Ramp up your Innovation in 2017 with The Affino Unified Digital Business Platform

Uncertain times lie ahead as the whole global marketplace enters into a period of significant change. We have no way of knowing what will happen longer term, but in the short run - supply prices will rise and inflation will creep up - as is already happening. The £ exchange rate is still down significantly, and we’ve seen several of our supply bills increase - like the Amazon hosting, as many of these technical services and components are priced and traded in dollars. We’ve so far absorbed those fluctuation and not passed them onto our customers, but there may come a time this year when we are compelled to raise prices in line with the additional costs being incurred.

In periods of uncertainty, it is the leaner and meaner organisations that stand to benefit - those that can ramp up their operation to take advantage of shorter-term opportunities. To those ends you need your solutions platform to be imbued with greater flexibility and adaptability so that you can adjust rapidly as paradigms shift.

If you’re not already running Affino, now is the perfect time to streamline and focus your digital business systems onto a single platform - which is most capable of delivering you the greatest range and variety of available revenue streams in the most self-contained manner possible.

Here follow the 10 key criteria which best apply to this premise:

Power

Affino delivers a complete digital front-end, encompassing CRM, CMS, DAM, Ecommerce, Messaging, Social, Sales & Marketing Automation and Analytics all in the same seamless solution. It also uniformly contains more specialist solutions for Recruitment, Education, Fundraising and Benchmarking. There is no equivalent single source solution which contains as much seamless / dovetailed and dasiy-chained functionality readily available and on-tap.

Stability

Affino is hosted on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (AWS / EC2) - the world leader in cloud computing, and it utilises the very latest load-balancing and auto-recovery systems to ensure robust running of your digital businesses. The system is engineered with a view to rapid response to any ensuing technical issues, with a view to minimising downtime and optimising peak-time.

Scalability

The same system that manages site-uptime and auto-recovery also monitors for rapidly changing consumer patterns of behaviour / site traffic. When sensing an uptick in traffic volume, the system auto-scales up to however many server instances are the maximum for that particular level of hosting. Typical variables are minimum two load-balanced servers ramping up to 4 under heavy load, and then automatically scaling back down again to 2 once conditions return to normal running.

Flexibility

This feeds out directly from the amount of Power Affino gives you on tap. There’s so much functionality included with Affino that it is simply impractical to fit it all into a single phase of development. What you have though is a massive swiss-army tool of a resource where you can rapidly expand and ramp up with a minimum of notice. Once you have one or two sites set up on an instance, it is relatively easy to copy, adapt and re-use core elements to rapidly deploy micro-site or new site areas.

Control

One of the essential benefits of Affino is ’Single Screen’ control - where you can pull up a customer or Account and view all related and relevant activities, interactions and transactions on the one screen. A core Affino strength is how it funnels so many different types of activity through a seamless single system - giving you a unique overview with maximum potential in shaping and influencing your customer experience.

Manageability

Another core benefit of Affino in having so much functionality immediately available in a single system - means much more hands-on control, and a far greater scope to manage everything in-house. You spend far less time managing integrations with 3rd party systems - meaning you have more immediate and rapid control over what you deploy, when and how.

Productivity

A key driver for Affino is empowering small teams to achieve the almost impossible. Many Affino sites have just a core of a few personnel running the whole vast enterprise. In other instances we have larger teams of editorial staff maximising their output simultaneously across digital and traditional channels. We’ve tried to engineer everything on the basis of maximum resource use - so that you can multi-display and multi-apply the same content across different perspectives and areas, giving you overall more output for less input.

Affordability

Overall cost is of course dependent on how you use and how large an audience you need to target. Yet solution cost for Affino is significantly below that of comparable solutions, and once you have one all-singing and dancing site instance up, you can very easily and rapidly create many more. As so much is included, you spend far less time, resources and finances maintaining 3rd party integrations.

Reproducibility

Successful business is all about being able to streamline what you do, and do it over and again for a variety of audiences - it’s very much the same sort of thing that applies to manufacturing - bringing costs down, and being able to ramp up production with relative ease. So is the case with Affino - where once you have one site deployment under your belt, you can very easily copy, re-apply and adapt key structures and settings profiles that you’ve already invested time in creating. You can capture a specific market niche, and then roll-out essentially the same model - with refinements, to various different audiences.

Innovation

With higher empowerment, productivity and lower overheads - maintenance and otherwise, with Affino you can put your resources into improving and innovating your business and its offerings. Trying to achieve comparable solutions outside of Affino puts too much onus on resource management and maintenance - where you get caught up simply trying to keep everything running smoothly, rather than having the time and resources to concentrate on making things better ...