How Atwix Delivered a Headless eCommerce Solution for Sony Biotech

A Complex Problem

Sony is famous for bringing pure, true sound to music, whether you’re listening to Taylor Swift or Nine Inch Nails. The secret is that Sony engineers know how to reduce signal noise from electric circuit currents to achieve very low noise electronics. Reducing rogue signal noise is also a key component in biomedical discovery.

Since 1995, Sony Biotechnology scientists have studied the physical and chemical characteristics of cells and particles, aiming to solve complex and serious medical challenges. Today they are headquartered in San Jose, California, with affiliate offices in Japan, China, and Europe.

In early 2024, Sony Biotechnology decided to upgrade their online operation. Their website hosted hundreds of pages of information, webinars, and news about their latest discoveries. They also had a traditional eCommerce store where customers could buy glycoprotein, antibodies, and other biomedical supplies. “It was very complicated to manage their content and make changes to pages, and Sony Biotechnology wasn’t happy with that,” shares Yaroslav Abrasimov, Business Solution Architect at Atwix.

A Simple Solution

Sony Biotechnology chose to work with Atwix because the company is one of the longest standing partners in the Adobe Commerce ecosystem. Atwix developers have contributed more source code to Adobe Commerce than any other solution provider, and are renowned for making complex and serious implementations simple.

“We constantly invest in research and development,” share Atwix team members.

Previously, Sony Biotechnology was using Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) as their CMS, deployed on-premise. As part of their digital transformation, they wanted to migrate from AEM to Adobe EDS. Sony Biotechnology needed the speed and simplicity of editing content with Adobe EDS for document-based authoring, while retaining the highly-customized Adobe Commerce checkout. As a B2B business, they had vast amounts of customer profiles, with complex pricing systems for many different regions. The answer was a headless solution that would add an EDS publishing platform for content, without having to rebuild their eCommerce system.

Unlike a typical bridge, Luma Bridge connects an Adobe EDS frontend to an eCommerce backend, ensuring a seamless user experience throughout the customer journey—with no surprising empty carts. With EDS, it was possible for Sony Biotechnology to use Google Docs or Microsoft Word to create their content and achieve a 100 Google PageSpeed score, while enjoying their existing, customized checkout.

“This was pretty straightforward and it’s very, very efficient,” Yaro shares. It was also much easier than trying to rebuild the entire store from the ground up. So, Atwix started work on a “soft migration” to headless.

Ready, Set, Stage

“One of the biggest benefits for Sony Biotechnology was that Adobe EDS provides an innovative approach to managing CMS content. It’s also easy to manage vast amounts of content, using SharePoint or Google Drive,” explains Abrasimov. Sony Biotechnology staff didn’t need to learn another CMS system—everyone knows how to use Word or Google Docs.

“I would guess this is probably one of the biggest points for Sony Biotechnology, and why they chose this solution; because they have a lot of detailed content,” Business Solutions Architect Yaroslav shares.

And because it’s a serverless headless storefront, there are no additional costs for deploying a new system or maintaining servers. “It all works out of the box,” Abrasimov adds. Atwix promptly built the whole system and the project is ready and running smoothly on a staging environment.

Now over the bridge, the Atwix and Sony Biotechnology teams realized they have one thing in common: you can solve the most complicated problem if you have the right tools.