Meet datenwerk innovationsagentur: Leading digital agency and Sulu Gold Partner

Based in Vienna, datenwerk is part of Team Farner, a rapidly growing, pan-European communications agency group headquartered in Switzerland. datenwerk’s 70+ clients include many public-sector agencies, whose requirements have become datenwerk’s specialty. datenwerk prides itself on understanding public organizations — how they don’t respond to traditional market pressures, and how they often face especially stringent legal obligations — and is able to tailor its solutions accordingly.

Sulu is proud to be open source, and this was an important factor for datenwerk. As early as 2006, they made the strategic choice to focus on open-source solutions. “Many clients had undergone bad experiences with proprietary content management systems because they had to change the system with every relaunch,” remarked Managing Director Wolfgang Zeglovits. “We chose not to focus on one provider, but on open source — for legal reasons, and because of its public orientation, and the communities you can tap into.”

Open source isn’t just practical. It’s also in tune with datenwerk’s values, and those of its public-sector clients: “We definitely have that openness, that sharing and entertaining, exciting and engaging element,” said Zeglovits. When datenwerk was looking for a Symfony CMS solution in 2019, they were only interested in open-source providers who shared these values — and Sulu was a perfect fit.

datenwerk’s clients include public institutes such as the Austrian Kinderfreunde and the Karl-Renner-Institut. While following privacy regulations like the GDPR is important for all organizations in Europe, the consequences of non-compliance can be especially harsh in the public sector.

“The fact that Sulu is a European solution is important because of GDPR and other legal frameworks,” said Wolfgang Zeglovits.

Based in Dornbirn, Austria, Sulu is designed with European legal frameworks in mind, ensuring that the CMS is compliant for local clients.

After using Sulu in three projects, datenwerk chose to become a Gold Partner. They were attracted by three features of the program:

• Priority feature requests: Having put Sulu to work in multiple projects, datenwerk could see a number of features that would make the CMS even more useful in future. Sulu strives to prioritize the feature requests of partners.
• Extended support: “Customer requirements become more complex when you work together for a long period of time. Professional support management is absolutely necessary. Being a Gold Partner means we can rely on Sulu being there for us when we need it,” said Wolfgang Zeglovits.
• Sales and visibility: Partners are featured on the Sulu website, adding to their visibility. But being a partner can also help when pitching to new clients, offering assurance that you have expert support for your CMS behind you.

Senior Developer Melanie Groissmaier was impressed with the quality of Sulu’s Slack support. “It’s very good,” she said, “Anyone can post in their channel and get an answer relatively quickly.” She added that, as a partner, datenwerk has received advice on the best way to implement particular concepts in Sulu, and has also benefited from a code review. “We got what we wanted from the partnership,” she said.