provider, they strongly believed that GCP’s Kubernetes was the future, calling it “a technology that makes reliability at massive scale possible.” 

In 2018, GitLab migrated from Azure to GCP so that GitLab could run as a cloud-native application on GKE. They used their own Geo product to migrate the data, initially mirroring the data between Azure and GCP. Post-migration, GitLab reported improved performance (including fewer latency spikes) and a 61% improvement in availability.    

• Containers are seen by many as the future of DevOps. GitLab was explicit that they view Kubernetes as the future. Indeed, containers provide notable benefits, including a smaller footprint, predictability, and the ability to scale up and down in real time. For GitLab’s users, the company’s cloud-to-cloud migration makes it easier to get started with using Kubernetes for DevOps.
• Improved stability and availability can be a big benefit of cloud migration. In GitLab’s case, mean-time between outage events pre-migration was 1.3 days. Excluding the first day post-migration, they’re up to 12 days between outage events. Pre-migration, they averaged 32 minutes of downtime weekly; post-migration, they’re down to 5. 

#10 Cordant Group : Bare Metal to Hybrid

The Cordant Group (est. 1957) is a global social enterprise that provides a range of services and solutions, including recruitment, security, cleaning, health care, and technical electrical.

Over the years, the Cordant Group had grown tremendously, requiring an extensive IT infrastructure to support their vast range of services. While they’d previously focused on capital expenses, they’d shifted to looking at OpEx, or operational expenses — which meant cloud’s “pay as you go” model made increasing sense. It was also crucial to ensure ease of use and robust data backups.

They began by moving to a virtual private cloud on AWS , but found that the restriction to use Windows DFS for file server resource management was creating access problems. NetApp Cloud ONTAP, a software storage appliance that runs on AWS server and storage resources, solved the issue. File and storage management is easier than ever, and backups are robust, which means that important data restores quickly. The solution also monitors resource costs over time, enabling more accurate planning that drives additional cost savings. 

• Business and user needs drive cloud needs. That’s why cloud strategies will absolutely vary based on a company’s unique needs. The Cordant Group needed to revisit its cloud computing strategy when users were unable to quickly access the files they needed. In addition, with such a diverse user group, ease of use had to be a top priority.
• Cloud ROI ultimately depends on how your business measures ROI. The strategic importance of cloud computing in business organizations is specific to each organization. Cloud became the right answer for the Cordant Group when OpEx became the company’s dominant lens. 

Which Cloud Migration Strategy Is Right for You?

As these 10 diverse case studies show, cloud strategies are not one-size-fits all. Choosing the right cloud migration strategy for your business depends on several factors, including your:

• Goals. What business results do you want to achieve as a result of the migration? How does your business measure ROI? What problems are you trying to solve via your cloud migration strategy? 
• Business model. What is your current state? What are your core products/services and user needs, and how are they impacted by how and where data is stored? What are your development and deployment needs, issues, and constraints? What are your organization’s cost drivers? How is your business impacted by lack of stability or availability? Can you afford downtime? 
• Security needs. What are your requirements regarding data privacy, confidentiality, encryption, identity and access management, and regulatory compliance? Which cloud security challenges pose potential problems for your business?
• Scaling needs. Do your needs and usage fluctuate? Do you expect to grow or shrink? 
• Disaster recovery and business continuity needs. What are your needs and capabilities in this area? How might your business be impacted in the event of a major disaster — or even a minor service interruption? 
• Technical expertise. What expertise do you need to run and innovate your core business? What expertise do you have in-house? Are you allocating your in-house expertise to the right efforts? 
• Team focus and capacity. How much time and focus can your team dedicate to the cloud migration effort? 
• Timeline. What business needs constrain your timeline? What core business activities must remain uninterrupted? How much time can you allow for planning and testing your cloud migration strategy? 

Of course, this list isn’t exhaustive. These questions are only a starting point. But getting started — with planning, better understanding your goals and drivers, and assessing potential technology fit — is the most important step of any cloud migration process. We hope these 10 case studies have helped to get you thinking in the right direction. 

While the challenges of cloud migration are considerable, the right guidance, planning, and tools can lead you to the cloud strategies and solutions that will work best for your business. So don’t delay: Take that first step to helping your business reap the potential advantages and benefits of cloud computing. 

Ready to take the next step on your cloud journey? As a Certified Google Cloud Technology Partner , Distillery is here to help. Download our white paper on top challenges for cloud adoption to get tactical and strategic about using cloud to transform your business.  

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7 Favorite Business Case Studies to Teach—and Why

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• Case Teaching
• Course Materials

FEATURED CASE STUDIES

The Army Crew Team . Emily Michelle David of CEIBS

ATH Technologies . Devin Shanthikumar of Paul Merage School of Business

Fabritek 1992 . Rob Austin of Ivey Business School

Lincoln Electric Co . Karin Schnarr of Wilfrid Laurier University

Pal’s Sudden Service—Scaling an Organizational Model to Drive Growth . Gary Pisano of Harvard Business School

The United States Air Force: ‘Chaos’ in the 99th Reconnaissance Squadron . Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School

Warren E. Buffett, 2015 . Robert F. Bruner of Darden School of Business

To dig into what makes a compelling case study, we asked seven experienced educators who teach with—and many who write—business case studies: “What is your favorite case to teach and why?”

