Member Article

E-Spirit celebrates 15 years on winning track

What started out as a small start-up evolved into a respected global enterprise in just 15 years. The e-Spirit Web content management (WCM) experts are celebrating 15 eventful and innovative years this fall. The company was founded on October 26, 1999, by IT engineers Jörn Bodemann and Stefan Walgenbach in cooperation with IT supplier adesso AG. In the ensuing years the supplier of the FirstSpirit content management system (CMS) has established 13 offices in Germany, Great Britain, Austria, Switzerland and the USA. e-Spirit is a market and technology leader in the field of content and user experience management. In its early years, e-Spirit handled specific Internet projects before establishing itself as manufacturer of the FirstSpirit CMS. “At the time, many companies had to start thinking about the impact of the internet for the first time,” recalls CEO Bodemann. “Since there were only a few experts in this field, we received many inquiries. During those initial projects, we found various similarities in the requests. Our most important discovery was that the industry needed a central managing system to cover basic requirements, so that we wouldn’t have to program everything from scratch for every client.” That was the inspiration behind FirstSpirit - long-term success coupled with great customer satisfaction. Many companies have been relying on e –Spirit for many years, including some of the very first customers like the Santander Consumer Bank or Gotha Insurance. “We strive for strong partnerships with our customers – our cooperation with them and our release policy are laid out for the long-term,” said Bodemann. “As fast as development cycles in IT are, especially the Internet, our users can rest assured that they have made a future-proof choice with FirstSpirit. Not only because we rely on long maintenance periods and make sure to have migration paths available, but mainly because customers can easily add new features, digital channels or formats to flexibly adapt their CMS to changing requirements”. The high level of customer satisfaction and continuity are two of the flagship characteristics of the CMS supplier. No other company in the industry has acquired more customers in Europe during the last four years. And no other supplier can boast similarly high recommendation rates. According to the results of an independent customer survey, 94 percent of users would recommend the software.

“The core of the e-Spirit company philosophy is usability. The company realised very early on that easy-to-use and quick to implement solutions are important for customers, as they simplify and accelerate processes and have the potential to save time and money. The company’s focus on easy-to-use IT products – especially for non-IT experts – distinguished e-Spirit as a provider of positive online user experiences. “Usability is written into the DNA of our company. New features that do not have usability as the central requirement are not even discussed. We always take the global user experience for all users into account – from developers and editors to website visitors, whether on a tablet or PC,” reports Bodemann.

When it comes to CMS, e-Spirit relies on product manufacturing “Made in Germany” and the IT-center Dortmund. The research and development as well as the product management departments are located here at the company’s headquarters where the software is developed in-house. e-Spirit pursues a best-of-breed strategy and is a leader when it comes to integration solutions. It has always concentrated on its core competences along with integrating other solutions, including web analytics, digital asset management, CRM, e-commerce and portal software. This approach gives companies added value and creates synergies resulting from the improved interaction between integrated solutions. In contrast to suppliers that try to create all-in-one suites, e-Spirit can add new functionalities much faster enabling users to act considerably faster. Since they are not committed to only one supplier, FirstSpirit users can respond easily to changing requirements without having to replace their entire infrastructure - faster time-to-market has been a key factor in FirstSpirit’s success. Moreover, e-Spirit involves all employees, giving them time and opportunity to explore their creativity to develop innovative ideas. Work satisfaction and dedication play an important role at e-Spirit. The company is constantly on the lookout for new employees, especially IT specialists to support further growth in its various offices. Within 15 years, more than 10,000 FirstSpirit projects have been completed. The company has grown from 16 to 140 employees and opened 13 locations in Europe and the US. e-Spirit is pleased not only about its powerful implementation partner network, but also its important strategic partnerships with all leading portal and e-commerce suppliers. “In the past 15 years, we have succeeded in becoming the market leader in Europe. During the past four years, we were able to acquire over 150 new customers – more than any other supplier in Europe. Without neglecting our strong domestic market, we seek to increase our international market share. Our expansion in the USA is going particularly well and we are pleased to work with significant new customers, among them two major US retailers from the jewelry and outdoor industries. In addition to the US, Great Britain, Scandinavia and the Benelux regions will play an important role. We intend to continue growing internationally,” adds Jörn Bodemann, CEO at e-Spirit. Johannes Häusele, director sales at e-Spirit, adds: “E-commerce and UX requirements will increasingly impact the global market. Content is essential in all aspects of the customer journey and a fast time-to-market is just as important, to allow companies a professional presence on the market quickly. Digital marketing developments require flexible, powerful solutions for providing personalised online results and customer targeting. That’s why the need for a CMS such as FirstSpirit will continue to rise. We deliver exactly what companies need to play a leading role on the Internet.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Oliver Jaeger .