Niji named Ibexa Partner of the Month for June

The approach is effective: with its founding office in Rennes, and bureaux in Paris, Lille, Nantes, Lyon, Bordeaux, and Singapore, Niji has seen annual growth of more than 20 percent over the past five years.

Such success is never a coincidence but depends on always delivering what your market wants and needs. “What we heard from many of our customers is that they were looking for a better way to create and manage digital experiences,” says Charles-Antoine Fournel, Site Director at Niji. “The solution with by far the biggest buzz was Ibexa DXP. We looked into it and decided the market was right! And so, in August of last year, we joined the Ibexa Partner ecosystem.”

Nothing illustrates Niji’s commitment to Ibexa DXP more strongly than its phenomenal drive to get its developers and commercial teams certified in the solution. “I must have about 10 Ibexa-certified developers in my team [in Lille]. In Paris and Lyon, we have three or four developers. In Nice, there are two, and we currenly have one Ibexa-certified developer in our Bordeaux office. In Rennes, we have as many as 10, which gets us to around 30 altogether.

“This has been our main thrust so far: to get us in the best shape possible for the many opportunities we are confident that the Niji/ Ibexa partnership will bring our way.”

Niji is our Partner of the Month for June.

One such opportunity is the site overhaul of a major industrial producer in the north of France, which has already selected Ibexa DXP as its technology of choice. “Ibexa gave us this lead,” Fournel mentions, “which of course is one of the advantages of the partnership. We are strong contenders for the project.”

What attracts this prospect and many other organizations to Ibexa DXP is its ongoing strategic focus on the B2B segment, which has seen it introduce a lot of functionality that is making the platform stand out from the competition.

“I particularly like Ibexa Connect,” says Fournel. “Because until now, when we needed to do marketing automation, we implemented additional tools, such as Talent or, in the WordPress ecosystem, MailPoet or Mailjet, that sort of thing. Or even full-blown marketing automation solutions such as Salesforce. The idea of having a DXP that includes this interconnection with different platforms and the ability to create marketing automation scenarios is a real plus for our customers.”

Ibexa Cloud is another aspect of this all-in-one advantage of the Ibexa platform.

“Ibexa Cloud saves the customer an incredible amount of time in terms of maintenance, costs, and deployment. You don’t have to worry about whether and when to update the system; Ibexa manages everything automatically. All the customer has to do is concentrate on his content strategy, his audience, how he addresses his customers, and how he develops traffic to his site. Everything else behind that, all the tech, security, maintenance, and so on is none of his concern. With Ibexa you get a turnkey solution. And that’s the big added value.”

Of course, Ibexa is not the only platform to offer hosting, but as Fournel points out, this typically involves a third party, and another contract, as is the case with VIP, the WordPress hosting solution. “It’s more elegant and less hassle to have just one relationship,” he adds.

One attraction of Ibexa for the Niji development teams was that the platform is now based on Symfony, which they know well in large part through their long experience with Drupal, a technology that has been historically very popular in France.

“By switching to Symfony, Ibexa immediately removed a huge competitive advantage of Drupal,” Fournel says. “This may not have been the objective, but it has certainly been the effect.”

Sustainability is hugely important to Niji, and its website is a beautiful example of what it calls “digital frugality”. Fournel tells us more about the approach.

“For three years now, Niji has been developing a sustainability framework,” he says, “where we aim to reduce the carbon footprint of its websites as much as possible. We have different formulas. We have sites with our basic framework, which we use on all our projects, and when the customer really wants to have an advanced eco-design experience, we put a lot of things in place, both from a design point of view to ensure that the user paths are as optimized as possible from an eco-design point of view.

“That means a fairly limited level of depth, colors and images, a minimum of animation, and a minimum of assets loaded to avoid making a lot of requests on the servers and therefore consuming carbon. It’s also about putting in a lot of static content to further reduce the number of requests made to the servers.

“At Niji we have probes that we can plug directly into the hardware to measure to the nearest watt the consumption of a given internet page. And it’s thanks to this that we can prove that we have reduced the footprint of a web page compared with a previous state.”

It is the frontend execution of a site that largely determines its sustainability. However, Fournel adds, the choice of technology also matters because some systems lend themselves better than others to Niji’s commitment to eco-design.

“One of the largest direct competitors of Ibexa has a CMS that is purely SaaS-based which means you have to make do with the functionalities that are made available on the SaaS side; you can’t necessarily go and customize and modify as you see fit to create functionalities for your customers. But with Ibexa you do get this flexibility and freedom, which is a huge advantage – and leaves Niji with more room for maneuver to enhance the sustainability of sites built on Ibexa.”

Niji has committed itself wholeheartedly to its relationship with Ibexa, because of the opportunities it knows exist in the market.

“In the past few years, Ibexa DXP has positioned itself powerfully as an all-in-one solution for B2B digital transformation,” Fournel concludes. “Combined with Niji’s deep market experience in consultancy, design, and implementation, our partnership will go from strength to strength.”