The resulting list of case study favorites ranges in topics from operations management and organizational structure to rebel leaders and whodunnit dramas.

1. The Army Crew Team

Emily Michelle David, Assistant Professor of Management, China Europe International Business School (CEIBS)

“I love teaching  The Army Crew Team  case because it beautifully demonstrates how a team can be so much less than the sum of its parts.

I deliver the case to executives in a nearby state-of-the-art rowing facility that features rowing machines, professional coaches, and shiny red eight-person shells.

After going through the case, they hear testimonies from former members of Chinese national crew teams before carrying their own boat to the river for a test race.

The rich learning environment helps to vividly underscore one of the case’s core messages: competition can be a double-edged sword if not properly managed.

Executives in Emily Michelle David’s organizational behavior class participate in rowing activities at a nearby facility as part of her case delivery.

Despite working for an elite headhunting firm, the executives in my most recent class were surprised to realize how much they’ve allowed their own team-building responsibilities to lapse. In the MBA pre-course, this case often leads to a rich discussion about common traps that newcomers fall into (for example, trying to do too much, too soon), which helps to poise them to both stand out in the MBA as well as prepare them for the lateral team building they will soon engage in.

Finally, I love that the post-script always gets a good laugh and serves as an early lesson that organizational behavior courses will seldom give you foolproof solutions for specific problems but will, instead, arm you with the ability to think through issues more critically.”

2. ATH Technologies

Devin Shanthikumar, Associate Professor of Accounting, Paul Merage School of Business

“As a professor at UC Irvine’s Paul Merage School of Business, and before that at Harvard Business School, I have probably taught over 100 cases. I would like to say that my favorite case is my own,   Compass Box Whisky Company . But as fun as that case is, one case beats it:  ATH Technologies  by Robert Simons and Jennifer Packard.

ATH presents a young entrepreneurial company that is bought by a much larger company. As part of the merger, ATH gets an ‘earn-out’ deal—common among high-tech industries. The company, and the class, must decide what to do to achieve the stretch earn-out goals.

ATH captures a scenario we all want to be in at some point in our careers—being part of a young, exciting, growing organization. And a scenario we all will likely face—having stretch goals that seem almost unreachable.

It forces us, as a class, to really struggle with what to do at each stage.

After we read and discuss the A case, we find out what happens next, and discuss the B case, then the C, then D, and even E. At every stage, we can:

see how our decisions play out,

figure out how to build on our successes, and

address our failures.

The case is exciting, the class discussion is dynamic and energetic, and in the end, we all go home with a memorable ‘ah-ha!’ moment.

I have taught many great cases over my career, but none are quite as fun, memorable, and effective as ATH .”

3. Fabritek 1992

Rob Austin, Professor of Information Systems, Ivey Business School

“This might seem like an odd choice, but my favorite case to teach is an old operations case called  Fabritek 1992 .

The latest version of Fabritek 1992 is dated 2009, but it is my understanding that this is a rewrite of a case that is older (probably much older). There is a Fabritek 1969 in the HBP catalog—same basic case, older dates, and numbers. That 1969 version lists no authors, so I suspect the case goes even further back; the 1969 version is, I’m guessing, a rewrite of an even older version.

There are many things I appreciate about the case. Here are a few:

It operates as a learning opportunity at many levels. At first it looks like a not-very-glamorous production job scheduling case. By the end of the case discussion, though, we’re into (operations) strategy and more. It starts out technical, then explodes into much broader relevance. As I tell participants when I’m teaching HBP's Teaching with Cases seminars —where I often use Fabritek as an example—when people first encounter this case, they almost always underestimate it.

It has great characters—especially Arthur Moreno, who looks like a troublemaker, but who, discussion reveals, might just be the smartest guy in the factory. Alums of the Harvard MBA program have told me that they remember Arthur Moreno many years later.

Almost every word in the case is important. It’s only four and a half pages of text and three pages of exhibits. This economy of words and sparsity of style have always seemed like poetry to me. I should note that this super concise, every-word-matters approach is not the ideal we usually aspire to when we write cases. Often, we include extra or superfluous information because part of our teaching objective is to provide practice in separating what matters from what doesn’t in a case. Fabritek takes a different approach, though, which fits it well.

It has a dramatic structure. It unfolds like a detective story, a sort of whodunnit. Something is wrong. There is a quality problem, and we’re not sure who or what is responsible. One person, Arthur Moreno, looks very guilty (probably too obviously guilty), but as we dig into the situation, there are many more possibilities. We spend in-class time analyzing the data (there’s a bit of math, so it covers that base, too) to determine which hypotheses are best supported by the data. And, realistically, the data doesn’t support any of the hypotheses perfectly, just some of them more than others. Also, there’s a plot twist at the end (I won’t reveal it, but here’s a hint: Arthur Moreno isn’t nearly the biggest problem in the final analysis). I have had students tell me the surprising realization at the end of the discussion gives them ‘goosebumps.’

