CIOIN

Sunil Sirohi

VP, NIIT

“All marketing spends lead to a single landing point dramatically increasing visits to the corporate site.”

Executive summary

CIO 100 Winner: With over 20 individual websites for different geographies NIIt was beginnign to realise that promoting multiple websites was not feasible for the brand in the long term. Sunil Sirhi had the ingenious idea of consolidating over 20 NIIT websites into one thereby increasing brand visibility and reducing server costs.

Functioning from 50 owned facilities and 350 partnerships, the National Institute of Information Technology, better known as NIIT is an IT talent development corporation and a household name. In India, catering to students in over 40 countries, the company thought it made logical sense to have over 20 individual websites for different geographies with a centralized content management system.

But that decision was beginning to hurt. "We realized that promoting multiple websites was not feasible for the brand in the long term. Since traffic gets split to 20 different websites, consumer exposure was limited only to information present on the site that he or she has landed on," says Sunil Sirohi, VP, NIIT.

To promote NIIT as a global brand and serve country-specific local business content, Sirohi felt that a single universal destination would be a smart move.That gave birth to uNIITe or niit.com: A single website that would offer higher brand visibility and help NIIT showcase its varied offerings.

"Now, all marketing spends promoting various brands lead to a single landing point and this has dramatically increased visits on the corporate site," says Sirohi. He also set up a Web content management solution to enable business content owners to create content on their own. The site now has fresh content and update delays have been eliminated.

But, convincing business leaders of the strategic advantages of opting for a single website for all business units proved to be a roadblock. Extensive communication and presentations explaining the information architecture of the new website helped NIIT deal with the situation.

The website was designed so that visitors from different geographies could receive information pertaining to them, based on where they are located.

Prior to the implementation, the various NIIT websites were ranked between 112,000 to 7,600,000 (according to Alexa). Now, the consolidated website is higher than rank 50,000. "A visitor to the new website now ends up staying longer than before hence opening up the possibility of higher rate of consumer conversion. Server consolidation helped save running costs and at the same time reduced our carbon footprint," says Sirohi.