Adobe Success Story

With 12 major motorsports facilities, including the famed Daytona International Speedway, International Speedway Corporation is a leading promoter of motorsports activities in the United States.

Challenge

To integrate and deploy 18 sites—complete with e-commerce functionality, personalization capabilities, and a content management system.

Benefits

· Significant increase in site traffic.
· A boost in repeat customers.
· Accounting management and business administration have become more efficient and cohesive since all Web sites are now centralized into one system.

Project Details

 

At first glance, a motor speedway and a Web site might not have much in common. But when International Speedway Corp. (ISC), a leading promoter of motor sports activities in the U.S., needed to accelerate the delivery of 18 Web sites into a unified, integrated community, the "need for speed" was paramount. Turning to Vertical Alliance and its flagship service "Vertical Tracker," an integrated solution for content management, personalization, and e-commerce, ISC re-launched those 18 Web sites in just 75 days.

With 12 major motorsports facilities in its family, including the famed Daytona International Speedway and Talladega Superspeedway, ISC currently promotes more than 100 events annually and is well known for its promotion of NASCAR events. In addition, ISC owns and operates MRN Radio, the nation's largest independent sports radio network; and Americrown Service, which provides catering and food/beverage/merchandise concessions.

However, such a broad empire also presents significant challenges in establishing personalized customer relationships. For example, each ISC racetrack maintained its own independent Web site without links to one another or ISC's corporate site. Fans had to remember (or bookmark) each track's Web URL and could not view an aggregated events calendar or purchase memorabilia and souvenir merchandise from multiple sites. Compounding the challenges was an inability to collect, store, or access a centralized database of unified customer information. .

A New Platform For Personalized Customer Relationships

Aiming to transform its Web presences and implement one-to-one marketing and cross-selling/upselling, ISC embarked on an ambitious strategy to bring greater cohesion and simplicity to its Web properties while forging tighter, personalized relationships with visitors. To execute that vision, ISC turned to Vertical Alliance, a leading provider of e-business software and integration services that provide content management, e-commerce, and personalization.

Vertical Alliance recommended basing ISC's Web strategy on its own Web development application suite, "Vertical Tracker." This sophisticated platform includes fully integrated content management for communicating with customers; e-commerce to exchange value with customers; and customer relationship management (CRM) tools that enable businesses to better know their customers. The breadth in functionality of Vertical Tracker enables businesses to create a single comprehensive view of their customers based on information collected from several different touchpoints

Using ColdFusion to Create a Web Toolset

Vertical Alliance built this suite of Web tools using Macromedia ColdFusion. According to David Cooper, Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Vertical Alliance, basing Vertical Tracker on ColdFusion was a fundamental choice for the company. "When we make a strategic decision like this for our company, we make a long-term commitment," he said. "We knew our selection of ColdFusion would have long-term ramifications for our business, so we evaluated our options carefully."

"We needed a language that was script-oriented because we felt that a browser-centric system wouldn't support objects as effectively. Plus, HTML and tag-oriented I/O were�and continue to be�the major contemporary standards."

Moving Closer to the Customer

Today, this ColdFusion-based suite enables Vertical Alliance to deliver rapid results through customized, template-driven content management, e-commerce, and personalization. Vertical Alliance completed an amazing 75-day project to integrate all 18 of ISC's Web sites and add fully functional, integrated e-commerce and content management for ISC's corporate site and ancillary businesses.

The results are already pouring in. In just a few months since the implementation of the redesigned community of sites, ISC has seen a significant increase in site traffic. Accounting management and general business administration have become more efficient and cohesive since all Web sites are now centralized into one system, according to Cooper.

ISC has seen a boost in repeat customers as new CRM capabilities take hold. For instance, Daytona International Speedway's Web site recorded the highest number of hits in response to a recent broadcast e-mail that was based on observed customer interests.

The Winner: International Speedway Corporation

According to Craig Neeb, Chief Information Officer for ISC, the revamped e-business architecture and strategy has been a tremendous success. "We're extremely pleased to work with Vertical Alliance," he said. "With Vertical Tracker, we are now positioned to have one enterprise solution for servicing our guests as well as the venues. Vertical Tracker provides a rich source of information to better service the needs of our entire business."

"Of course, we certainly believe that Vertical Tracker is a very sophisticated e-business platform," said Cooper. "But we could not have achieved this high level of functionality in this timeframe without Macromedia ColdFusion. People who aren't even programmers can learn ColdFusion very quickly. And we can use ColdFusion to implement and enforce some standards in our programming. But ultimately, it's the speed with which we can develop that matters most. We can get new features to market quickly�and, just like a racetrack, speed matters."

Site Summary

Vertical Alliance (www.verticalalliance.com)
190 West Germantown Pike, Suite 210
Norristown, PA 19401-1385

ISC Implementation
· Macromedia products: ColdFusion Enterprise 4.5.1; ColdFusion Studio 4.5, Flash 5
· Hardware: Launched on a cluster of 3 NT servers behind a Local Director with an NT Database server with SQL Server 7, and a mail server. Migrated to a cluster of Sun 420 web servers with a very large DB server for Oracle 8i. Also using a 420 as a Flash Server
· Operating system: Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 sp 6A
· Database: Microsoft SQL Server 7, 2000, and Oracle 8.1.6
· Size of DB: 6.5 GB and growing
· Internet Connection: T1
· Implementation Team: 14 full-time developers for 75 days

Benefits of Macromedia
· Short Learning Curve—"Even people who aren't ColdFusion programmers can learn it quickly."
· Application Performance—"On the Web, through a browser, nothing will operate faster than a ColdFusion application."
· Rapid Development—"ColdFusion gives us so many ways to develop, we can get to market much faster."

---

Do you have a story you would like to share? Join the Adobe Customer Reference Program.