Key benefits

• Improved content velocity, from 7-10 days to 72 hours
• Automated translation through structured content
• More personalized, innovative digital experiences

Sanity emerges as the most flexible platform for structuring content

DataStax was using a decade-old legacy CMS, and wanted to open up possibilities for greater innovation on the web and other customer-facing platforms with a headless CMS that enabled a modern Jamstack approach. The company needed to create a consistent brand and visual experience alongside managing a rebrand, while also minimizing content migration.

In its search for the ideal partner, Sanity quickly became the platform to beat as it rose to every technical challenge and exceeded expectations on support and strategic advisory from the team.

“The contrast between Sanity and the other vendors was stark," said Chad. "Sanity offered a unique and customizable approach to tackling our technical needs. Our engineering team is very happy with our new CMS, and that’s virtually unheard of!"

Automating translation through structured content

Using Sanity’s platform for structured content, DataStax set up a modeling framework that enabled its developers to integrate and re-use content across channels and use cases, with Sanity’s open-source content editor, Sanity Studio, representing components on the front-end for live editing by non-technical users.

This created a single source of truth for DataStax so that any content could be translated through an integration with translation platform Transifex, then propagated to target countries and languages with little to no human intervention. At the outset, that was DataStax’s main priority: to globalize its digital footprint in a way that would scale with the company’s fast-growing customer base.

“We wanted to have changes made once and then reflected across the entire ecosystem of both content and information,” said Drew Witmer, lead project engineer at DataStax.

DataStax also wanted to empower more autonomous decision making around web data and content, using analytics pulled from various places, like Google Analytics, directly into Sanity Studio’s content editor to determine whether a piece of content should be human- or machine-translated. “Knowing how well a page is performing can help us determine if it’s worth the investment to have it translated by a real person,” said Drew. Content creators can now quickly drive the translation process, with minimal technical support.

The new system for content localization has become a powerful engine for serving DataStax’s increasingly diverse customer base. Catering to customers hailing from new countries with different languages became a largely automated process.

Launching content faster: from 7-10 days to 72 hours or less

With the ability to take project requirements and come up with an experiential solution, then model, configure and express it in Sanity, the entire development cycle for DataStax has been compressed, as has DataStax team’s time to solve problems.

“Our release cycle used to average 7-10 days. Now, we’re able to get that down to 72 hours,” said Chad.

Because of how easy it is to reuse components, site migration has been simple. Developers use Sanity Studio to create straightforward workflows for content creators and approvers, who can update pages on their own with minimal training.

“We’re using Sanity to get a 360-degree view of all of our other services. We get collaboration by way of API integration, and since all our data is pulled into Sanity Studio, no one on the team has to ask someone else for it,” said Chad. “We can mold the system to the user’s workflow and do whatever we dream up.”

As a developer platform, documentation is also a critical branch of DataStax’s content, and part of the rebrand was rearchitecting both the docs and .com sites. DataStax was able to take its existing documentation in ASCIIDoc format and handle it directly in Sanity without needing to reformat the content. Previously, DataStax had to connect to documentation toolchain Antora to transform that content into a web-compatible format. This has reduced time-to-publish and decreased the need for technical support on the docs site.

“Content modeling in Sanity has enabled us to do so much more than we ever expected,” said Drew.

More room to innovate on digital experience

As Sanity empowers greater scale and automation of DataStax’s content, the company is exploring new ways to offer its customers a more personalized experience.

On the roadmap: an SSO integration through Sanity’s SAML support, integrated A/B testing, digital content asset management, a significant integration with Algolia to power personalized search, and microsites targeted to individual users.

Treating content as data is helping DataStax achieve its mission to connect every developer in the world to the power of Apache Cassandra™, with the freedom to run their data on any device and in any cloud.