Background
As a top-six Premier League club, with European football on their 2016/2017 fixture list, Southampton FC wanted to create an all-new digital platform to reflect their success on the field. Their goal was to significantly elevate digital fan engagement and set a new benchmark within the Premier League. To achieve this, the club appointed creative and technology partners who could deliver on that vision.
Leading the project was Delete, an award-winning digital creative and marketing agency based in London, Leeds and Munich, specialising in digital transformation strategies for major brands.
The challenge
With a strong focus on digital campaign design and delivery, Delete needed robust managed hosting services to support the infrastructure behind their creative vision. Their client, Southampton FC, required a high-performance, secure, and reliable digital platform, capable of handling heavy traffic and providing a seamless user experience. Ultimately, the site needed to be resilient, highly secure and offer maximum service uptime.
Having worked together on multiple campaigns, Delete trusted Hyve to support the delivery of Southampton’s digital strategy.
The solution
Delete designed a dynamic digital platform which acted as both a brand hub and promotional engine for Southampton FC. Objectives included boosting ticket and merchandise sales, enhancing sponsor visibility, and building an engaged fan database fit for a top-six club.
Hyve played a crucial role by helping Southampton FC identify their unique hosting needs. Our consultation phase seeks to understand customer needs to architect the perfect cost-effective solution, within budget and to a project planning timeline.
Based on the outcome of our consultations with both Southampton FC and Delete, our team then designed and managed an enterprise cloud solution tailored for performance and scalability.
Service and support are also central to our overall approach. Each Delete client, including Southampton FC, is allocated a dedicated Hyve Technical Account Manager, who has detailed knowledge of the priorities and challenges they face. Their clients receive direct, personal support from their account manager contact.
For Southampton FC, Delete and Hyve have been able to deliver a creative, reliable online presence, backed up by the highest levels of customer service. We deliver 24/7/365 monitoring and support, backed up by ongoing performance tuning, giving them the ability to scale seamlessly and according to their requirements.
Jake Madders, Director at Hyve said “Hyve are incredibly proud to host Southampton FC on our managed cloud. It’s really great to see a client take full advantage of our exciting cloud features such as rapid scaling in order to adapt to huge regular traffic spikes.”
Hear from Southampton FC and Delete
“We have a responsibility to our supporters locally and around the world to ensure that our website is a high performance, always an available resource, so we needed a secure, stable hosting platform to be able to cope with high demand. Hyve not only fully understand this but they have exceeded all of our expectations. They have been agile enough to meet our exact architecture requirements and deliver a hosting solution that allows us to bring the best experience to our fans.”
James Kennedy, Head of Marketing at Southampton Football Club
“We are very strong both creatively and technically, but the idea of also becoming a web host with the expertise to support our campaigns was not part of our planning. We needed a specialist partner who could work directly with us and clients such as Southampton FC to deliver the strategic technical advice, services and support they require.”
We love the confidence and flexibility Hyve provides. Quite a lot of the work we do is complex, and Hyve plays a vital role in creating smarter ways of doing things that will save money, or do more with the same budget. Some clients need a hosting company with capabilities and expertise around specific platforms such as Kentico and Sitecore. As a result, they put Delete and our hosting partner through a lot of due diligence – and Hyve’s support and experience in areas such as these is vital to winning business and overall project delivery.”
James Carrington, Partner and Chief Technology Officer at Delete.