Finally, through the unexpected plot twist, it imparts what I call a ‘wisdom lesson’ to young managers: not to be too sure of themselves and to regard the experiences of others, especially experts out on the factory floor, with great seriousness.”

4. Lincoln Electric Co.

Karin Schnarr, Assistant Professor of Policy, Wilfrid Laurier University

“As a strategy professor, my favorite case to teach is the classic 1975 Harvard case  Lincoln Electric Co.  by Norman Berg.

I use it to demonstrate to students the theory linkage between strategy and organizational structure, management processes, and leadership behavior.

This case may be an odd choice for a favorite. It occurs decades before my students were born. It is pages longer than we are told students are now willing to read. It is about manufacturing arc welding equipment in Cleveland, Ohio—a hard sell for a Canadian business classroom.

Yet, I have never come across a case that so perfectly illustrates what I want students to learn about how a company can be designed from an organizational perspective to successfully implement its strategy.

And in a time where so much focus continues to be on how to maximize shareholder value, it is refreshing to be able to discuss a publicly-traded company that is successfully pursuing a strategy that provides a fair value to shareholders while distributing value to employees through a large bonus pool, as well as value to customers by continually lowering prices.

However, to make the case resonate with today’s students, I work to make it relevant to the contemporary business environment. I link the case to multimedia clips about Lincoln Electric’s current manufacturing practices, processes, and leadership practices. My students can then see that a model that has been in place for generations is still viable and highly successful, even in our very different competitive situation.”

5. Pal’s Sudden Service—Scaling an Organizational Model to Drive Growth

Gary Pisano, Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

“My favorite case to teach these days is  Pal’s Sudden Service—Scaling an Organizational Model to Drive Growth .

I love teaching this case for three reasons:

1. It demonstrates how a company in a super-tough, highly competitive business can do very well by focusing on creating unique operating capabilities. In theory, Pal’s should have no chance against behemoths like McDonalds or Wendy’s—but it thrives because it has built a unique operating system. It’s a great example of a strategic approach to operations in action.

2. The case shows how a strategic approach to human resource and talent development at all levels really matters. This company competes in an industry not known for engaging its front-line workers. The case shows how engaging these workers can really pay off.

3. Finally, Pal’s is really unusual in its approach to growth. Most companies set growth goals (usually arbitrary ones) and then try to figure out how to ‘backfill’ the human resource and talent management gaps. They trust you can always find someone to do the job. Pal’s tackles the growth problem completely the other way around. They rigorously select and train their future managers. Only when they have a manager ready to take on their own store do they open a new one. They pace their growth off their capacity to develop talent. I find this really fascinating and so do the students I teach this case to.”

6. The United States Air Force: ‘Chaos’ in the 99th Reconnaissance Squadron

Francesca Gino, Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

“My favorite case to teach is  The United States Air Force: ‘Chaos’ in the 99th Reconnaissance Squadron .

The case surprises students because it is about a leader, known in the unit by the nickname Chaos , who inspired his squadron to be innovative and to change in a culture that is all about not rocking the boat, and where there is a deep sense that rules should simply be followed.

For years, I studied ‘rebels,’ people who do not accept the status quo; rather, they approach work with curiosity and produce positive change in their organizations. Chaos is a rebel leader who got the level of cultural change right. Many of the leaders I’ve met over the years complain about the ‘corporate culture,’ or at least point to clear weaknesses of it; but then they throw their hands up in the air and forget about changing what they can.

Chaos is different—he didn’t go after the ‘Air Force’ culture. That would be like boiling the ocean.

Instead, he focused on his unit of control and command: The 99th squadron. He focused on enabling that group to do what it needed to do within the confines of the bigger Air Force culture. In the process, he inspired everyone on his team to be the best they can be at work.

The case leaves the classroom buzzing and inspired to take action.”

7. Warren E. Buffett, 2015

Robert F. Bruner, Professor of Business Administration, Darden School of Business

“I love teaching   Warren E. Buffett, 2015  because it energizes, exercises, and surprises students.

Buffett looms large in the business firmament and therefore attracts anyone who is eager to learn his secrets for successful investing. This generates the kind of energy that helps to break the ice among students and instructors early in a course and to lay the groundwork for good case discussion practices.

Studying Buffett’s approach to investing helps to introduce and exercise important themes that will resonate throughout a course. The case challenges students to define for themselves what it means to create value. The case discussion can easily be tailored for novices or for more advanced students.

Either way, this is not hero worship: The case affords a critical examination of the financial performance of Buffett’s firm, Berkshire Hathaway, and reveals both triumphs and stumbles. Most importantly, students can critique the purported benefits of Buffett’s conglomeration strategy and the sustainability of his investment record as the size of the firm grows very large.

