Making the successful switch from Cumulus to Canto

The decision to switch from Cumulus to Canto, thus making the change from on-premise to the cloud, was first and foremost a matter of cost for Martin Brenner and his Team at the VDE Services GmbH. When it was time to renew their license, Brenner had reviewed the operating costs and, after checking with the Canto sales department, came to the conclusion that a cloud solution would better suit VDE’s needs.

In addition to the cost, the complexity of Cumulus was a crucial point, since they did not use all of the features which were of interest to VDE. The configuration expenses for these just would not pay off. Here, Brenner’s colleague Mireille Schäfer also recognized the cloud solution’s main advantage. By switching to Canto, she would be able to make changes to the configuration herself, without requiring additional IT support. But before the system could be rolled out, the existing media assets first had to be migrated from Cumulus to Canto.

From a technical point of view, switching to the cloud was easy for VDE, Brenner recalls. Internally, Canto was first connected to the Azure Active Directory to enable straightforward logins. “That went without a hitch, also because your colleagues provided us with excellent support,” Brenner tells Canto during the interview.

The next step was to migrate the existing media files from Cumulus to the new Canto cloud solution. Here too, they received a great deal of support from the Canto Customer Success Team, Schäfer remembers. The existing image library was transferred one-to-one to Canto. All other media assets were then imported and merged together in a new media library. The Canto team was at their side every step of the process, providing advice and assistance. “Canto’s support was exceptionally good and competent. Support was always very quick to respond in case of questions and would always offer a solution – I’m very satisfied with that,” Schäfer says. Unlike before, Schäfer was able to take on technical administration herself and define user roles independently. From the new media library, the team then selected the assets to be provided to internal users through a portal.

With Canto, the Brand, Marketing and Communication Department makes important assets centrally available for the entire VDE Group. The corresponding portal is set up in such a way that users can quickly locate relevant content while always navigating the system styled in the corporate design. Canto has thus become a central storage system – which lightens the workload for a lot of other departments since they can now download and use assets from the portal worldwide without worries.

IT administrator Martin Brenner, on the other hand, no longer needs to worry about new releases or obsolete hardware. With Canto as their cloud solution, VDE can save costs. In addition, using Canto is easier and more user friendly since all steps of the workflow can be completed right in the web browser. His colleague Schäfer also sees it that way: “Thanks to the continuous releases, we also have the advantage of always benefiting from the newest features. In this regard, Canto obviously makes it a high priority to cater to customer requests, something which is also very important for us. Overall, Canto is a modern system and very user-friendly.”

In another step, Brenner is also planning to connect the CMS CoreMedia used to Canto so as to simplify additional work processes. For Brenner and Schäfer, the fact that they were able to implement the solution so quickly and successfully was primarily thanks to Canto Support which accompanied them in an exemplary manner throughout the entire process.