Demant achieves global scalability and 30x faster response times with Vercel

With a mission to offer innovative technologies, solutions, and expertise in the field of hearing care, Demant serves a diverse range of customers around the world. Due to their global nature and ever-growing customer base, the team needed a frontend solution that could scale with them while providing a flawless end user experience. 

The choice to migrate to Next.js and Vercel

Before adopting Vercel, Demant faced several challenges with their existing web infrastructure. The traditional CMS setup hosted in Azure required large and complex regional data center setups to facilitate global scaling. Despite significant investments, the setup struggled to deliver satisfying response times, resulting in a poor user experience for visitors to Demant's websites.

Recognizing the need for a more scalable and performant solution, Demant embarked on a journey to adopt a headless setup, isolating their frontend from the CMS runtime. This approach aimed to mitigate scaling and performance issues while maintaining cost efficiency. Demant chose Next.js and Vercel for their stability, feature completeness, and adoption within the developer community.

The transition to Vercel involved building an entirely new platform from the ground up. While the core web team at Demant spearheaded the initiative, individual business units also contributed to frontend development efforts. Despite the significant overhaul, the transition was smooth, with frontend developers finding the switch to Next.js intuitive and well-supported by comprehensive documentation.

Seeing value after migration 

With websites running on Vercel, the team has managed to reduce the cost of hosting a globally scaled setup by 10x while improving response times by more than 30x—offering a massive increase in overall ROI.

On top of that, Demant's developer experience has drastically changed in terms of both agility and efficiency. Build times have gone from hours to minutes, and because their developers can spin up new frontend apps without spending a massive amount of time provisioning infrastructure, they've become more independent and self-reliant.

Demant's new setup utilizes Sitecore as a headless CMS, integrated with a Next.js app extended with Sitecore's JSS SDK. Leveraging Vercel features like Edge Middleware, Image Optimization, and Edge Cache, Demant has achieved remarkable performance improvements, enabling a globally scaled setup at a fraction of the previous cost.

The team collaborates seamlessly within Vercel, utilizing Preview Deployments to share progress with stakeholders and easily manage the QA and testing of different environments. The success of their Vercel implementation has led to adoption across multiple business units within Demant, encompassing more than 200 websites.

Looking ahead

By partnering with Vercel, Demant has overcome scalability and performance challenges, delivering faster, more responsive web experiences to its customers worldwide. The transition to Vercel has not only improved ROI, but also enhanced developer agility and efficiency, empowering teams to deliver high-quality web solutions at unprecedented speed.

With Vercel's support, the team continues to drive innovation in the field of hearing healthcare, fulfilling its mission to improve people's health and hearing around the globe.