By the end of the class session, students seem surprised with what they have discovered. They buzz over the paradoxes in Buffett’s philosophy and performance record. And they come away with sober respect for Buffett’s acumen and for the challenges of creating value for investors.

Surely, such sobriety is a meta-message for any mastery of finance.”

More Educator Favorites

Emily Michelle David is an assistant professor of management at China Europe International Business School (CEIBS). Her current research focuses on discovering how to make workplaces more welcoming for people of all backgrounds and personality profiles to maximize performance and avoid employee burnout. David’s work has been published in a number of scholarly journals, and she has worked as an in-house researcher at both NASA and the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

Devin Shanthikumar  is an associate professor and the accounting area coordinator at UCI Paul Merage School of Business. She teaches undergraduate, MBA, and executive-level courses in managerial accounting. Shanthikumar previously served on the faculty at Harvard Business School, where she taught both financial accounting and managerial accounting for MBAs, and wrote cases that are used in accounting courses across the country.

Robert D. Austin is a professor of information systems at Ivey Business School and an affiliated faculty member at Harvard Medical School. He has published widely, authoring nine books, more than 50 cases and notes, three Harvard online products, and two popular massive open online courses (MOOCs) running on the Coursera platform.

Karin Schnarr is an assistant professor of policy and the director of the Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) program at the Lazaridis School of Business & Economics at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada where she teaches strategic management at the undergraduate, graduate, and executive levels. Schnarr has published several award-winning and best-selling cases and regularly presents at international conferences on case writing and scholarship.

Gary P. Pisano is the Harry E. Figgie, Jr. Professor of Business Administration and senior associate dean of faculty development at Harvard Business School, where he has been on the faculty since 1988. Pisano is an expert in the fields of technology and operations strategy, the management of innovation, and competitive strategy. His research and consulting experience span a range of industries including aerospace, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, specialty chemicals, health care, nutrition, computers, software, telecommunications, and semiconductors.

Francesca Gino studies how people can have more productive, creative, and fulfilling lives. She is a professor at Harvard Business School and the author, most recently, of  Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life . Gino regularly gives keynote speeches, delivers corporate training programs, and serves in advisory roles for firms and not-for-profit organizations across the globe.

Robert F. Bruner is a university professor at the University of Virginia, distinguished professor of business administration, and dean emeritus of the Darden School of Business. He has also held visiting appointments at Harvard and Columbia universities in the United States, at INSEAD in France, and at IESE in Spain. He is the author, co-author, or editor of more than 20 books on finance, management, and teaching. Currently, he teaches and writes in finance and management.

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Top 40 Most Popular Case Studies of 2017

We generated a list of the 40 most popular Yale School of Management case studies in 2017 by combining data from our publishers, Google analytics, and other measures of interest and adoption. In compiling the list, we gave additional weight to usage outside Yale

We generated a list of the 40 most popular Yale School of Management case studies in 2017 by combining data from our publishers, Google analytics, and other measures of interest and adoption. In compiling the list, we gave additional weight to usage outside Yale.

Case topics represented on the list vary widely, but a number are drawn from the case team’s focus on healthcare, asset management, and sustainability. The cases also draw on Yale’s continued emphasis on corporate governance, ethics, and the role of business in state and society. Of note, nearly half of the most popular cases feature a woman as either the main protagonist or, in the case of raw cases where multiple characters take the place of a single protagonist, a major leader within the focal organization. While nearly a fourth of the cases were written in the past year, some of the most popular, including Cadbury and Design at Mayo, date from the early years of our program over a decade ago. Nearly two-thirds of the most popular cases were “raw” cases - Yale’s novel, web-based template which allows for a combination of text, documents, spreadsheets, and videos in a single case website.

Read on to learn more about the top 10 most popular cases followed by a complete list of the top 40 cases of 2017.  A selection of the top 40 cases are available for purchase through our online store . 

#1 - Coffee 2016

Faculty Supervision: Todd Cort

Coffee 2016 asks students to consider the coffee supply chain and generate ideas for what can be done to equalize returns across various stakeholders. The case draws a parallel between coffee and wine. Both beverages encourage connoisseurship, but only wine growers reap a premium for their efforts to ensure quality.  The case describes the history of coffee production across the world, the rise of the “third wave” of coffee consumption in the developed world, the efforts of the Illy Company to help coffee growers, and the differences between “fair” trade and direct trade. Faculty have found the case provides a wide canvas to discuss supply chain issues, examine marketing practices, and encourage creative solutions to business problems. 

#2 - AXA: Creating New Corporate Responsibility Metrics

Faculty Supervision: Todd Cort and David Bach

The case describes AXA’s corporate responsibility (CR) function. The company, a global leader in insurance and asset management, had distinguished itself in CR since formally establishing a CR unit in 2008. As the case opens, AXA’s CR unit is being moved from the marketing function to the strategy group occasioning a thorough review as to how CR should fit into AXA’s operations and strategy. Students are asked to identify CR issues of particular concern to the company, examine how addressing these issues would add value to the company, and then create metrics that would capture a business unit’s success or failure in addressing the concerns.

