About Ayn Rand Institution

ARI offers a variety of educational experiences to promote greater understanding of Ayn Rand’s philosophy and, through the writing and speaking of our experts, advocates her principles of reason, rational self-interest and laissez-faire capitalism.

Challenge

Reducing costs

Ayn Rand Institution wanted to focus on creating a great user experience for their customers while reducing maintenance and hosting cost.

Solution

First to deploy Sitecore on Azure

ARI partnered with XCentium to upgrade their website to Sitecore 8.2u2 and migrate to Azure WebApps. ARI's three new sites also run on Azure SQL Database and XCentium’s Gigya connector for Sitecore to handle all user profile data.

Outcome

Delivering innovation

ARI now has reduced page load times from 20 seconds to 5 seconds, an astounding 4x increased performance which allows their servers to handle more concurrent users, and a scalable architecture backed by Microsoft Azure WebApps provides ease of management and low maintenance. This gives the ARI team peace of mind and the freedom to focus on their business and customers rather than managing infrastructure while simultaneously reducing hosting and management costs.

ARI’s Campus site which is aimed to educate people of all levels on the works and philosophies of Ayn Rand, saw the most dramatic improvement. Users are able to enroll, interact with, and complete a large number of lessons and courses throughout the site. Each user’s interaction data is stored in a custom SQL database to provide both reporting as well as content Personalization.