Biotech Innovator Amyris Scales Digital Experience

Challenge

In an intense phase of growth, the Amyris team found itself supporting an expanding range of audiences and portfolio of brands. As a publicly traded company (NASDAQ: AMRS) and parent brand to a family of nine consumer brands, a strong corporate website is critical to its branding and communications. 

Amyris needed a modern, highly-responsive website to serve its growth and key audiences.

The legacy site did not reflect the cutting-edge technology our organization develops. Seemingly simple changes, like swapping out images, required web developer experience as the interface was not user friendly. We needed to wipe the slate clean and start fresh.

- Rhett Henderson, Senior Applications Engineer at Amyris

Amyris’ security measures also needed refreshing – external developers only had access to master user credentials to perform file transfer (FTP), which introduced strains on management’s time and risked the development process. 

Amyris sought out a new web platform to support  a major redesign on WordPress, secure the development workflow, support Amyris’ rapid growth, and better reflect the company’s success. 

Why Pantheon

Pantheon’s separate Dev-Test-Live environments allowed the Amyris team to develop and test its site without impacting the Live environment's availability to the world.

Switching to Pantheon was night and day. Dev-Test-Live development workflow is very valuable for our redesign and ongoing digital marketing projects, and it's out-of-the-box security solved our risk exposure.

- Rhett Henderson, Senior Applications Engineer at Amyris

Pantheon Support is always there.  Pantheon’s expert support team is available 24/7 with technical insights, expertise, and solutions. Amyris also relies on Pantheon’s open platform for easy integration with vendors including Cision for critical investor and board relations information and, for talent management, the Lever application tracking system (ATS).

“In exploring all our options for web platform providers, Pantheon had proven itself by delivering what we needed and more. And it wasn’t just the website. They supported our promotional videos, style guides, and anything else we needed. This was a huge project, and Pantheon delivered. They have been a true partner,” said Henderson.  

Results

The corporate website redesign project was a major success. Henderson said, “Working with the design agency and Pantheon, we managed within the budget and achieved important marketing goals, including featuring our family brands on the main website, , leveling up our site performance, and growing our industry recognition.” 

The team streamlined development using Dev-Test-Live and lowered security risks with a secure and efficient credentialing process, freeing up time to focus on brand building.

Streamlined deployments on Pantheon supported the massive redesign and ongoing development and marketing initiatives. And while the legacy site’s performance was acceptable, Pantheon sped up page loads even on image- and video-rich pages. Amyris will shortly roll out Autopilot for even more time savings with efficient CMS update management. 

Henderson added, “The development stages, the security, the smooth migration, and the nice speed boost surprise were all big wins. With Pantheon, we have the quality WebOps foundation we need to deliver a digital experience that accurately reflects Amyris’ impact on people and the planet.”