#3 - IBM Corporate Service Corps

Faculty Supervision: David Bach in cooperation with University of Ghana Business School and EGADE

The case considers IBM’s Corporate Service Corps (CSC), a program that had become the largest pro bono consulting program in the world. The case describes the program’s triple-benefit: leadership training to the brightest young IBMers, brand recognition for IBM in emerging markets, and community improvement in the areas served by IBM’s host organizations. As the program entered its second decade in 2016, students are asked to consider how the program can be improved. The case allows faculty to lead a discussion about training, marketing in emerging economies, and various ways of providing social benefit. The case highlights the synergies as well as trade-offs between pursuing these triple benefits.

#4 - Cadbury: An Ethical Company Struggles to Insure the Integrity of Its Supply Chain

Faculty Supervision: Ira Millstein

The case describes revelations that the production of cocoa in the Côte d’Ivoire involved child slave labor. These stories hit Cadbury especially hard. Cadbury's culture had been deeply rooted in the religious traditions of the company's founders, and the organization had paid close attention to the welfare of its workers and its sourcing practices. The US Congress was considering legislation that would allow chocolate grown on certified plantations to be labeled “slave labor free,” painting the rest of the industry in a bad light. Chocolate producers had asked for time to rectify the situation, but the extension they negotiated was running out. Students are asked whether Cadbury should join with the industry to lobby for more time?  What else could Cadbury do to ensure its supply chain was ethically managed?

#5 - 360 State Real Options

Faculty Supervision: Matthew Spiegel

In 2010 developer Bruce Becker (SOM ‘85) completed 360 State Street, a major new construction project in downtown New Haven. Just west of the apartment building, a 6,000-square-foot pocket of land from the original parcel remained undeveloped. Becker had a number of alternatives to consider in regards to the site. He also had no obligation to build. He could bide his time. But Becker worried about losing out on rents should he wait too long. Students are asked under what set of circumstances and at what time would it be most advantageous to proceed?

#6 - Design at Mayo

Faculty Supervision: Rodrigo Canales and William Drentell

The case describes how the Mayo Clinic, one of the most prominent hospitals in the world, engaged designers and built a research institute, the Center for Innovation (CFI), to study the processes of healthcare provision. The case documents the many incremental innovations the designers were able to implement and the way designers learned to interact with physicians and vice-versa.

In 2010 there were questions about how the CFI would achieve its stated aspiration of “transformational change” in the healthcare field. Students are asked what would a major change in health care delivery look like? How should the CFI's impact be measured? Were the center's structure and processes appropriate for transformational change? Faculty have found this a great case to discuss institutional obstacles to innovation, the importance of culture in organizational change efforts, and the differences in types of innovation.

This case is freely available to the public.

#7 - Ant Financial

Faculty Supervision: K. Sudhir in cooperation with Renmin University of China School of Business

In 2015, Ant Financial’s MYbank (an offshoot of Jack Ma’s Alibaba company) was looking to extend services to rural areas in China by providing small loans to farmers. Microloans have always been costly for financial institutions to offer to the unbanked (though important in development) but MYbank believed that fintech innovations such as using the internet to communicate with loan applicants and judge their credit worthiness would make the program sustainable. Students are asked whether MYbank could operate the program at scale? Would its big data and technical analysis provide an accurate measure of credit risk for loans to small customers? Could MYbank rely on its new credit-scoring system to reduce operating costs to make the program sustainable?

#8 - Business Leadership in South Africa’s 1994 Reforms

Faculty Supervision: Ian Shapiro

This case examines the role of business in South Africa's historic transition away from apartheid to popular sovereignty. The case provides a previously untold oral history of this key moment in world history, presenting extensive video interviews with business leaders who spearheaded behind-the-scenes negotiations between the African National Congress and the government. Faculty teaching the case have used the material to push students to consider business’s role in a divided society and ask: What factors led business leaders to act to push the country's future away from isolation toward a "high road" of participating in an increasingly globalized economy? What techniques and narratives did they use to keep the two sides talking and resolve the political impasse? And, if business leadership played an important role in the events in South Africa, could they take a similar role elsewhere?

#9 - Shake Shack IPO

Faculty Supervision: Jake Thomas and Geert Rouwenhorst

From an art project in a New York City park, Shake Shack developed a devoted fan base that greeted new Shake Shack locations with cheers and long lines. When Shake Shack went public on January 30, 2015, investors displayed a similar enthusiasm. Opening day investors bid up the $21 per share offering price by 118% to reach $45.90 at closing bell. By the end of May, investors were paying $92.86 per share. Students are asked if this price represented a realistic valuation of the enterprise and if not, what was Shake Shack truly worth? The case provides extensive information on Shake Shack’s marketing, competitors, operations and financials, allowing instructors to weave a wide variety of factors into a valuation of the company.

