Time is money in the real estate industry, as companies often have to meet high customer demands. It’s critical that real estate companies are up-to-date with the latest tools and services to best serve clients. In this Acceleration Case Study, learn how Royal LePage partnered with Watserv to boost business efficiency and better meet clients’ demands. By modernizing its portal, the company decreased hosting expenses by 50% and reduced 10 hours of weekly manual work.
Business Challenge – Upgrading Its Enterprise Applications
Royal LePage strives to remain at the forefront of the latest technology. It aims to offer its realtors and brokerages the best solutions. Royal LePage needed to deliver a top-quality experience for each one of its realtors. So, the company contacted the team at WatServ to perform an initial review of their Intranet portal.
- They identified paint points and operational support issues, including:
- Java-based CMS that required computing and manual resources to maximize uptime and performance
- The Intranet portal was created with difficult-to-manage proprietary technology
- Inadequate IT support within its data center to work at an optimal level
Additionally, the system also had to be manually re-indexed to maintain peak performance. This often prevented users from gaining access to the Intranet. Because the existing portal was hosted within the company’s data center, the IT team had to spend time managing the hosting environment. The Royal LePage team needed a modernized portal solution to overcome these operational challenges and enable its employees to focus on other priorities.
- They defined goals, such as:
- Modernize its enterprise applications with a portal solution
- Scale the system to create a robust and responsive design with updated features
- Moving the application from the data center
The Solution – Partnering with WatServ and Improving Its Intranet Portal
The tech team at Royal LePage partnered with WatServ to help redesign, reimagine, and reengineer their Azure application. This enables the company to decrease the hosting footprint, enhance agility, and eliminate reliance on their data center by using the cloud. WatServ used Azure’s web and SQL platform to replace VMs. They also implemented Azure’s Web Application Firewall to provide an added layer of protection against cyber threats. Furthermore, the team updated the Intranet architecture to help eliminate any problems due to the customized CMS. WatServ had to convert the platform to an ASP.NET web framework to achieve these results.
The modernized application was officially launched in January 2019. The application made it easy for agents to access data to improve business decisions. In addition, it tracked their progress with a brand new awards tracker widget. By using the CRM dashboard to view the pipeline for individual sales, they can easily monitor contacts, e-campaigns, and tasks. Agents can also post their profiles online in a referral directory to connect with other real estate agents. Overall, the new portal enables agents to be more productive by accessing real-time data for an excellent user experience.
Ultimately, WatServ modernized the Azure portal. This boosted efficiency for the IT staff at Royal LePage by decreasing the deployment time of new features. It also reduced the amount of time needed for bug fixes.
The Results
The modern version of the Intranet portal gave Royal LePage a competitive advantage. This technology boosted the company’s reputation for offering the most cutting-edge technology for its brokers, agents, and franchises.
The portal’s responsive design enables agents to check the portal anytime, from nearly any location on all types of devices. Azure also allows the portal to auto-scale for accommodating user demand. This provides realtors with uninterrupted access to the portal as well as other third-party services.
Working with the team at WatServ to modernize the portal decreased hosting expenses by 50% after moving to Azure. This new system also reduced 10 hours of manual work each week for monitoring and rebuilding indexes. In addition, outsourcing monitoring and maintenance of the portal enabled the Royal LePage IT staff team to redeploy nearly one-third of its infrastructure team to focus on other areas. Because of this success, WatServ continues to work with Royal LePage as a trusted advisor with many other projects underway.
