How a global agency built a web innovation engine in two months
If you’ve experienced a new technology for the first time at an exhibit or event, the talented technologists at Globacore, an award-winning digital agency based in Toronto, might have introduced you.
Globacore specialized in creating interactive experiences for physical spaces, like trade shows and offices, that stretched the laws of technology and human imagination for global brands like Acura, the IEEE, Volkswagen, and Samsung.
“We catch people’s attention with cutting-edge technology that they’ve never seen, much less experienced,” says Dave Boyle, Head of Development at Globacore.
But with the pandemic upheaving in-person experiences, Globacore was faced with a choice: put their projects on hold or shift their innovation to the digital world. With Next.js and Vercel at their fingertips, they were able to make the shift in just two months.
In a matter of weeks, the physical spaces that served as the canvas for their digital projects vanished. All the shows in their project pipeline were canceled one by one.
Fortunately—amid the chaos, confusion, and an uncertain future—trade shows made a virtual revival. Trusting in their technology and storytelling chops, customers called Globacore back to create interactive, 3D event experiences for the Web.
After hiring a new team of web developers, Dave turned to Mike Robinson, a seasoned full-stack developer and now DevOps Engineering Manager at Globacore, to lead these projects and establish the agency’s web foundation.
Building short-lived virtual experiences for major global brands, Globacore could not afford to compromise on performance.
Vercel’s Global Edge Network is handling edge computing and caching for us and ensuring that during these virtual events reaching audiences around the globe that our users were receiving the fastest possible response no matter where they were—or which device they used to join—without us having to think about it.
Mike RobinsonDevOps Engineering Manager
Not only does the success of their client’s investment hinge upon the speed of their virtual experience, but Globacore had to deliver on 99.99% uptime service level agreements (SLAs) for larger brands. To protect the virtual experiences they deliver on behalf of their customers, they rely on Vercel’s enterprise plan for scale and support as a key part of their workflow.
In addition to the zero-configuration workflow and optimizations, Globacore’s developers relied on Next.js’ fast refresh to see edits in the browser within a second of saving. Thanks to the ecosystem surrounding Next.js, they didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. The whole team was able to get up to speed quickly and had confidence in what they were doing. This allowed them to build and iterate faster with hundreds of changes being made daily.
With Vercel’s interactive and collaborative Preview Deployments a Git Push away, they're also able to involve clients in the review process for new features their iterating on and tighten the feedback loop.
"Vercel is practically our DevOps department. We don't have to do anything more than link our Git repository and push our code to get a website up and running with preview environments” explains Mike.
While physical spaces have returned, Globacore has transformed into a hybrid agency that can deliver omnichannel experiences for their customers.
“We changed our tagline from ‘digital experiences for physical spaces’ to ‘digital experiences for any space’ to reflect the transformation we made,” says Dave. “In a few months, Vercel allowed us to build world-class digital experiences at scale with a lean engineering team and at a cost that allowed our business to grow during the pandemic.”
If you’re ready to speed up your team's development process and site performance, we’d love to chat. Get in touch today.