#10 - Searching for a Search Fund Structure

Faculty Supervision: AJ Wasserstein

This case considers how young entrepreneurs structure search funds to find businesses to take over. The case describes an MBA student who meets with a number of successful search fund entrepreneurs who have taken alternative routes to raising funds. The case considers the issues of partnering, soliciting funds vs. self-funding a search, and joining an incubator. The case provides a platform from which to discuss the pros and cons of various search fund structures.

40 Most Popular Case Studies of 2017

Click on the case title to learn more about the dilemma. A selection of our most popular cases are available for purchase via our online store .

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Case Studies

Speed is nothing without reliability.

This case study highlights a real-world example where a major US bank, initially awarding only 39% of its wireless business internet connections to Verizon based on coverage and speed assessments, later found that Verizon's service outperformed other carriers in reliability. Consequently, the bank switched 144 connections to Verizon after experiencing issues with other providers.

Oct 14, 2024 ,  3 min read

Customer Success Story

Securing Travellers: DFAT's Partnership with Verizon

Explore how the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) collaborated with Verizon to pioneer secure travel documentation, setting new standards for data security and connectivity in a connected world.

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Accor partners with Verizon to meet the standards of PCI compliance

Learn how the hospitality group teamed up with Verizon to manage the complex challenges of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

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The Florida Panthers improve the fan experience with Verizon 5G Edge Cashierless Checkout

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Learn how the Fujifilm Group steps up its cybersecurity

Learn how Verizon Security Operations Centres enables Fujifilm to boost its surveillance & set the foundation for secure digital transformation.

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Verizon’s advanced security operations centre has vastly strengthened the Fujifilm Group’s cybersecurity monitoring & intelligence.

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Prosegur scaling securely, reliably with LTE Business Internet from Verizon

Prosegur found what it was looking for with Verizon. LTE Business Internet from Verizon combines compatible wireless routers with connectivity on the 4G LTE network.

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Learn how Behavioral Perspective Inc. used One Talk to set up schedulers with Native Dialer so that calls could be routed during and outside of business hours.

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How We Did It: Mastering Multi-Site SEO Case Study

Discover the benefits of multi-site SEO for businesses with multiple domains. Improve rankings, target different audiences, and consolidate SEO authority.

Multi-site SEO is a complex but essential strategy for businesses managing multiple domains or subdomains .

It’s not just about optimizing each site in isolation – it’s about creating a unified approach that ensures all domains work together to boost rankings and conversions.

By building a cohesive digital presence, multi-site SEO helps businesses target different audiences, meet specific user needs, and consolidate SEO authority.

This approach can significantly enhance visibility and performance, but only when executed with detailed planning and a clear strategy.

What Is Multi-Site SEO?

Multi-site SEO is the practice of optimizing multiple domains or websites under a single organization .

It involves a centralized codebase that operates as the brain across the network, while strategically allowing administrators to manage each site’s content, pages, keywords, and internal links separately to avoid internal competition while boosting visibility.

For enterprise companies with diverse brands, locations, or audience segments, multi-site SEO is critical to creating a cohesive digital presence.

It allows businesses to cater to various customer needs while building domain authority across their entire portfolio.

Additionally, a multi-site network allows the content and codebase to be managed centrally while providing the option for unique customizations for each of the child sites.

The Top 9 Multi-Site SEO Tactics We Used For Orlando.org

When we had the opportunity to lead the multi-site SEO and website strategy for Orlando.org, it was a unique challenge.

The Orlando Economic Partnership (OEP) was managing four different web properties, each targeting distinct audiences – businesses, talent, investors, and media.

These websites were disconnected, had separate management, and faced issues with data tracking, SEO performance, and user experience.

Integrating these sites into one cohesive multi-site architecture wasn’t just about improving SEO; it was about streamlining and end-to-end experience.

Here’s how we did it.

1. Selecting The Right Domain Structure And Centralized Architecture

One of the most critical decisions in multi-site SEO is selecting the appropriate domain structure .

Here are three primary options, each with its own impact on SEO:

• Separate Domains : Ideal for businesses with distinct brands, separate domains allow each site to target different audiences without overlap. However, this structure requires considerable effort to build authority for each domain, as SEO equity doesn’t transfer between them.
• Subdomains : Subdomains (e.g., blog.example.com) are separate from the main domain but share some of its authority. This structure provides flexibility to target different keywords while retaining some SEO benefits from the root domain. Additionally, it allows each of the websites within the sub-domain to retain a centralized codebase but with unique layouts and design templates.
• Subdirectories : Subdirectories (e.g., example.com/blog) are part of the main domain and directly benefit from its existing SEO authority. This structure is easier to manage but might limit flexibility when targeting different audience segments or geographic locations.

After careful analysis, we decided that a subdomain structure was the best choice.

This setup allowed us to create distinct spaces for businesses, talent, investors, and media while keeping SEO authority centralized under the parent domain.

Each subdomain could be tailored to its audience’s needs, and the flexibility in targeting keywords was critical for improving performance.

By using a centralized architecture with subdomains, we simplified content management, optimized user flow, and ensured SEO authority was distributed efficiently.

This strategy prevented internal competition between subdomains while allowing each one to rank for its intended audience.

2. Audience Research And User Behavior

The foundation of our strategy was rooted in deep audience research. We analyzed the behaviors, pain points, and goals of each target group to tailor the subdomains accordingly:

• Businesses : Needed insights into Orlando’s infrastructure, tax benefits, and talent pool to determine whether relocating or expanding in the city made sense.
• Talent : Focused on job opportunities, cost of living, and lifestyle factors like housing and schools to decide if Orlando was the right place to live and work.
• Investors : Required data on Orlando’s economic growth, market opportunities, and potential returns, relying on detailed investment case studies.
• Media : Needed quick access to press releases, success stories, and economic statistics to cover developments in Orlando’s growth.

Through this research, we developed ideal user journeys for each division.

By developing user personas for each audience, we ensured that each subdomain addressed the specific search behavior and content preferences of its users, which guided our strategy.

3. Establishing Content Silos For Audience Segmentation

Creating content silos was essential to improve SEO relevance and user engagement. Each subdomain had clearly defined content categories aligned with user intent, ensuring that visitors found exactly what they needed.

For OEP, we segmented the site into four content silos – each targeting a specific audience (businesses, talent, investors, and media).

This helped improve the clarity of messaging while bolstering topical authority for search engines. Each subdomain’s content and keywords were optimized to serve its specific audience’s needs without overlap, ensuring a streamlined user experience.

Important Tip For Avoiding Duplicate Content

Multi-site SEO strategies often risk duplicate content and keyword cannibalization , especially when managing multiple subdomains.

To avoid this, we implemented canonical tags and conducted regular content audits to ensure that each subdomain had unique, well-optimized content tailored to its audience.

This prevented internal competition between subdomains and kept each site ranking for its targeted keywords.

4. Configuring The Multi-Site Website Architecture

Once we had a solid understanding of our audiences, we turned our attention to building a centralized, multi-site architecture.

This allowed all digital properties to be managed under one domain while still serving segmented content via subdomains.

The key to this architecture was establishing dynamic data relationships across content types. By centralizing the content database, we could repurpose specific content across subdomains with tailored messaging for each audience.

Through user research, we analyzed user journeys, drop-offs, and conversion paths to guide the type of data relationships needed.

For example, businesses needed to see success stories, but the same content could be reframed to attract talent by emphasizing job creation.

5. Mapping Out Our Content Types And Taxonomies

To make content easily accessible and cross-promote it across subdomains, we categorized it using flexible content types , such as Page, Post, Video, Podcast, Event, Success Story, Statistic, Downloadable, Company, etc.

We also used taxonomies to categorize content to help us build key relationships across the various content types like: Industries, Topics, Regions, Team/Unit, Post Type, Department, Theme, etc.

This system allowed us to connect the same content to different subdomains, depending on how it was categorized.

For instance, market data relevant to investors could also appear under businesses or regions, ensuring that content was dynamically linked across the site.

Example Use Case: Cross-Promoting Content

In the aviation industry, we tailor existing content types to the audience:

• Company profiles could highlight leading tech companies in Orlando, attracting new businesses.
• Team member bios would show key executives, enticing talent.
• Statistics could show key stats for the industry relative to attracting businesses or talent.
• Downloadables like reports on market growth could capture investor interest.

By linking content like market data, company profiles, and team members through smart taxonomies, we ensured the same content was shown to the right audience across subdomains.

This not only improved SEO by focusing content around related keywords but also enhanced user experience, providing visitors with a more tailored journey.

6. Establishing Our Domain Transition Phases

Phase 1: Content Audit And Consolidation

The first step was a comprehensive content  audit  to  identify which content needed updating, which could be consolidated, and what could be pruned.

By eliminating duplicate content and refining the focus of each subdomain, we ensured we wouldn’t compete with ourselves.

Phase 2: Prioritized Migration And Data Relationships

Next, we prioritized the migration of the content into the new architecture, using 301 redirects to maintain SEO equity.

Each piece of content was tagged with specific taxonomies, allowing it to be cross-promoted between subdomains.

For example, an event video gallery could be categorized under both industries and opportunities, ensuring it was seen by businesses and talent.

Phase 3: Continuous Optimization And Testing

Once the site was live, we moved into continuous optimization.

This involved testing internal links, refining keyword strategies, and ensuring that each subdomain’s content was fully optimized.

Regular A/B testing allowed us to understand how different audiences interacted with the site and adjust the user experience accordingly.

7. Configuring Technical SEO Best Practices

Cross-domain tracking using ga4 data streams.

With Google Analytics 4 (GA4) , cross-domain tracking is more efficient thanks to the use of data streams.

Instead of using UTM parameters, we set up cross-domain tracking directly within GA4, linking multiple domains and subdomains under one property.

By configuring data streams for each subdomain, we were able to capture user interactions across the entire Orlando.org ecosystem in a unified view.

This setup allowed us to track user journeys across subdomains seamlessly, providing detailed insights into traffic sources, user behavior, and conversion paths.

GA4’s event-based tracking enabled us to measure engagement metrics more accurately, allowing us to analyze which sections – whether businesses, talent, investors, or media – were driving the most value and to optimize content for better performance across subdomains.

Internal Link Building Efforts

Internal linking was crucial for ensuring SEO authority flowed between subdomains.

Each internal link was strategically placed to guide users to relevant content while strengthening the SEO performance of each subdomain.

For example, a business blog post about relocation could link to investment opportunities or talent recruitment stories, providing seamless navigation while distributing link equity across the site.

Implementing Consistent URL Structures

Maintaining a consistent URL structure across subdomains was essential for improving site crawlability and helping search engines understand its architecture.

This also enhanced user navigation, increasing engagement and reducing bounce rates.

Each subdomain, such as business.orlando.org, life.orlando.org, or news.orlando.org, followed a clear, intuitive structure, making it easier for users and search engines to explore the site under the parent domain of Orlando.org.

Managing Sitemaps And Robots.txt Files Across Multiple Sites

Sitemaps and robots.txt files play a crucial role in multi-site SEO.

Each subdomain had its own optimized sitemap, helping search engines crawl and index content efficiently.

Robots.txt files were configured to prevent duplication and manage the crawl budget, ensuring the most important pages were prioritized and properly indexed.

8. Ongoing Testing And Optimizations

Even after launching the new Orlando.org, continuous optimization was key to long-term success.

• A/B Testing and User Behavior : We conducted A/B testing to determine which versions of content performed best with different audiences. Business pages often needed more detailed data, while talent-focused content benefited from videos and success stories. This helped fine-tune the user experience for each audience.

9. Analyzing Our Results & Performance

The launch of the new website consolidated four separate properties into a streamlined multi-site platform, significantly improving engagement with the Orlando Economic Partnership’s target audiences and delivering impressive results within the first six months:

• 287% increase in organic web traffic : Improved audience segmentation and keyword optimization fueled significant traffic growth across subdomains.
• 10,600 organic keywords ranked : Ranking for numerous long-tail and national keywords.
• 1,105% increase in lead conversions : Improved user journey and lead capture funnel.
• 73.6% reduction in CPA : Through improved lead quality and conversion rates.

Additionally, the centralized architecture reduced operational complexity and content management efforts, giving OEP flexibility to scale the platform while maintaining a unified digital presence.

Common Pitfalls To Avoid In Multi-Site SEO

Over-fragmenting domains.

Creating too many subdomains or domains dilutes link equity and spreads SEO efforts too thin.

Focus on a streamlined structure that centralizes authority while keeping content segmented.

By consolidating Orlando.org into subdomains, we maintained strong SEO authority and avoided fragmentation.

Keyword Cannibalization

Targeting the same keywords across subdomains can lead to keyword cannibalization , where your sites compete against each other.

To avoid this, create distinct keyword strategies for each subdomain and regularly monitor keyword positioning.

This ensures each subdomain ranks for its intended terms without overlap.

Poor Link-Building Coordination

Neglecting to build backlinks for subdomains can limit their SEO growth.

Each subdomain requires its own link-building strategy, paired with internal cross-domain linking, to distribute link equity effectively.

For OEP, this approach helped improve rankings and ensured all subdomains benefitted from the authority of the main domain.

Ignoring Cross-Domain Tracking And Analytics

Failure to implement cross-domain tracking can make it difficult to track user behavior across subdomains.

Using UTM parameters and enabling cross-domain tracking is critical to understanding how users interact with different sections of the site.

This insight is essential for optimizing each subdomain and its contribution to the overall site.

Mismanaging Site Migrations

A poorly executed site migration can harm SEO if not done carefully.

Beyond using 301 redirects , ensure proper handling of internal links, sitemaps, canonical tags, and URL structures.

By managing site migrations correctly, you protect SEO authority and prevent ranking drops during the transition.

A well-executed multi-site SEO strategy is critical for businesses managing multiple domains or subdomains.

By leveraging a strategic approach – as we did – that incorporates audience research, website architecture, and phased execution, businesses can boost rankings, improve user experience, and drive engagement across all audience segments.

With proper planning and continuous optimization, multi-site SEO can unlock significant value and deliver lasting results.

More resources: 

• Simplifying Google Updates And Communications For C-Level Stakeholders
• Creating Value And Content Across Multiple City And Area Service Pages
• State Of SEO 2025

Featured Image: nmedia /Shutterstock

Johnny Hughes is an award-winning strategic digital marketing advisor, leading enterprise B2B clients through full-funnel lead generation, AI integration and ...